Good Bad Bugs / Final Fantasy

Final Fantasy I

• Final Fantasy:
  • The creators accidentally made a four-square peninsula on the world map belong to the wrong monster area, making the enemies there be much more powerful than the ones normally fought at that point in the game. The area is known to Final Fantasy fans as the "Peninsula of Power." It proved so popular that, despite being a glitch, it stayed in all subsequent remakes of the game for years, and inspired similar high-powered monster hideaways in subsequent Final Fantasy installments. The Pixel Remaster remake finally patched out this exploit.
  • In the PSP remake, with the glitch described here, one can turn low-level equips into top-tier equipment, as well as equipping items on classes that shouldn't be able to use them, such as the Barbarian Sword, the strongest weapon in the game equipped on the White Mage.
  • Damage is damage regardless of the source, even in the remakes. As such, it's actually possible to block the poison running through a Fighter's veins by holding a shield in front of him. It makes no sense... The down-side to this bug is that Healing was considered "negative damage", and as such was still a form of damage, which means you could block that as well! Luckily, this has been fixed for the remakes, leaving only the "block poison running through your veins" part in the game.

Final Fantasy II

• Final Fantasy II:
  • In the initial NES release, a bug allowed players to level up spells by giving the command to cast the spell then canceling it, which made it possible to level up a spell in a single battle. This is because Final Fantasy II is supposed to have dynamic leveling that increases stats based on what you use, but spells were coded in such a way that just selecting the spell flagged it as being used. The Dawn of Souls remake fixed the bug; the spell now has to actually be cast to count.
  • The original Famicom version had a bug involving the Wall spell, which blocked magic up to a level equal to the number of "hits" the spell lands. Though Wall is supposed to automatically nullify spells, it still plays the animation—and for instant-death spells such as Toad, the animation includes removing the enemy from battle. This can allow you to kill anything in the game, up to the final boss, with a Level 1 spell.◊
  • Also in the Famicom version, the Wizard Staff's Scourge XVI spell hits a random target in battle, whether on the enemy or ally side. It can also randomly (and hilariously) hit the Emperor instead, because the Final Boss battle against him uses a unique targeting byte that doesn't get excluded by the Wizard Staff's random targeting.

Final Fantasy III

• Final Fantasy III:
  • There is an item duplication bug in the Nintendo DS version. On the one hand, finding Phoenix Downs (which revive fallen characters) is extremely rare and there exists a limited amount of them in treasure chests, making each and every one a precious resource; on the other hand, being able to duplicate them at will can annihilate the game's natural difficulty.
  • Rather early in the game (before the second dungeon or so), you find one Elixir. What you're supposed to do with it is give it to a sick NPC in the town you find it in, and you get a rather impressive stash of treasure for giving it up. However, you won't find another for at least three more dungeons, and even then, there are only 20 guaranteed in the game. If you keep the Elixir it completely ruins any game difficulty, as that one elixir will last you for a long, long time.
  • The original Japanese version has some wonderful glitches, like the item upgrade glitch that exploits an inventory stacking overflow error to alter the types of items, making it very easy to obtain most of the Onion equipment.

