Stahn's younger sister Lilith was originally planned to be a recruitable party member, but the intended route to recruit her was removed during debugging before release; Lilith would later appear as a hidden party member in the PlayStation 2 remake of the game. For almost 29 years, it was believed that the only way to recruit Lilith in the original PlayStation version was through a bug you could perform in Dycroft in the first Japanese release, but recruiting Lilith would trigger a softlock by preventing a necessary scene flag from playing out.

This would all change in November 2026, when the administrator of the long-running Tales of series fansite Majestic Phantasian reported that he found a complicated, but legitimate method to recruit Lilith in the original Japanese version without the use of glitches. He also reported that the softlock can be circumvented by saving before entering Neuestadt after recruiting her, turning off the game, and then loading a later revision of the Japanese version that was only released under the budget marketing label "PlayStation the Best". The softlock was fixed in this version of the game, allowing the save data to carry over and let you finish the game with Lilith in your party. While it was initially thought this was limited to the Japanese version due to it requiring two different Japan-only revisions, it was discovered by a group of English fans the following day that both this method and the softlock fix were included in the original English version of the game. The recruitment sequence was fully translated, but had visible line-wrapping text issues, indicating that it was not fully tested before release.

The game's co-producer Jun Toyoda congratulated the players and revealed that this method was unintended as the development team was supposed to completely omit Lilith as a party member. They were unable to do so due to time constraints that resulted in five major bugs, including the softlock, being left intact, which he apologized for.