XII - the absurdest/ most OP on top:
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
Edit:
I'll just briefly explain these five glitches/ tricks - editing poast as I type them up:
1. Seitengrat chest manipulation ("Meme bow")
Speaking of Seitengrat... Roostalol, leader of FFXII ENG and FFXII JP Any% (amongst other things) decided that leading the two hottest categories wasn't enough, so he went for IZJS as well. And he does it by, along with other strats, manipulating the game's RNG
by listening to the disc loading on the PS2.
Check out from 1:04:30 and onward when he places his mic on the PS2 and then later explains what we're listening for. (He gets the RNG load at 1:37:45.)
I'm not sure who came up with this first, they keep referring to ema non in the chat but I haven't checked if they're talking about him in this context.
These speedrunners.
Edit: Also, hahaha, HAHAHAHA, now I know why his "notes" for this run is listed as the following on the leaderboard site:
1. Kill Mimic Queen.
2. Get 2 Seitengrats.
3. ???
4. Split on "The End."
Watching this run is so funny
To add to this: The Seitengrat is a weapon used during development for testing. As a result, it has no model - it's invisible. It was left in the game purely as an Easter Egg, and is almost impossible to obtain without using any sort of trick (the one mentioned above, or some kind of RNG manipulator). With its 240 Attack power (vs Zodiac Spear's 150 (vanilla XII, 141 in IZJS)) it's by far the best weapon you can ever obtain in IZJS.
The only way to get the Seitengrat without cheating is out of that specific chest, which is invisible, and you need the Diamond Armlet equipped (which is hard to get on it's own.) Then it gets peculiar:
- Chest appearance rate is 1%
- Appeared chest has 20% chance to be an item (80% gil)
- If chest is an item, it's 5% chance to be the Rare Item (the Seitengrat)
Which pretty much means that when you enter the deck, you have a 1/10 000 chance of getting the Seitengrat!
2. Dead Character Glitch ("DCG")
Used especially for Yiazmat in an Order of Ambrosia% speedrun (~100% run), this glitch takes advantage of the limited effect capacity system of the PS2 hardware. What you basically do is clog up the queuing system in FFXII, by throwing an item while dismissing an esper and turning to Stone at the same time. This results in a 'dead (stoned) character' that is using up x amount of the capacity queue by "endlessly" trying to throw an item.
How this is useful for Yiazmat is that Yiazmat will always start with the move "Death Strike", and will never do another move until Death Strike is completed. But since Death Strike takes a lot of capacity, there isn't enough room for it to finish, and so he will try casting it over and over again, basically fixating him in a permanent loop.
Check out zer0's OoA% run, starting at around 7 hours 8 minutes:
He starts by having Balthier use Infuse on himself, then on the other characters, which is an easy way to crit down to below 6.5% health, which is the cap for maxing weapon combos.
3. Underflow glitch ("Less than zero % glitch")
This glitch utilizes a bug in the game programming. Since the bug was fixed in later versions, it only works on specific versions of the game, and for IZJS it is completely removed.
The bug is basically a calculation mistake. Basically, the game will calculate a character's chance of landing a debuff on an enemy based on the enemy's vitality and the character's magic stat. But in some cases, the calculation results in a calculated result that is a negative number - or "less than zero percent chance". In these cases, the number - I guess, due to the bug's name - because of memory limitation, results into a positive number, or, at least in some way, is interpreted to a number that the game qualifies as 100%. And so, as a result, the debuff will
always land.
In speedruns, this glitch is utilized heavily on several bosses, and is the only reason Fran and Balthier are kept at such low levels for most of the run. Making sure they can NEVER land debuffs such as Confuse, Immobilize, Death and Sleep, you make sure they will ALWAYS land them.
The most powerful (imo) use of this glitch in a speedrun is when they use Fran to Death all the Brainpans needed for the first level of Pharos, see video from about right before 5 hours 8 minutes:
When Fran reaches level 22 (I think it is) her magic is too strong, and the Underflow glitch will no longer work.
See also at around 5 hours 25 minutes: Balthier casting Sleep on Fenrir, another important use of the glitch. Another worth mentioning is using Confuse on Tyrant and Pandemonium.
4. Despawning ("Immobilize") trick
This glitch also takes advantage of hardware limitations in the PS2. Due to capacity, the game only concentrates on having enemies spawned in one place. This can be exploited by having two characters separated by a certain distance, and then switching back and forth between them. See again zer0skar_i's run, at 4 hours 34 minutes:
Not every enemy can be despawned though, like the dreaded Giruveganus.
No needed to be mentioned this works pretty well combined with the Underflow glitch.
5. ATB resetting
In FFXII, spells in particular have a cooldown time, sometimes due to animations, sometimes due to... something else, probably? At least I think it's not just animations, it can be though. Either way, cooldown time can be skipped if you change a piece of equipment (armour, weapon) on a character. This is used heavily throughout all speedruns of FFXII as it lets you cheat your way to the front of the effect capacity queue. The first time we see this used very deliberately is in the Belias fight. See Roostalol's current WR at 2 hours 4 minutes:
He lets two rounds of Aeros hit Belias, but, since he can't afford to wait for a third, as Belias sub 50% HP starts triggering Greater Barrier and then the devastating special that is Firaja, he cheats his way to placing a third round of Aeros ahead of the queue until Belias has enough room in the capacity queue to get Firaja off.
Had he not ATB reset these spells, he wouldn't have made it and the party would mostly be dead.
6. Dustia respawning
I almost forgot about this one!
When you kill an enemy, if you manage to zone out of the area before the "EXP" and "LP" text shows up, the game will interpret the enemy as "not killed" - you'll still get the EXP and LP, but the enemy will still be there.
How is this useful? Mostly because of the enemy Dustia, an enemy that can be killed with a Phoenix Down, so you can pretty much farm this enemy for EXP, LP and gil (drops, Books of Orgain and Flame Staves) from a very early level. Even better, as you only need one character to kill Dustia, you can farm it with Vaan only before you pick up the other characters. And since the levels of other characters depends on Vaan, well... it's pretty much the best way to level all your characters very early.
Coming up: A discussion on which ones I find the most "broken", and why. (I find #1 to be the most absurd, but not the most broken.)
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