The FF4 Glitch That Squaresoft Made Canon

final fantasy 4 known as two on the super nintendo is a masterpiece of a game where the story goes from the middle ages to the space age in a matter of hours i say a matter of hours because that's all it takes for speedrunners to absolutely destroy this game today we're going to dive into a glitch that breaks the game in such a huge way that even squaresoft made an excuse to try to make it canon in the story to start out there are some things we need to clarify there are many versions of final fantasy 4 out there but the only ones that fall under the criteria for this video are the super nintendo and super famicom versions of the game unfortunately we won't be talking about any of the other versions today with that out of the way let's take a look at the story while the game is massive in scope and has the players going through many different parts of the world the goal ends up being similar to many early final fantasy games collect their crystals have your best friend betray you twice actually and save the world from the evil moon wizard zerumus to understand why this glitch is so important and so broken we need to dive into the 80 no 64 category first as you may have guessed no 64 means that no 64 door glitch is used in this run taking a quick look at the ross world record we'll be using a handy little chart to show off the route while no speed running knowledge is needed this chart does insinuate that you have played through the story and beaten the game at some point starting from barren runners go through mist kypo and watery past the damsean from there they go to ant lion cave backtrack to kaipo and then push forward to mount hobbs and fabul after fabul runners end up in masidia and go through mount ordeals to fight mylon z and to make ceso a paladin soon after from masidia they teleport back to baron and fight bygan and kanazo getting the airship from barren runners head to tororia and go through cave magnus for the crystal there after the crystal is obtained they go into the tower of zot and go through a sequence of events to fight vivalus heading to agart runners enter the underworld into the dwarven palace for a couple of boss fights and use a trick to get the crystal there entering the tower of babel and dealing with a few more boss fights runners go through there and head back to barren castle for an airship upgrade heading to ebelin through the cave they go back through the tower of babel to fight rubiconte they then return to the dwarven castle to wake up sid head to the seal cave to lose cane and go to masidia to grab the lunar whale after going to the moon and recruiting fusoya runners go back to the earth and into the giant of babel in the giant of babel runners make their way to the four elemental fiends and cpu bosses and defeat them then they head to the moon and fight the silly man himself beating the game the ross record is a 3 hour 2 minute and 31 second run which is an incredibly strong time for the category why did we need to know this and what does it have to do with the 64 door glitch well it just so happens that this glitch cuts out an entire third of the game respectively this glitch is used in a few different categories any percent no credits warp any percent super nintendo and any percent super famicom so we're a few minutes in and the question needs to be asked what exactly is this glitch let's jump all the way back to 1992. squaresoft had a series of newsletters called the agupogo examiner which answered questions about their titles sent in by fans and had small columns with bits of information about the games themselves in one issue they referred to the 64 door glitch a zeramus's eight squared recursive extinction trap and for players to beware traveling between certain floors too many times as it could crash their game or even erase save files perhaps the company gave this warning as they knew how broken this glitch could be but unfortunately for them that wouldn't keep curious minds away fast forward 20 years later a japanese speedrunner by the name of cheap looked into different ways to break final fantasy 4 and found out there is a hierarchy counter that changes whenever you enter rooms this counter starts at 0 in the overworld and increases to 1 whenever you enter a town dungeon and some other places these are also used by the warp spell which decreases the counter by 1 and the exit spell which warps you to floor 0 to place you in a location there are also rooms that increase this counter by 1 and decrease this counter by one these are called go rooms and return rooms respective to how they affect the hierarchy going into a little more detail when you leave a go room the game records your current map id coordinates and direction in association with your current hierarchy counter then it increases the counter by one when you leave a return room the counter decreases by one and you move to the place that was saved for the previous counter value it is actually speculated that developers use this method to make it easier on the game to set a movement event in general for those familiar with concepts in speedrunning like this you may see where i'm going here there are certain rooms that mistakenly only increase the counter when you take a specific exit and this counter can be increased by a huge amount up to 63. okay maybe 63 isn't a massive number but if you try to increase it again something weird happens it goes back to zero from what is understood final fantasy 4 doesn't have any dungeons with that many floors so the developers would have never expected that number to go so high so after increasing this counter you're now back at a hierarchy counter of zero in a place that's not the overworld that kind of breaks the rules of how decreasing that counter works so when you do something to decrease that counter by one like exiting your return room then instead of going back to whatever floor 63 was you go to floor negative one you could say that this is literally the minus world of final fantasy but honestly it's much crazier than that at first glance this looks to be your run-of-the-mill map glitch with some maps looking plain and boring and others having absurd visual effects however most of these maps are actually generated based on values in the game's memory that we can control while this sounds complicated it's actually fairly simple when broken down each floor is