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Bugs:Final Fantasy VI

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This page details bugs of Final Fantasy VI.

Vanish-Doom bug

The Vanish-Doom bug is perhaps the most infamous bug to have ever graced a Final Fantasy game. The basic gist is: cast Vanish on an enemy, then cast an instant death spell (most commonly done with Doom, but X-Zone and some other spells will work as well) and the enemy will die instantly, even if that enemy would normally be immune to instant death.

This bug gained infamy because it can be used to defeat almost any enemy, including some of the harder enemies and bosses in the game. Only the handful of enemies and bosses that are immune to Vanish (such as the final Kefka fight) are impervious to the effects of this bug.

The reason why this bug happens is an oversight in the game's mechanics. The way the Vanish status works is that it causes all physical attacks against the target to miss, but all magical attacks will ignore accuracy checks to always hit. However, the check for Vanish status happens before the check for instant death protection, so if the target has Vanish status, all other checks are skipped and its instant death protection is thus effectively nullified.

The bug was partially fixed in the GBA port by moving the check for instant death protection ahead of the check for Vanish status. However, other checks are still skipped, so it's possible to e. g. use Life/Raise and Life 2/Arise (which normally only work on fainted party members) to heal a living party member if that party member has the Vanish status.

Psycho Cyan bug

This bug makes Cyan attack all enemies repeatedly until they are dead. To perform it:

  • Have Cyan use Retort/Sky.
  • Cast Imp on Cyan to turn him into an Imp.
  • Kill off Cyan, then revive him

On the next attack, Cyan will start attacking repeatedly, without his turn ever ending, until all enemies are dead.

The reason why it happens is a combination of two bugs:

  • If Cyan is killed and revived while Retort/Sky is active, he will counterattack the next physical attack that occurs in battle, no matter who the target was.
  • If Imp is cast on Cyan while Retort/Sky is active, he will counterattack with a physical attack instead of with Retort/Sky. The effect will not go off, so Cyan will keep counterattacking all physical attacks that hit him until he successfully uses Retort/Sky (i. e. until the Imp status is removed from him)

If those two bugs are combined, Cyan will "counter" his own attack with another attack on his own, and thus create an infinite loop that never ends until the end of the battle. The bug can also be performed with Gogo if he is given the SwdTech/Bushido command.

This bug still works in the GBA version if the steps are performed in a different order (kill and revive Cyan, then use Sky, then cast Imp on Cyan). It was fixed for the mobile (iOS/Android) ports of the game.

Rippler bug

The move Rippler is intended to swap status effects between the caster and the target. However, an unintended side effect is that it also swaps a handful of special cases that are implemented as status effects in the game's code but were never actually intended to be accessible to the player. This includes:

  • Magitek (wearing the Magitek armor e. g. in the prologue or during the short sequence in Cyan's dreams).
  • Petrify
  • KO
  • Critical (this allows any character, even if not on low HP, to perform a desperation attack)
  • Dance
  • Rage
  • Frozen
  • Morph
  • Control
  • Hidden (used when the character is hidden e. g. by having Jumped in the air or by being ejected out of the battle by Sneeze or BabaBreath)
  • Interceptor Guard (this allows Shadow's dog to be swapped over to other characters or even Shadow to lose Interceptor permanently if an enemy targets him with Rippler)

This bug was fixed for the mobile (iOS/Android) ports of the game.

Empty party bug

This glitch can only be done in the World of Balance after the battle with Kefka at Narshe, but before the events in the Opera House.

In Narshe, create a party of only Gau. Go to Kohlingen and recruit Shadow. Make your way back to the Veldt by going through Figaro Cave, Mt. Kolts, the Returner Hideout, Lete River, Doma, the Phantom Forest and Baren Falls. Once on the Veldt, have Gau Leap on an enemy, then leave the Veldt with only Shadow through the Serpent Trench to arrive at Nikeah, and take the ferry back to South Figaro to get back to Narshe.

The moment you step into Narshe, Shadow will bid farewell, and you will be left with an empty party. The game is effectively softlocked at this point, and trying to open the pause menu crashes the game.

Equipment bugs

Several bugs are tied to the game's equipment:

Heal Rod bug

The Heal Rod is supposed to only be able to target the party, but due to a bug, that doesn't work, and you can use the Heal Rod on the enemy like any other weapon... except if you try to throw the Heal Rod using the Throw command, in which case you can only select a party member as the target, and as that actually deals damage instead of healing the target, it makes throwing the Heal Rod completely pointless. This was fixed in the GBA version.

Shield bug

Shields that apply inherent statuses to the wearer are bugged when they are equipped during a battle: instead of applying the status to the new holder, they provide immunity against the status. This affects the Force Shield (inherent Shell) and the Cursed Shield (inherent Seizure, Muddle, Mute and Sleep).

