The Seven Most Broken Exploits/ Glitches - VOTING

[Jason Tandro]

Okay so we have a whopping 35 Nominations (I'm adding one last one as I write this) to sort through so I broke them down according to game as well as a brief synopsis of what they do. For "how they work" - google it or refer to the prior thread, I'm trying to keep this accessible.

How Voting Works
1. The vote will be open for 7 days.
2. You can vote for as many as you like.
3. Ties are okay but the lowest ties will have a tie-breaker round if they make more than seven winning entries. (i.e. 6 entries win but then two tie for 7th place, those would have a tiebreaker).
4. Use this opportunity to tell us which ones you voted for and why. Remember that your explanation may make it into the frontpage article! If you wish to remain anonymous but still have your entry considered, just be sure to let us know.


Whole Series
Phoenix Down On An Undead Boss - In some games such as 6 and 8 you can instantly KO bosses who are undead by using a Phoenix Down

FF1
Stair Teleport To Endgame Glitch - Self-Explanatory
The Peninsula of Power - A small patch of land available early on hosts some monsters from much later in the game, making it ideal (though difficult early on) to power level.

FF2
Command Spamming / Attacking Self - Because of FF2's broken stat system you could attack yourself or enter and then cancel commands to individually raise your stats an insane amount in a single fight.

FF3
Item Duplication - Self-Explanatory
Item Overwrite Trick - Using this trick you can actually change what your items are.

FF4
Item Duplication (Underflow) - Self-Explanatory
Bypass Event Glitch (Mist Skip) - Allows you to skip Mist and keep Kain in your party, as well as affecting a few other party members.
64 Door Heirarchy Glitch - Uh, look here. Basically crazy shit happens.

FF6
Vanish + Doom / X-Zone - This trick allows you to instantly kill almost anything in the game including bosses.
Lete River Level Up Trick - A trick that allows unlimited leveling in a given spot; simply leave the A button pressed down and let the game sit for a few hours!
Death Time Travel Exploit (Drillmet) - By triggering a certain series of events you can effectively "restart" the game with either the airship available early, or General Leo in the party.
Sketch Bug - Crazy Shit Happens, sometimes good, sometimes bad
Game Over Glitch -Not sure

FF7
Final Attack + Revive / Phoenix - If mastered, this materia combination basically makes you unkillable.
W-Item Duplication - Item Duplication Glitch
"Run Away" to prevent Back Attacks - By starting to flee then stopping when you are back attacked your characters face the right way and negate the extra damage dealt.
Quadra Reflect Glitch - Only the first spell of a Quadra Magic pair will be reflected, allowing the other three to pass through.
Yuffie Time Travel Glitch - Allows you to travel through the game with the power of Yuffie. More here.
Overflow Glitch-Messes with the internal math to produce vastly higher than expected numbers (often damage or AP) More here.


FF8
Infinite Rosetta Stone, D-District Prison - Allows you to get multiple of this valuable item.
Escaping After Drawing 100 Spells to Avoid Leveling - Handy Low Level trick to get plenty of spells but acrue no EXP.
Disc 1 Lionheart (and other Ults) - Through a series of steps mainly involving playing Triple Triad and using Card Mod you can obtain ultimate weapons on the earliest disk.

FF9
Using Tents In Battle - Tents heal but can also inflict status effects. Use them on your enemies.

FFX
AP-> Overdrive + Ally Overdrive Setting AP Farming (FFX) - Allows you to earn obscene AP just from standing around in battle.

FFX-2
Catnip Gunner - This trick allows you to, at low HP, deal insane damage with the Gunner's "Trigger Happy" ability.

FFXII
For these I'll link to Fangu's excellent post: https://thelifestream.net/forums/showpost.php?p=745441&postcount=5

Seitengrat chest manipulation ("Meme bow") (IZJS only) - Allows you to obtain a beta test weapon.
Dead Character Glitch ("DCG") - Overloads the queue capacity to nerf a powerful boss; Yiazmat
Underflow glitch ("Less than zero % glitch") - Guarantees you will always land a debuff on enemies.
Despawning ("Immobilize") trick - Removes enemies.
ATB resetting - Changing equipment to allow you to bypass ability cooldowns.
Dustia respawning - Leaving an area before the EXP / LP prompt leaves the screen will not register the kill, allowing some unique enemies to stay alive and be farmed.

Item Inversion Accessory - An accessory which reverses the effect of healing items allows you to deal fixed damage to otherwise tough opponents using healing items.


FF: Tactics
Level Down, Brave / Faith Manipulation - Allows you to tweak your stat, mainly Brave and Faith to create a team that is impervious to spell damage and has a high chance for reaction commands to trigger (such as Counter or Blade Grasp)
Ninja Calculators - After learning all Math skills, take your calculator through the Rogue set, specifically Ninja to boost their Speed stat, allowing for incredibly fast Math casting which can basically break any sense of challenge.