generated using three separate criteria in the game's memory not just that but these criteria are mostly different for each floor lore negative 9 for example is based on the current xy coordinate for the black chocobo were left in the oval world and how many times you got on the black chocobo during the session cheap not only found out the criteria for the floor generation but he was also able to map out negative floors all the way down to negative 159 at the time he not only documented all this but he also posted a video of the glitch in action on the super famicon version of the game back in 2012 beating the game in the process another user by the name of deruber owner also was one of the first documented to perform this glitch on the us version of the game being shown in september 2012 believe it or not this glitch can actually be started in several places in the game the town of barron is a great example of this but unfortunately there's an issue with trying the glitch anywhere in the overworld remember the talk of the boring looking map earlier the tan one that map is a default map for the underworld and not only does it let you progress through the glitch floors you can also use warping some of these maps if need be for the regular overworld default maps can't be walked out of and warp doesn't work either so what does this mean for the speed run let's look at the route i showed earlier and give it a little trim that's right the run now jumps from dwarven castle all the way to zeramus in february 2013 a runner by the name of brocentia did a run on the us version of the game making this one the first documented runs of the no credits warp category he completed his run in 2 hours 24 minutes and 42 seconds much faster than what the no 64 category could do at the time fast forwarding a little bit to february of 2014 and legendary speedrun tasser pirohiko completed a task of the japanese version using this glitch in 1 hour 42 minutes and 3 seconds continuing a bit further from there multiple runners such as myself 086 exident and a couple others were able to refine the route and menuing to improve the game even more including a lucrative step route that allows runners to control what encounters they get in the game this is another concept that we won't go into much in this video since the focus is the 64 door glitch but i'll leave a link to some resources in the description so how do runners do this exactly to navigate the negative room safely and fight the final boss some specific things had to be done by the runner on the way to the underground not just that but runners also need to access specific rooms to get things they need to defeat the final boss mostly following the normal no 64 glitch route let's highlight these points some of the small glitches i talk about here will be just an overview and i won't go into great detail to start out runners need a specific amount of gp to get through floor negative 47 and the buying selling route is specifically designed to keep that in mind along with the gp received from required fights fleeing from fights can cause variance with this but we'll cover how runners deal with that a little later there are also two main routes involving the purchasing of items the 9 item route and the 12 item route in this example from rivers mccown we'll use the nine-item route using the duplication glitch to duplicate and underflow kane's iron shield as well as performing the misclip glitch to access mist from the right side starts us off runners sell a stack of 65 535 shields for a whopping 3 million 276 800 gp and buy 10 dancing daggers from the shop skipping forward to fabul after getting a couple more characters in the party runners duplicate yang's fire claws to get a stack of 65535 during the fabul gauntlet then do some equipping and unequipping to bring the stack down to a total of 254. going into the masidia shop runners do a little more complicated shot menu that can vary from runner to runner rivers opts to do an altered route that buys 70 of tier 2 and 70 of life then he sells a 70 stack of fire claws twice leaving him with 114 fire claws total while these numbers seem extremely arbitrary the exact counts involved in the routing are incredibly important to get through several rooms in the glitch later on fast forwarding to baron rivers then shops to get 10 headbands karates and silvers then gets eight thunderclaws 58 ice claws 68 fire claws and three stacks of 13 cure rods also after this purchase menu rivers equips one of the ice claws on yang giving him a stack of 57 ice claws that will also be important for later after all these purchases boss fights and encounter runaways rivers ends up with 3 million 153 749 gp while the number itself isn't designed to be exact runners can use a special gp calculator to determine if it's safe to go through floor negative 47 or not other floor setups in the run include several things floor negative 7 is determined on how you park the hovercraft outside of mount hobbs floor negative 9 is mainly determined by the black chocobos x coordinate floor negative 10 depends on how your last yellow chocobo left the screen when you hopped off of it floor negative 44 is depending on your window settings and battle settings with the map being changed with the red and green settings x coordinate placement with the green and blue settings and the y coordinate with the battle speed floor negative 45's map changes every frame you wait on the file select screen with the first 50 frames being guaranteed safe so runners have less than one second to match through that screen on their last load floor negative 46 changes with every second of the in-game timer and the maps cycle every 256 seconds this floor is actually the most dangerous as it has the highest chance of a hard lock when going through this room at the wrong time the game either won't let you navigate the room or it'll freeze and make a sound that is akin to bacon sizzling on a stovetop runners can use an in-game timer calculator to determine if they're able to make safe passage to the room or not similar to the gp calculator concept other rooms involve moving around fusoya's magic and some other things but wait we don't get fusoya before we go into the glitch so how does that work we'll leave that question unanswered for right now but in order to get to that point we need to talk about another trick that's used in the midst of this mind-boggling