Final Fantasy IV

• Final Fantasy IV had a ton of glitches present in its early SNES days. While most of them were patched out or fixed in rereleases, a few remained for a while longer.
  • You could duplicate anything that could be equipped on the left or right hand through an equip glitch, even items that could only be obtained once. This was incredibly handy for dual-wield characters, and gave Edge many more weapons to throw (multiple copies of the Excalibur sword, for example). You could also sell the more valuable dupes for tons of GP, turn around and stock up on other items in shops, which was especially useful when trying to purchase high-priced items like Ethers and Elixirs. It was also possible to equip a shield on Rosa and Rydia, substantially increasing their staying power, since they wouldn't otherwise be able to do that. This only works with the SNES and PlayStation versions though; the GBA port or DS remake fixed this.
  • Similar to the duplication glitch, it was possible in the SNES version to create a "blank" item that could be sold for roughly 1.6 million gil. This also got fixed in remakes.
  • Using Tents and saving while in transition from one overworld map tile can skew the game's collision detection, allowing the player to glitch through solid obstacles. Most famously, this can be used to pass through the village of Mist without actually entering it, though you can then enter from the right and buy powerful equipment, if you have enough gil (perhaps from selling a "blank" item). Certain scripted events play out as if you'd gone through Mist normally, but Tellah will not appear in the Watery Pass, and the game will freeze up if you enter the "Spoony Bard" battle without him in your party. So you do have to trigger the Mist scene to proceed.
  • In the initial SNES release of the game, the Dark Elf's dragon form didn't have Contractual Boss Immunity to Weak/Tornado, which reduces the target's HP to a single digit. All you had to do was have Tellah cast the spell once, then have anyone else attack, and boom; no more Dark Elf Dragon. All subsequent remakes of the game removed this weakness.
  • ROM hackers and tool-assisted speedrunners have found a way to confuse the game's positioning system by walking up and down a stairway 64 times and then causing the counter to go negative. This results in a glitched or otherwise unnavigable screen, but the right arrow button inputs can allow players to skip huge portions of the game.
  • It is possible to create an "MP underflow" situation where a character has negative MP, but is interpreted to have an obscenely high amount instead. This can allow Tellah to cast Meteor despite never having enough MP to legitimately cover the cost.
  • If you manage to time it so Edge steals a weapon or shield from an enemy after you've already opened the item menu with a different character, that character will be able to equip the stolen gear even if it's equipment they can't normally use. In this way, it was possible to equip Rosa and Rydia with weapons they'd normally never be able to use, even if the selection was somewhat limited. This was once again patched out with rereleases.
  • Putting Sylph in the upper-right corner of Rydia's summon menu will, for some reason, make it not use MP. You still need enough MP to be able to cast it, but your MP won't drain after casting it. This was only present in the SNES version of the game.
    • Sylph also had another glitch in the SNES version where if it was cast while Rydia was at full health, it would restore her MP instead of her HP. And by the time Rydia could obtain Sylph, this would heal hundreds of MP per cast, in addition to damaging enemies and healing allies, creating quite a Game-Breaker. When the bug was removed, many players questioned its loss, as it was thought for a long time that this was how Sylph was supposed to work.invoked
  • If you're able to time it so you target an enemy with Life 1 then kill them before the spell is cast, the enemy will revive with 0 HP and immediately die again. You'll see the animation of the spell go off, and nothing more, but when the battle ends you'll have gotten experience and gil from two enemies instead of one. Doing this in a battle with an enemy that can repeatedly summon other enemies can yield massive amounts of experience in a very short time.
  • In the SNES version, you can skip the entire Sealed Cave, along with its horde of Trap Doors and Demon Wall, if you have Rydia cast Warp immediately after battling Golbez in Giott's Castle. The crystal will be back, allowing you to take it and set the same Event Flag as taking the crystal in the Sealed Cave, and merely entering the cave will trigger the event that happens when you beat it. The Speed Runners loved this one, as did people who hated how hard the damn place was. This glitch was removed from subsequent rereleases and remakes; past the SNES version, you have to go through the dungeon the hard way.
  • The Second Form glitch in the SNES version made bosses with more than one form into a joke. If you're battling any boss that changes forms mid-battle (such as Mom Bomb or the Dark Elf), and you kill them by reflecting an offensive spell off of an ally with Wall/Reflect, the boss will die without transforming. The reason is the transformation is programmed as a counter-attack, but counter-attacks are programmed to not trigger when a target is hit by a Reflected spell. This even works on the Climax Bosses and the Final Boss. This was once again fixed in remakes.

