[tuxdev]

Most games shape their random events because true random is actually really frustrating to play.. but what it appears to me here is that there's a PRNG here that was seeded before he save-stated.. and since he didn't do anything that called the PRNG before that head-butt, the number didn't changed.

This sort of behavior is famous in Fire Emblem.. but there's also a trick due to how some of the games do pathfinding. Some of the games, if the game can't decide which path to take, calls the PRNG to decide. Since you've induced a call to the PRNG, you can redo a specific battle with a different random number generation.