 

[Flintlock]

This is a subject I know quite a lot about from watching speedruns so I'm going to give my opinions on a number of nominees. If I've left something out it's because I either don't know it or don't have anything to say about it. The ones I plan to vote for are starred, but I won't vote yet, in case someone is able to convince me to vote for something not on this list. I know we can vote for as many as we like but I feel it's appropriate to pick seven.

General: Phoenix Down On An Undead Boss
This is definitely not a glitch, and I probably wouldn't call it an exploit myself either. It's obviously a very easy way of beating certain bosses but I think that's exactly what Squaresoft / Square Enix intended, otherwise they wouldn't keep doing it.

FF1: Stair Teleport To Endgame
This is incredibly powerful. It's a typical case of arbitrary code execution (ACE). Due to a bug in the way stairs work in the game, you can overflow the memory and make the game start executing code of your choosing. The code you can input is limited to your characters' names, however, which makes the discovery of this glitch all the more impressive. Names in this game can only be four characters long, and each one is stored in one byte of memory, meaning you can only execute four bytes of code at a time. And you also have to choose specific jobs for your characters to even reach that part of the game's memory. Here's a quick video primer. As it turns out, it's possible to execute code that jumps right to the end of the game before you've even left Castle Cornelia. It's mostly a tool-assisted speedrun (TAS) strategy but it has been used in human runs as well to beat the game in under an hour.

FF1: Peninsula of Power
This appears in a number of games and is definitely an exploit. As we all know, the random encounters on the world map in any Final Fantasy game depend on where the player is. Move to a new zone, get different battles. The trouble is that the actual navigable area of the map doesn't always correspond to these "enemy zones" very well. In some cases it's possible to fight enemies that aren't supposed to be available until much later in the game by walking on specific parts of the map. Of course, these fights are hard, but they're also an excellent place to grind early in the game.

FF4: Item Duplication (Underflow)
We're all familiar with the W-Item glitch from Final Fantasy VII, I expect. Well, whereas that glitch requires you to alternate between pressing the cancel and confirm buttons to duplicate one item at a time, Final Fantasy IV's equivalent gives you an enormous stack of items all at once. They just have to be items you can equip in either hand. IV is a game where you can change characters' weapons in battle, and by switching them in the right order, you will create an "invisible" item. Selling this item yields ridiculous gil:

Alternatively, if you don't sell it, you can use it to get 256 of the item you originally duplicated: one equipped and 255 in your inventory. And unlike W-Item, this is available relatively early in the game, making it an absolutely ridiculous exploit. It also combines perfectly with the glitch below.

FF4: Bypass Event Glitch (Mist Skip)
What are you going to do with all that gil you've got lying around from item duplication? I guess you could spend it on Phoenix Downs and Ethers, but that wouldn't really be making the game much easier. Instead, why not jump over one of the first towns in the game, enter it from the wrong side and go shopping for gear that's not supposed to be available until much later? By skipping the events that normally play when you enter Mist, the town isn't destroyed and you can buy Dancing Daggers - really overpowered throwable weapons for that part of the game that cost 5000 gil (or GP) each - to your heart's content. This video explains both this glitch and the previous one. The glitch isn't just used for Mist, though that's what it's primarily known for.

FF4: 64 Door Hierarchy Glitch
Yay, another glitch that involves walking back and forth for ages! This one actually works quite differently from Final Fantasy I's stair glitch, though. Due to the presence of the Warp spell in Final Fantasy IV, the game keeps track (sorta) of where you've been recently so it knows where to warp you should you use that spell. The idea is easy enough: there's a room level counter which starts at 0, increments by one when you enter a room and decrements by one when you leave it again. Casting Warp takes you to the last place where the counter was 0. The trouble is that some doors are not clearly entrances or exits - because they're part of a circular layout of rooms, for example. In those cases the counter increments no matter which way you go through the door. The result is that you can go through them repeatedly to increase your room level all the way to 64, at which point it goes back to 0. You can use this to warp to places you're not supposed to be able to go, including, amazingly, the final boss fight from the Dwarven Castle, skipping about half of the game. See here from about the 1:37 mark.

FF6: Vanish + Doom / X-Zone
The point of the Invisible status in FFVI is that it makes you impervious to physical attacks but vulnerable to all magical attacks - they never miss. As a result, you can use Invisible to inflict status effects which normally shouldn't be possible, like casting Doom on bosses to defeat them very quickly. An extremely powerful exploit which has never been fully fixed in any release of the game!