Final Fantasy V

• A surprising number of "boss" encounters (i.e. the boss-battle music plays) are not, in fact, considered such by the game, and the enemy lacks the usual immunities to status ailments and instant death attacks.
• None of the bosses (including the ones with the right flags) are immune to the Blue Magic ability Level 5 Death. Chemists can boost levels through their !Mix ability and Blue Mages can also inflict the Old status, which gives persistent level drain, on enemies.
• Chemists in general are the secret to Huge Power in this game. Drink yourself levels, speed, elemental immunities, or use some of the more esoteric !Mix results to skip boss scripts, such as Exdeath's transformation into Neo-Exdeath.
• Cannoneers can similarly skip scripts with their !Combine ability.
• The Super Famicom version has several underflow errors that can be taken advantage of: equipping the Thornlet (which drops magic power) on a berserker (the lowest magic attack of all classes) will cause everyone save Lenna to be able to take advantage of several damage formulas that are otherwise unimpressive. Additionally, using Ninjas to throw an "empty" item in the last slot of the inventory and then stealing a Coral Sword will cause that slot to fill up with 255 of the swords, which then can be sold for great profit.
• By combining the Steal and Throw commands with the 2-Handed ability and some inventory management, one can roll the item counter from 0 to 255, gaining scores of items. Furthermore, because the shops aren't programmed to handle quantities higher than 99, you can sell your newly stolen items one at a time and never run out, yielding infinite cash as well.
• In the Japanese and American Advance versions, reloading a save (normal or quicksave) causes the second battle in any area to be the rarest encounter in that area. This makes it useful for filling out the bestiary, but also makes Movers a much more reliable enemy to grind against in the final dungeon to max out all the job classes.
• An oversight in how the Pixel Remaster remake handles the Brave Blade/Chicken Knife choice^Explanation Saving after you enter the clearing where they appear, returning to the title screen from the menu, and reloading your save places you on the regular Moore map with the events and NPC from the choice event still loaded. If you take a weapon and "leave", you can walk south again to reenter the clearing and restart the event, since the flag to prevent it from repeating isn't set until you leave the clearing map—and as far as the game is concerned, you were still in Moore when you made your choice. lets you get both weapons in one playthrough, or even multiple copies of the same weapon. The Chicken Knife has the potential to be the strongest weapon in the game hands-down, so abusing this glitch until you have eight and then slapping two of each on your party will let you steamroll the last few dungeons.

