Hacker News Reader

Comment by aidenn0 | Hacker News Reader

The NES Final Fantasy 1 had gobs of bugs. Some of them are very game-changing:

Major ones to know for playing the game well:

* the index in the weapons table is used rather than the value in the table, making later weapons much more powerful and making Axes (lower %hit, higher critical%) useless.

* No secondary effects of weapons work at all

* Intelligence has no effect on spell effectiveness (yet another reason why red-mages are more powerful than they ought to be)

* All enemies are immune to poison.

Interestingly enough, people have created patches for most of the known bugs!

https://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/522595-final-fantasy/4557505...

View on HN

Those older JRPGs really could use some unit testing.

Another one of my favorites is from the Gameboy (original) Final Fantasy Legend. There's a weapon, Saw, which performs an instant kill if it hits. It was supposed to work if your Strength is higher than the opponent's Defense, meaning it could take out random mobs in a single hit, i.e., the usual sort of useless instant kill technique that only instantly kills things that were already not a threat to you. However, the comparison sense is reversed, so it only instantly kills opponents whose defense is higher than your strength.

In particular, you can one-hit the final boss with this: https://youtu.be/bCyToT8jiJ4?t=1m26s As this predates the era of "post-game content" this is supposed to be the hardest fight in the game.

http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Saw_bug

Article author here. Wow, I had no idea the game was so buggy. I just played as a kid and found a couple of the same things out, such as poison not working, but not nearly that many.

Ahh, the times before online updates where committing code meant burning it into ROM :)

Another one I know of is that the agility stat lookup is broken, which severely affects your chances to run from a battle. The character at position 1 looks up the agility stat of position 3, character 2 looks up the stat for character 4, and characters 3 and 4 read garbage data. In effect, this means that characters 3 and 4 have about 1/10 the chance of running away.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com