[shitcoder]

Yeah I definitely agree, wasting time figuring out how to get to the save and apply your changes is the worst obstacle there, in most cases the saves are encrypted and have a check sum applied. Although I've found some games that allow you access the save data without messing around with this stuff, mainly the Shin Megami Tensei line of JRPG games in my experience.

Granted, the saves are binary blobs but once you find the value you want you can find an entire struct of data along side it. There are tools like imHex which help the process and help you define the structure of the save file. It's become a common project of mine to save hack and then build a save editor when I'm confident my changes work.