Final Fantasy VI

• Relm Sketch Glitch: Using Relm's sketch command under certain conditions might erase your game... or it could max your hitpoints to 9999, fill your inventory with secret items, and turn Edgar into General Leo, who was supposed to be a Guest-Star Party Member usable in only one battle. While the glitch is potentially dangerous, the conditions to trigger a given result are also predictable enough to be safely exploited if you know what you're doing. Later releases of the game fixed this glitch.
• The Evasion stat never actually gets used for physical attacks, like it's supposed to. Instead, evasion for everything in the game is ruled by the M-Block statistic, and it is possible to max out this stat, making the character Nigh-Invulnerable. This has an interesting consequence for the game's "Dark" status, which blinds a character; it effectively raises the enemy's Evasion when that character attacks. This has no effect whatsoever, due to the bug! There's also an item called "Goggles," whose only effect is to prevent the "Dark" status, so of course, the Goggles Do Nothing. The Dark status effect does have one negative effect: it prevents Strago from learning any Lore spells while he has it. All of this is fixed in the Game Boy Advance remake.
• The Psycho Cyan glitch causes Cyan to launch physical attacks non-stop—not allowing anyone else to move—until all enemies are dead. It's a bit of a pain to set up, but is plenty entertaining if successful and a huge help to players attempting Low Level Runs. Here's a demonstration. The GBA and Playstation ports fixed this glitch, but dedicated players found a new way to trigger the effect.
• Vanish/Doom: Casting Vanish on anything will give the Clear status, which makes physical attacks always miss in exchange for making magical attacks always hit (which it's supposed to do). But this means that instant death spells will always hit, even against bosses that have Contractual Boss Immunity to instant death.^note This is because the coding that says "If target has Clear status, and attack is magic-based, attack hits" was accidentally programmed to take priority over "If target is immune to instant death, and attack causes ID, attack misses". The only monsters that can't be killed in two spells are the ones immune to the Clear status (of which there are few, because Clear is a positive status ailment) and undead enemies (since they're already dead, though X-Zone/Banish still works on them). This was fixed in the Game Boy Advance remake, though it still works on monsters not normally immune to instant death, but that's to be expected and far less game-breaking.
• The original Japanese version also includes a glitch that let you equip absolutely anything as a helmet. The best helmet in the game? A drill. Eventually Square-Enix realized this, as it got referenced in Dissidia with the "Machine" armor set!
• When Setzer tells Celes she looks stunning, she blushes. However, Edgar and Sabin share the same colour palette, and blush too. It's cute.
• A couple of nifty Slot glitches: Strago can learn Lv. 5 Death from 7-7-7 Joker's Death, and, by confusing and unconfusing Setzer, 7-7-BAR Joker's Death, ordinarily a Total Party Kill, can be reversed onto enemies (including ones which outright prevent a 7-7-7 Joker's Death, such as the very final boss). 7-7-BAR and 7-7-7 Joker's Deaths are the same spell, but with a different aiming byte - so if you have Gogo Jump out of the way of 7-7-BAR, then Mimic it, nothing happens... at first, as the game knows your party ought to be dead. But if you then Mimic the Mimic, Gogo will successfully cast 7-7-BAR Joker's Death on the opponent, which doesn't check if the opponent is immune to the move or not.
• The Rippler spell, one of Strago's possible Lores, allows the user to trade status effects with the target. Normally, one would assume this means the status ailments and status buffs; however, it also includes things such as Gau's Rage, Mog's Dance, and Shadow's dog. With some Rippler maneuvering, Interceptor can be set (permanently) to guard whatever character the player decides needs the protection, instead of guarding Shadow. However, if an enemy uses Rippler on Shadow and the enemy dies, Interceptor goes with it and the dog is lost forever. Oops!
• Every enemy in the game has a hidden "weight" stat, which makes them immune to certain moves, like Sabin's Meteor Strike suplex. However, the programmers accidentally forgot to make the Phantom Train boss have the proper weight statistic, allowing Meteor Strike to work on it. Sabin being able to suplex an entire train into the air and slam it back on its rails made Sabin a Memetic Badass among Final Fantasy fans. While a lot of other bugs were fixed in remakes, this one's been kept in, because it's a once-per-playthrough experience that was too much fun to correct.
• Wind God Gau. Ordinarily, Gau isn't supposed to be able to equip weapons, but in the original SNES version, he can equip the Merit Award, which allows any character to equip any weapons and armor. In this case, give Gau one of Cyan's swords, the Kazekiri (Tempest), which randomly casts Wind Slash half the time. Then give Gau the Master's Scroll (Offering) relic, which allows him to attack four times, and use the Stray Cat Rage. If you're lucky, Gau will attack four times at quadruple damage and use the Razor Wind after each strike, which also got the "quad damage" boost. This effectively let Gau sweep everything on the field at no cost, since there were very few enemies that were resistant or immune to Wind damage. Later releases removed Gau's ability to equip the Merit Award, then removed Gogo's ability to equip the Merit Award when players did the Wind God setup with him instead.
• General Kutan. There are some shortcomings in the way Final Fantasy VI determines if the player character has collided with an immovable object that, with a bit of finesse, makes it possible to walk right through certain barriers. Exploiting this in Locke's scenario allows the player to completely bypass getting Celes. The scripted battle that ends Locke's scenario requires that he has a partner, however, and the game picks Kutan — one of the generic moogles from the three-party battle early in the game. Amusing as it is to have the part of Celes played by a moogle, Kutan's stats outright suck, and the cute fuzzy general quickly becomes a liability, especially at the beginning of the World of Ruin, where he's the only character you can have in your party for a substantial amount of time.
• There is a major Sequence Breaking glitch in the game where, if you save early in the game, play until the Floating Continent without saving, hop back on the airship from the Floating Continent, go back to the Continent, and die, you'll wake up right at the beginning of the game with your airship. This allows you to skip everything between leaving Narshe and finding the unconscious Terra in Zozo, while having a party consisting of Locke and Terra. Various applications of this glitch allow you to turn Relm and Strago into Ghosts and have them one-shot the final boss with Possess, or add General Leo or Maduin to your party, or take Banon to the World of Ruin, and then turn the World of Ruin back into a glitchy version of the World of Balance with WoR towns through triggering Kefka's invasion of Figaro... Or you can have Banon sing at the opera, causing his sprite to glitch out explosively. This glitch went undiscovered for over ten years before anyone caught it, but considering what has to be done to trigger it, it's no wonder it wasn't caught.
• Locke's Mug ability allows him to both attack and Steal at the same time. Mug has a glitch to it in that none of the special traits of Locke's weapons will apply when he Mugs a monster. This can be bad (e.g., the Valiant Knife loses its defense-piercing ability) but it can also be good (instant-death weapons won't automatically revive undead creatures, allowing Locke to attack them with these weapons, and weapons like the Blood Sword and the Soul Sabre can be used as normal weapons without their limits).