glitch remember the weird amount of items obtained throughout the game rivers have been reordering them in battles up until the point of the glitch and these items are used for something called inventory warping basically some tiles in the game are trigger tiles and when stepped on the game searches specific parts of the game's memory to decide what to do with that trigger usually this is data that's already linked to the trigger and whatever's supposed to happen happens however if the trigger doesn't have any data defined in that part of the memory it actually doesn't stop searching it just keeps going endlessly until it finds something to use when the game is looking for that data it looks for five bytes in a specific pattern trigger x trigger y target map target x and target y so knowing what bytes we need we can manipulate this directly in the easiest way possible through our inventory in regards to inventory slots this is the exact same as the design i talked about in my chrono trigger video the item itself takes up one byte and the item amount takes up the other byte thus one inventory slot consists of two bytes now you might be thinking with these whole inventory slots there's no way to make five bytes only happen which is correct but since the game is looking for a specific value to start the sequence we can make the game ignore the first byte and then check all the rest instead while in the 64 door glitch in the us version runners used the mage room as their warp setup the mage room is first set up as floor negative 9 thanks to the black chocobo event i talked about earlier the way this is set up actually allows the runner to use the mage room as their exit spell point this will be important for a little bit later but for right now this is where the inventory warping concept comes into play back in the goal best fight rivers ends up moving equipment in his inventory to set this up he puts the items in clusters of three and slots next to each other for example cure times 13 fire claw time 68 and thunder claw times 8 allow rivers to warp to the seal cave since the map id for the seal cave entrance is 68 and the event tile was set up in that specific place in the mage room thanks to the specific items that he used how does this end up being set up as our exit room though well remember the ice claws that were bought those were organized also and that weapon is associated with the mage room map id the event tiles in the mage room are considered to be plus 1 tiles this means that going through the tile and floor negative 9 brings you to a floor 0 mage room and then the seal cave event tile brings the count to one exiting from the clk brings it back to zero with going back to the mage room and then back to negative one by going back into the glitch exit so why do we need to go to the seal cave in the first place well thankfully our story is almost over and i can finally tie everything together the sealed cave warp is required to make kane leave your party to later allow for fusoya to join the party this not only is how we can manipulate the later floors but also set up for the final boss battle floor negative 44 ends up being the lunarian palace where rivers recruits fusoya who is the most important part of being the game so quickly since all the characters in the party are such low level and don't have the abilities to defeat zeramus we need someone who can pack a little more of a punch after rivers recruits the puddle of beard he proceeds through the most dangerous rooms in the game avoiding being turned into sizzling bacon and changes his magic and items around to set up for the final rooms he'll venture through floors negative 59 through negative 66 are based on fusia's black magic positions and floors negative 67 through negative 74 are based on his white magic positions going through this rivers ends up back in the dwarven castle and here's where another fun glitch mechanic goes into play when you're in a negative floor and you proceed through a plus one door you go back to floor zero and some settings get corrupted based on your xy coordinates and the direction you leave the room this corruption allows fusoya to get the spell upzko the most powerful spell in the game for this run now that rivers has everything he needs for the final boss he uses exit to teleport back to the mage room he set as his excellent point earlier and uses one of the event tiles to warp into the zero must fight map which so happens to be map 114 and is related to the 114 fire claws in rivers inventory he broke the previous warp by moving his items around and so the updated warp destination was now zero mrs lair from the mage room tile besides the legendary engineer sid taking fusoya's place things go as normal up until the start of the final fight [Music] kusoya casts upko and instantly defeats zeramus it turns out that up code doesn't do any damage to the enemy but it flags that is dead so the battle just ends after that at the time this was the world record for the category with a time of 1 hour 56 minutes and 26 seconds on january 28th to 2017. eventually the 12 item route i mentioned earlier became more used allowing for runners to teleport to the lunarian palace right after the seal cave instead of walking to it via specific in-game settings this optimized route allowed the roth to complete the run in just one hour 54 minutes and 50 seconds on january 16th 2018. now that we're done looking at the no credit score category what does the credit score version of this glitch look like well it's not quite as exciting as its more popular counterpart as runners use the mage room to warp to the credits from room negative 9 fast forward a few years and not much has changed with either of the categories a few runners have broken their way into the top 10 of the no credits warp category but it is proven to be a massive challenge for those looking to defeat zeramus with the game pretty much solved how much will it take for this game to be pushed further will runners choose to try and find other creative ways to quickly navigate this absurd glitch or will they choose the grind until one run lets them through stay hydrated folks and thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: DoctorSwellman

Views: 330,644

Keywords: ff4, squaresoft, ff4 glitch, ff4 speedrun

Id: Xo7UhSN1lmg

Length: 19min 35sec (1175 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 12 2021