FF6: Lete River Level Up Trick
The Lete/Lethe river in Final Fantasy VI contains a split which leads to a loop and the exit. A first-time player, not knowing which direction leads where, might traverse the loop once and then figure out that they need to go the other way. The more grinding-inclined, though, can just ride the loop forever, fighting the forced encounters for experience and gil. The only justification for calling this an exploit, in my opinion, is that it's possible to automate the process with a turbo controller (make sure to set the cursor position to "memory" and have Banon Pray to restore HP). Aside from that it's not much different from grinding anywhere else except that you don't have to move back and forth to trigger the encounters.

FF6: Sketch Bug
A really powerful and potentially dangerous bug which can destroy your save file (some people say it can also destroy your entire game cartridge but I haven't seen evidence of that happening). It can also be massively exploited, however. There are so many things you can do with it that it's probably best to let a video do the talking here (and it's a long video!):

The most powerful thing you can do with it, of course, is to skip the Floating Continent and almost the entire World of Ruin, enter the final dungeon with your full World of Balance party intact, and beat the game. So there's that.

FF6: Game Over Glitch
The Sketch bug is not the quickest way of beating Final Fantasy VI, however. For that, you just have to die 52 times in a row on the world map, which causes a stack overflow. By manipulating the frame on which the game over is confirmed as well as a couple of other variables, it's possible to jump straight to the credits, bypassing the entire game. Extremely powerful, obviously, but I kinda regret nominating this because I can't imagine anyone actually doing it for fun.

FF7: Final Attack + Revive / Phoenix
Not an exploit for me; I think it works as intended. Final Attack will only be triggered as many times as its materia has stars, up to a maximum of five, so this doesn't make you invincible. And if the dying character doesn't have enough MP, it won't cast anyway.

FF7: W-Item Duplication
I think everyone here knows about this one.

FF7: "Run Away" To Prevent Back Attacks
Also not an exploit. Sorry if this bursts anyone's bubble, but it doesn't actually do anything. Yes, your characters will be facing the right way, but it's purely a cosmetic change. Try it for yourself: fight the same battle (say, Motor Ball) twice in a row, tap the run away buttons in one of the fights and observe how much damage your characters take. You'll see it makes no difference which way they're facing. Sorry.

FF7: Yuffie Time Travel Glitch
More commonly known as the Yuffie warping glitch, this PC-version only exploit lets you warp to any part of the game you want after finding and beating the Mystery Ninja in a forest. Unfortunately you still have to go to the place you want to warp to on a second save file (in which you haven't recruited Yuffie), limiting its value in my eyes. It's certainly interesting, though, since you can do things like skip the end of disc one and keep Aeris in your party for the rest of the game.

FF7: Overflow Glitch
So powerful that it can one-hit kill Emerald Weapon. Unfortunately there's no easy way to pull it off; you have to either kill tens of thousands of enemies with Vincent or max out a load of materia for Barret's Missing Score. There are some other cases of overflow in the game but they're not particularly useful, like equipping multiple Cover materias leading to a 256% cover chance, equivalent to a 0% chance. Ruby Weapon can't even be beaten with this glitch because its defence is too high.

FF8: Escaping After Drawing 100 Spells (Low-Level Saver)
Not an exploit, just (in my opinion) really badly designed.

FF8: Disc 1 Lionheart
Possibly an exploit. I'm not sure if Square intended for the player to be able to create weapons without the relevant Weapons Mon* magazines. Definitely OP but it's not like there aren't easier ways of breaking FFVIII (hello Card Mod).

FF9: Using Tents In Battle
I love this technique and I can't help but feel it wasn't intentional. Using a tent in battle is just plain weird to begin with if you ask me, but using them on your characters is a risky business since they're likely to get bitten by a snake and get a bunch of unwanted negative status effects. It's not all bad, though: use a tent on a boss and it will have a chance of getting those same status effects. Of course, you'll heal the boss in the process, which is why it's best to do it at the very start of the fight. My favourite place to use this is on Gizamaluke to make him both blind and silenced, turning a tricky fight into a piece of cake.

FFX: AP-> Overdrive + Ally Overdrive Setting
Probably not an exploit.

FFXII: (all)
I can do no better than to refer you to Fangu's excellent write-ups. My personal favourites are the dead character glitch and the Immobilize trick .

 

[Jason Tandro]

Flint, if the vack attack trick wins a spot we will use it as a chsnce for a PSA to reveal that it does nothing. I think the PD trick still counts as an "exploit" in cases whrre regulsr Life spells font work such ad Abadon from FF8

 

[Joker]

I just noticed this thread and

FF7: Final Attack + Revive / Phoenix
Not an exploit for me; I think it works as intended.

FF9: Using Tents In Battle
I love this technique and I can't help but feel it wasn't intentional.

FFX: AP-> Overdrive + Ally Overdrive Setting
Probably not an exploit.

completely agree with all save the middle, because the tent has a negative consequence for using it and is entirely luck-based. It's not particularly exploitable, either, because tents are expensive during the early game, which is the only time this is all that useful (imo).