Final Fantasy VII

• Final Fantasy VII, due to a convoluted development process reflecting Square's biggest game project at that time^note Essentially, the game was built out of a series of modules based on battle, world movement, menus and dialogue sequences, made the game have numerous quirks and strange consequences when certain strategies were implemented. The game's buggy nature led to it becoming a prime candidate for speedruns:
  • The Gold Saucer date can be easily manipulated by utilizing a quirk in the Midgar Building — during the group's imprisonment, the player can farm infinite "date points" from either Tifa or Aerith due to a dialogue choice not disappearing.
  • The W-Item materia. It allowed you to use two items in one turn, but due to a very easy exploitable glitch, also allowed you to create infinite copies of any item usable in battle. This includes rare items, expensive items that could be sold to shops for loads of gil, items you're only ever supposed to get one of, and items that are Game Breakers in their own right when available in mass quantities; an endless supply of Elixirs, Megalixirs, and Hero Drinks basically removes all difficulty from the game.
  • The "Quadra Magic Glitch", which lets you get the Quadra Magic materia without doing any chocobo breeding. See here.
  • Vincent's final weapon increases in power the more enemies Vincent kills, up to a cap. However, if you kill a ridiculous number of enemies (around 65535) with him, the damage formula for the weapon overflows, which triggers a failsafe script that forces any target hit by the weapon to die instantly. Yes, even Emerald Weapon and Ruby Weapon.
  • The Turbo MP materia which increases both damage output and MP cost by up to 50%, also has a cap bug that prevents the MP cost for growing above 255, making it cheaper for anything that cost more than 170MP: Such as Knights of the Round Table, 250MP, which coupled with Turbo MP costs only 255MP instead of 375.
  • Not nearly as well known: Under normal circumstances, it's not possible to use the support materias HP Absorb, MP Absorb, Added Cut, or Steal As Well with either the Slash All or Double Cut command materias. It is however possible to put any of those four support materia in a pair of linked slots with Master Command; if you also have Slash All or Double Cut equipped, the benefits of the support materia will be added to them as well.
  • Want to heal your party to full-health in the middle of battle? Cast Regen on the party, then pop the lid on your Playstation open, then have someone in your party cast a magic spell. The whole battle will grind to a halt until you close the cover, but Regen heals your party in real-time, so you can wait out your injuries before resuming. Later entries in the series, such as Final Fantasy IX, prevented this by pausing the game if the cover is opened, but you could still use Regen and cast a summon spell with an impossibly long attack animation for a similar effect.
  • By holding down both trigger buttons (or their equivalents on the PC port) during Chocobo races, your Chocobo actually regenerates stamina. This is immensely useful, as even if you've stuffed the aforementioned feathery god with sylkis greens, at higher classes of races, it's increasingly likely that a jockey whose stats are 25% higher than your Chocobo's will appear (even if that means his stats are above the cap for normal Chocobos. But, due to his inability to sprint before the final leg of the race, combined with this bug, you can win even class S races every time. Which makes getting the Magic-counter materia merely tedious, as opposed to teeth-gnashingly frustrating.
  • Yuffie's Conformer weapon was intended to do more damage to enemies stronger than Yuffie and less to those that were weaker, and was given to the player relatively early in the game to allow maximum exploitation of this effect before Yuffie got too powerful for it to be useful. However, sloppy programming left it dealing more damage depending on enemy level, making it one of the most useful weapons in the entire game. This trait of it even lasted while using Morph, which ordinarily deals hugely reduced damage but turns the enemy into an item when killed using it; the Conformer just deals whatever damage it would deal if used with the Attack command. This makes Yuffie invaluable when farming for Sources, items which permanently raise your stats which can be created by Morphing enemies in the same area where the Conformer is found.
  • Due to the way the game tracks party slots, it sometimes gets mixed up as to whether Cait Sith and Vincent are Cloud and Sephiroth, who appear in a flashback using the same party slots, meaning they also share the same Limit Breaks (though these are not accessible through normal gameplay). This occasionally allows those doing massive Sequence Breaking or exploiting the Debug menu to add Sephiroth to their party, though you can't change Sephiroth's equipment and Materia loadout and doing his Limit Break will break the game. Or you can have a party with both an adult and teenage Cloud! (Bizarrely, the teenage Cloud has his own stat sheet different to both his adult self and his slotmate Cait Sith, even though this has no effect under normal circumstances.)
  • The "Materia Smuggling" glitch, discovered in early 2020, also breaks the game wide-open. Due to the way the game handles memory and registry files, it's possible to use the Exchange Menu to place any two Materias in the two uppermost-left slots of the last character in the menu, achieve a Total Party Kill in battle and switch to a savefile with less characters, which allows the Materia (regardless of what they are) to be pulled back out for use. At its base level, this can be used to "smuggle" Materia into Wutai, which doesn't get removed even with Yuffie stealing up to 48 of the player's best at the very beginning of the sidequest. On the PC/Steam version, this glitch can be used to smuggle endgame Materia like Knights of the Round into any savefile, as demonstrated by Youtuber 4-8 Productions when he smuggles the aforementioned KOTR and HP = MP Materia into the very beginning of the game and uses it on low-level soldiers.