Capture bug

If Locke equips the Thief Glove relic, his Steal command turns into Capture, allowing him to attack the enemy in addition to trying to steal its item. However, weapons that have secondary effects lose this effect if they are used in conjunction with Capture. This has a couple of odd side effects:

  • The Atma Weapon uses the normal damage formula instead of calculating the damage off the user's HP; it will thus be stuck as a short sword that deals little damage.
  • The Dice and Fixed Dice also use the normal damage formula instead of calculating the damage based off a roll of the dice. Because their Hit Rate is set to 2 and 3 in the code (respectively), they will miss almost all of the time.
  • The Heal Rod will deal damage instead of healing.

Cursed Shield bug

Gogo can never uncurse the Cursed Shield due to a bug: the counter that counts how many battles have been completed with the Cursed Shield equipped is tied to gaining magic points after battle, and as Gogo does not gain magic points, he cannot uncurse the Cursed Shield. The Pixel Remaster fixed this bug.

Evade bug

The Evasion stat (called Evade% in-game) is not used by the game's damage calculation due to a bug. Instead, the Magic Evasion stat (called MBlock% in-game) is used for both physical and magical attacks.

This means a few effects that rely on the Evasion stat go completely unused:

  • The Blind status effect, which was intended to decrease Hit Rate by 50% and Evasion by 25%, is completely ineffective, with the sole exception of making Strago unable to learn Lores if he is inflicted with Blind. This also renders the Goggles relic (which provides immunity to Blind) completely useless.
  • The Beads/Prayer Beads relic is also completely ineffective. It was intended to increase Evasion by 20 (absolute value) and also give the wearer a 50% chance to dodge any physical attack (that is not unblockable).
  • The Zombie, Muddle, and Life 3 statuses were all intended to decrease Evasion by 25%.
  • The Poison, Near Fatal, Seizure, and Haste status were all intended to increase Evasion by 25%.

The other effect is that several monsters have completely different strategies to defeating them than originally intended. For example, the Ursus/Mugbear found on Mt. Zozo have an Evasion of 110, which would make them very hard to hit with physical attacks if it weren't for the bug. Instead, the monster uses its Magic Evasion, which is 0, making it very trivial to defeat.

This bug was fixed in the GBA version, where the Evasion stat works as intended.

Celes learnset bug

Celes does not learn Muddle (normally learned at level 32) if she joins the party at a level between 32 and 40. This is due to a sorting order bug in her learnset: the entry for "Muddle Lv.32" comes after the entry for "Bserk Lv.40", and due to how level averaging works when new members join the party, the entry for Muddle gets skipped altogether.

This was fixed in the GBA version.

Confuse/Item bug

If a party member tries to use an item on an ally, but gets inflicted with the Confuse status before his turn comes up, the targeting will switch and the party member will use the item on the enemy instead. The most useful application of this bug is with the Smoke Bomb item, which removes all enemies from battle, even those immune to instant death.

This bug was fixed in the mobile (iOS/Android) ports.

The Sketch Glitch

Another especially infamous glitch that became notorious for being easy to unintentionally trigger when fighting Intangir.

If Relm somehow misses when trying to sketch an enemy, the game will still try and draw the targeted enemy's sprite, but will go down an incorrect pathway. If the party leader's 28th spell slot is Silence/Mute or another spell with the same "aiming byte" (ie. it can't be multi-target and defaults to the enemy), this will typically result in the game violently bugging out. If it somehow doesn't crash and you're able to escape the glitched-out battle, you'll typically find that your inventory has been completely stomped and replaced with random values, often to the tune of 255 Atma Weapons or Illuminas! (Of course, there are other, less desirable effects, with a chance of savegame corruption. Take caution!)

This was fixed in the Revision 1 US version.


(Source: Let's Break Final Fantasy VI)

Slot 256 / The Optimisation Glitch

A strange glitch in the original JP release that allows characters to equip anything in any slot. Sell off all items your character of choice could possibly equip in your equipment slot of choice, put the item you want to equip in the very last slot of the inventory (the 256th) and hit the "Optimise" button to equip that item in that slot.

Equipping items that aren't supposed to be equipped can result in insane stat boosts. For example, wearing a Potion as armor will give you 255 defense, reducing all incoming damage to a single hit point! Using non-weapon items as weapons can result in a variety of visual glitches as the game attempts to pull up invalid weapon animation data, often with a habit of gradually pushing the character off the screen as they attack!

This was "fixed" in the US release by removing the ability to put any items in the 256th slot. That slot still exists, though, and the Sketch Glitch can occasionally stuff items into it, allowing the rest of the steps to be reproduced.


(Source: Let's Break Final Fantasy VI)

Death By Charm Bug

The Charm ability was primarily intended to be used by monsters against the party. It has no resistances and can only be removed with Dispel. However, Gau can learn Charm from the Nightshade monsters (initially found in a painting in Ozwer's house), and can use it on any monster. Including bosses. No resistances, remember?

Any monster effected by Charm will then ignore the player and mindlessly attack itself until it dies, as the effect is never broken by damage.


(Source: Let's Break Final Fantasy VI)