If you want to really EXPLOIT Overdrive -> AP, you're going to want the Don Tonberry AP farming method, where you can easily gain 99 SL in a single fight.

 

[Fangu]

Thank you Jason, for the summaries, and thank you Flint, for excellent analysis.

FF7: "Run Away" To Prevent Back Attacks
Also not an exploit. Sorry if this bursts anyone's bubble, but it doesn't actually do anything. Yes, your characters will be facing the right way, but it's purely a cosmetic change. Try it for yourself: fight the same battle (say, Motor Ball) twice in a row, tap the run away buttons in one of the fights and observe how much damage your characters take. You'll see it makes no difference which way they're facing. Sorry.

I love that despite of this very good explanation of why this ISN'T an exploit, it's still gained votes since then Not sure how thorough people are reading up on the subject before voting...

Anyway, I'll be casting my votes based on reading what you guys wrote, plus what I've learned from watching speedruns, particularly relays. First of all though, I'll go through the six exploits from XII in the order I find them to be broken, because I said I'd do so in the other thread. I'll vote later, because I need to do this in chunks... need to do some more research

Spoiler: Rant

So the six I had on my list were:

1. Seitengrat chest manipulation ("Meme bow") (IZJS only)
2. Dead Character Glitch ("DCG")
3. Underflow glitch ("Less than zero % glitch"
4. Despawning ("Immobilize") trick
5. ATB resetting
6. Dustia respawning

Order of "broken" - I've reordered them based on how "exploity" they are, paired with how easily accessible they are, I think that's a pretty important factor.


1. Dustia respawning/ Dustia leveling
This goes on top of my list because it's a trick that makes you really feel like you're completely doing something the game did NOT intend you to do. Fairly easy to do - all you need is to get one character below 10% HP, then Phoenix Down and cross the zone line to your heart's content. This is a ridiculously fast way to level characters early in the game, and will save you a lot of hours of grinding Cockatrices, Skeletons, what have you. There's a reason speedrunners can get all characters to level 21 within a couple of hours - and that's not from starting the leveling, that's from starting the game.

2. Despawning ("Immobilize") trick
This is an exploit that makes you go all "mwahaha so you think I was HERE did you?" Casting Immobilize is really easy with a character with high magic. Then all you need to do is keep one character at the end of the zone, then run the other until you see enemies - switch to Immobilized character as your party leader, then switch back - bam, ALL (well most) enemies are GONE! This makes getting through the Feywood puzzle take just minutes (crew you, Behemoths!) and Giruvegan likewise. No more spending hours fighting hard enemies that can Sap, Poison, Disable and generally just kill you.

3. Dead Character Glitch ("DCG")
Despite being hard to learn to use, I'm placing this one third because it's so magnificently interesting, because of how you can actually completely defang FF's biggest superboss with it. It's hard to learn to use, but because of how much fun it is, it takes third.

4. ATB resetting
This is a REALLY powerful trick, bypassing cooldowns, but since it's a bit tricky to get into without extensive knowledge on the queuing system, it places fourth.

5. Underflow glitch ("Less than zero % glitch"
True that it can get you through some difficult fights and areas of the game, but unless paired with other planned out OP strats, you won't have a very broad use of it.

6. Seitengrat chest manipulation ("Meme bow") (IZJS only)
Using an RNG calculator? Listening to your game disc load? Come on. This is an exploit for the severely interested


Also, a comment to Nihopalaoa (listed in poll as "FFXII: Item Inversion Accessory"): This isn't technically an exploit, as it's a built in, intended feature in the game. Remedy + Nihopalaoa is a sassy thing, specially useful for a lot of pesky Rare game, and really does feel OP, but - it's not an exploit.

 

[Ghost X]

 

[Fangu]

Crap, I've been busy all weekend and haven't had the time to vote and do write-ups Is there a way we can postpone closing this poll with a day...?

 

[Jason Tandro]

Mods is that possible?

 

[Fangu]

Even if it can't be _technically_ done, you could always add my votes? You don't have a lot of material for your article, so I thought you might want some more? I'll have time for write ups later. But if it's whatever, then, whatever

 

[Jason Tandro]

Even if it can't be _technically_ done, you could always add my votes? You don't have a lot of material for your article, so I thought you might want some more? I'll have time for write ups later. But if it's whatever, then, whatever

At risk of opening up a can of worms I will allow any late votes and comments for 24 hours only. At 4 AM EST on 5/9/17 all bets are off.

 

[Cthulhu]

Mods is that possible?

Yup, just hit the 'edit poll' button if you have it.

 

[Jason Tandro]

Thank you Yop, but I do nay have that option. Fangu you can just message your votes and reasonings here. No point in editing the poll now since it will be reclosed in 12 hours.