Final Fantasy IX

• Final Fantasy IX:
  • Ipsen's Castle screws with the normal battle mechanics so that the stronger your weapon, the weaker your physical attacks are. To get the most mileage out of your physical attacks, you need to go back and re-equip your weaker starting weapons. Unfortunately, since your characters learn most of their special attacks from their weapons, this will cramp the ability of your fighting characters to learn many abilities...until you realize that the changes Ipsen's Castle makes to the battle mechanics only affect the Fight command. Special attacks aren't affected at all, not even physical ones, so you can freely use attacks like Freya's Jump and Lancer, Steiner's Darkside, and Amarant's No Mercy and Throw attacks to full effect while still learning new abilities from your weapons.
• The most famous glitch in this game is easily the Eiko/Marcus stat bug. The three guest characters Blank, Cinna, and Marcus share a stat file in the code with Amarant, Quina, and Eiko respectively. While the intended use of this is their levels transferring to the three permanent characters, this doesn't apply to Marcus and Eiko. Instead of Marcus's level, his stat boosts from leveling up transfers to Eiko instead. Using a turbo controller & rubberbands, the equipment you want to use to boost certain stats, a Blood Sword, and K Oing the other party members, one can auto level Marcus to 99 overnight, which results in a very tanky and powerful little girl.

