What I'm wondering is, is there a way to identify exactly who these characters are? Can these names/ID's be matched to character models or voice clips (I see that the phone call characters such as Nozomi, Gui Zhang etc are also part of this list, leading me to assume voice clips are part of this file's function as well?) Or would you need to write something as you said to match with Character ID's?
Any assistance with this would be greatly appreciated, if only to resolve the Gao/Li and Xiang/Lu debacle once and for all!
The purpose of this asset in Shenmue III is effectively what you're trying to create out of it It lists every character in the game, along with their respective character ID and some other details. There's basically two ways of going about it, we can look at how the data is written to file alone or we can make use of some runtime approach, like by just dumping the table that this asset represents, while the game is running (fastest) or maybe swapping Ryo or another character for whichever character you're looking into (slow). So in that regard, I'd have to do either of those, in order to get the mapping. I'll do it though, because you have a very legitimate reason for wanting this stuff.. and not just wasting my time.. or something
Great work you've done, glad to be of help up to to this point and I look forward to putting this whole ordeal to a close by getting the mapping for you :)