Final Fantasy X

• Final Fantasy X:
  • The opposing team in the blitzball enemy AI has no programming for what to do if you swim into your own goal while carrying the ball. The opposing team's members will swim uselessly around in circles, never coming close to you. It's quite easy to get one goal ahead, get the ball back, swim into your own goal, and just wait for time to run out.
  • Ordinarily, you'd have to go through many blitzball leagues and tournaments just to get all of Wakka's overdrives, and eventually, his sigil for his Celestial Weapon. But the reason the tournament opens is because the game counts how many times you enter the blitzball menu, not how many matches you play. So you could go in to the blitzball menu, exit the menu, and repeat until the tournament to get Wakka's equipment opens up.
  • There is a chance that Geosgaeno, upon its final defeat, will drop a weapon with the No Encounters ability, which is normally available only for armor.
  • The PS4 version had a faulty random number generator, meaning some stuff that is normally left up to random chance... isn't. Some people were actually annoyed when Sony fixed the bug, due to its usefulness: Players using the nonrandom results will always be able to open all twelve chests in the Omega Ruins (normally a 1/240 chance of success, with the result determined the moment players first enter the Ruins). The prize for doing so is 99 Warp Spheres, allowing characters to teleport to anywhere on the Sphere Grid they want, as much as they want. As such, it can be advantageous to delete the 1.01 patch which fixes the error before entering the Ruins, take the chests, and then reinstall the update.
  • For some reason, the Cover ability works on the various worm monsters when they use Regurgitate to spit out a character they swallowed earlier. The result is the user teleporting into the worm's mouth and being spat out in place of the intended character, which causes the "protected" character to become invisible (save for their weapon) but still usable, which serves no purpose other than looking ridiculous.
  • The Lightning crater glitch turns what is otherwise a painstakingly painful That One Side Quest into a tedious but doable one. In the Thunder Plains, it's possible to draw out lightning at will by running into a crater. This makes dodging 200 lightning bolts consecutively easier.
  • The Japanese and Indonesian version of Final Fantasy X International had the Home Glitch that allowed one to replay the game from the attack on the Al Bhed Home on Bikanel like some sort of New Game Plus only with Yuna in the party. Most of the side effects include dialogue not playing, cutscenes not triggering and Yuna disappearing and reappearing randomly.

Final Fantasy XII

• Final Fantasy XII: the zone-out glitch consist on killing a monster and then immediately moving into a new area before the EXP and LP appear on the screen. While the player does get the rewards for the slay, the game thinks that the monster has not been defeated and thus respawns it. This allows to repeatedly kill an otherwise unique enemies, getting all prizes for doing so. The common targets of this glitch are the Dustia monster from the Dalmasca Westersand (low level parties can amass large amounts of EXP, LP, and gil early in the game) and the Helvinek from the Necrohol of Nabudis (parties can procure several sets of Grand Armors, the strongest heavy armor in the game).

Final Fantasy XV

• Final Fantasy XV:
  • Throughout the game, party member and photographer Prompto will automatically snap pictures of your party members as you play, allowing for fun things to post on your real-life social media feed. Sometimes, though, the photography AI glitches out and creates photographs taken from impossible angles (like a selfie positioned beneath the soles of Prompto's feet), with surreal lens distortions, or just incomprehensible glitchy messes. This seems to particularly be a problem in dark dungeons, where the dynamic lighting tends to interfere with the code, resulting in nightmare-inducing selfies where Prompto is completely black except for a brilliant white reflection off his grin.
  • Sometimes the lighting engine glitches out and causes objects to glow for no reason, including Noctis's hair◊.
  • The game seems to have trouble figuring out if guest party member and Ensemble Dark Horse Aranea Highwind is a party member or not. Some players have noticed that in New Game Plus games, she will appear photobombing Prompto's pics even if she's not a member of the party. She also seems to appear as a permanent party member in New Game Plus, interacting with the boys as if she was always meant to be there in normal gameplay (although she is immortal, and in cutscenes she just stands about with nothing to do while the boys walk through her).
    • This has since been patched out, but not the opportunity to use the same glitch to get Cor to join the party, although he's glitchier than Aranea, with fewer interactions with other characters and no campfire animations. At least one player was even able to get two Cors in their party.
  • The AI party members have a tendency to stand on the tops of each other's heads, and get stuck there sometimes. This happens even when they're on Chocobos.
  • It's possible to call a Chocobo right before entering certain dungeons, then warping into the Chocobo-free zone, making your Chocobo spawn inside a zone where it could not normally appear. Doing this can trigger other silly effects, such as party members becoming invisible and being able to easily kill Zur.
  • A common glitch where Ignis would occasionally start T-posing on top of his chocobo instead of riding it was considered funny enough to get a reference in the official manga.
  • A very common glitch in the Royal Edition of the game is that, in Chapter 14, Noctis and the gang will revert to their younger selves, including an Ignis with perfectly healthy eyes, despite wearing the Royal Raiment and Kingsguard outfits. Then, if you use Umbra to travel to the past, the older versions will show up in the open world instead of the younger ones. If you try to enter the Final Boss battle like as the Chocobros' younger selves, the game will glitch out and toss you inside a sealed shelter to force you to Umbra yourself back to adulthood, but it otherwise allows you to use the character models you like best throughout all most of Chapter 14, including cutscenes.

Non-Mainline Entries

• Final Fantasy Mystic Quest
  • Clearing a battlefield with enough experience to gain a level will automatically increase your level a second time.
  • As in many games of the series, Revive Kills Zombie...or that's how it's meant to work. Due to a mixed-up flag, the Life spell instead instantly kills anything but undead enemies.
  • The Cure spell bases the amount healed off of the target's maximum HP and the user's Magic stat. As a result, if Benjamin casts Cure on the Dark King, it causes the amount healed to overflow and instead do tens of thousands of damage.^note It doesn't work with Phoebe because her higher Magic stat causes the Cure spell to overflow twice, thus restoring the Dark King's HP as normal.
  • It's possible to entirely skip the Fireburg section of the game due to one of these. By using up all your Cure Potions, then purchasing zero seeds at Fireburg, the game glitches out and places the next object in the game's code into the Cure Potion's slot, which is the Sky Coin. These Sky Coins are not coded to open that door in Focus Tower, but if you then try to buy a certain number of Cure Potions, the game glitches again and places several objects into your inventory, one of which is the Sun Coin. This coin works like it's supposed to.
• Final Fantasy Tactics:
  • The PS1 version had an awesome glitch that could let you get all the abilities of certain jobs. If you had enough JP to buy a skill, you could press down square, hit accept, then exit, which could make your JP for that job 9999 (though it didn't work for every job). This lead to fun things like Half-MP Bahamut in Dorter Slums.
  • There was an item duplication glitch. Putting a weapon in a character's left hand, and a shield in the right, and hitting optimize at the item shop would swap out the weapon, by putting the one you had back in your bag, and purchasing another from the shop. This could then be used to get infinite copies of one-time only weapons.
  • If you use a gun to jump on something with Blade Grasp equipped, you'll skywalk.
  • Speaking of Blade Grasp, it was programmed to work on all attacks the game considers to be physical. This means that a unit equipped with Blade Grasp can potentially ignore arrows, bullets, and some Monster attacks.
  • The first stage of the Deep Dungeon/Midlight's Deep occasionally spawns a male Time Mage... who isn't actually male. The Mage in question is female in every sense except her portrait and in-battle sprite. She can be Invited into the team (and remains a crossdresser should you try), even using Bard sprites for the female-only Dancer class. It could, in theory, be a very obscure Final Fantasy V reference, but more likely it's just a very funny and ultimately harmless bug.
• Mobius Final Fantasy sometimes loses track of which way Wol is facing in battle. This doesn't affect gameplay at all, but looks hilarious when he's shadowboxing away towards the camera while nuking enemies behind him.

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