The FF4 Glitch That Squaresoft Made Canon 

Thanks youtube

Thank YOU for watching!

An actual youtube comment, never thought I'd see one on a video under 100k views

Give us back our dislike button

Wtf

This is so dumb, it made me laugh. In a good way.

I laughed way too hard at this

So sad how Tellah died from ligma.

@@HYDEinallcaps Who's Tellah?

Bwwwwooooowwm....

Who needs to fight an enemy that's already dead.

I really hope FF14 references this in some way.

What's up bruh?

Lol this is new to me.. only ever played SNES version.. can anyone explain what upt co is?

@@scottrauch1261 Undead Monsters:

It's got a Woolsey feel to it.

I always thought he looked like a fried egg when he was on the ground "SWOONED".

@@Tony_Cardoza YOU SWOONY BEARD!

half beard, half man, and another half beard just to be sure

such a shame that the 3D remake opts to have him flatten like he just got run over by a steamroller in a looney tunes cartoon, it's still funny in its own way but beard puddle is still the funniest

"The 64 thing is easily explained" Oh, okay. I'll wait for that, then.

Long story, short: They tried to save memory by using a very specific and relatively small space to store this number. Once the small space is used up, the number 'flips over' and breaks things. Personally, every time I see a power of 2 (in this case: 64), I'm sure someone was attempting to be too clever for their own good. Well... at least since we got more than 640KB of RAM.

NEEEEEEEEEEEEEERRRRDDDDDDDD!

For those who don't understand what is going on with the 0 and 1s let me reframe it. For this example, I'll be using base 10. You don't need to know what this "base 10" thing is just as long as you understand this is a "close enough" approximation. In this example 63 will become 999999. And I might been off on some of this so feel free to correct me if I am. Now when running a game everything that is happening and stored in represented in numbers. Generally speaking, these values are stored in 4 digit sections. Since we have 4 digits to work with it can store a number of 0-9999. In this case a number of 42 would look like this: 0042. Now to store a number larger than 9999 we will need to grab a second section. So 654321 would become 00654321. Now imagine you’re in the early days of video gaming and you have only a very small amount of room to store a whole lot of stuff. You want to store a value (lets call this value A) that is going to have a number larger than 9999 but don’t want to use up two whole sections. Well you decide that there is totally never going to be a chance that your value is going to be larger than 999999 so you’re always going to have two leading 0s (00999999). Why not put a value in there that only needs two digits to represent it (let’s call this value B)? So when you’re wanting to check value B you look at the two leading digits of our 8 digit number (so 87654321 is read as 87###### [the # to represent digits we are ignoring) and for value A you look at the last 6 (so so 87654321 is read as ##654321). But since we’re storing two values in only one number how do we change one without changing the other? Easy, when you want to change value B you can add and subtract from it with values like +23000000 (22654321 + 23000000 = 45654321) or -1000000 (22654321 - 1000000 = 21654321). And for value B you just add and subtract like normal. But what happens if our assumption that our Value B could never be larger than 999999 is wrong? What happens if we add +1 to 00999999? 01000000. Value A flips back to 0 (##000000) but also value B has changed from 0 to 1 (01######). And oh boy, that’s not how that is supposed to work. Now to wrap this all back to the video, due to how computers store numbers (look up base 2/binary if you are curious) 4 digits can only store a number of 0-15. 6 digits, however, can represent a number of 0-63. The Hierarchy Counter is value A in my example and Value B is whatever poor value is being changed when the Hierarchy Counter goes from 63 to 0.

What?

I wonder if it has any relation to Page 64🤔

My first ff 🤍

Where it is said about the lore. I watched through whole video but I did not got it.

Funny thing is that it isn't the first time Square pointed out a glitch. In FF1, there's this little 1x2 piece of land where the above map zone, with stronger enemies, clips into the bottom zone. Square realized this and, instead of fixing it, just decided to make it canon. It's called the Peninsula of Power because you can grind here for easy EXP, which is basically needed for this game. In fact, I think it was never patched out of remakes. That is if memory serves me right.

@@TheRealWalt it is in the pixel remaster sadly

Lots of code goes into games, Square knew of their peninsula of power, and much more intricate tricks have been found in other games. Still, it is a great feat to not only find such game-breaking glitches, but also use it in such a way that would majorly benefit speedrunners.

Notice most of the work was done in 2012. I think the early 2010s was peak civilization, and once smartphones became bigger, better and more distracting the world went downhill.

@@robertramsey8871 2010 was an outstanding year for gaming. Truly, it was. We got RDR, Dead Rising 2, Fallout, New Vegas, and other masterpieces.

early 2010s was when a lot of war happened which obviously benefits everybody

@@robertramsey8871 this is the first time i've seen someone "back in my day" the 2010s, damn

Missingno never outright deleted my save, but it has corrupted it beyond salvaging multiple times.

The concern about gen 1 pokemon was warranted. While not technically deletion, in gen 1 there are numerous glitch Pokemon and glitch moves that can immediatly corrupt your save file so badly the game refuses to load it when they appear or are used, and this is really bad because gen 1 has no backup save and most of the glitch moves/pokemon that can do this don't have a way to fix your game so you can save a valid file once they corrupt your save data. (If you are wondering how glitch Pokemon corrupt save data, the sprite for most of them them is incorrectly defined, and trying to display it makes the function that displays the sprite overwrite data stored after the memory space used for the sprites - the next thing along is the Hall of Fame, which is why Missingno corrupts part of that when it appears, and other, more harmful glitch Pokemon make this go deep enough that a more important part of your save file is overwritten, making the file unreadable for the game).

@@alexstewart9592 Best example is 8F in Red/Blue and it's equivelent in Yellow, which using it without a VERY specific setup WILL result in save data deletion.

@@Toksyuryel no it didn’t lol. MissingNo. Is harmless. It just jumbles sprites and duplicates items

To be fair, while Missingno itself cannot cause the game to fall apart, it was never meant to be seen. This made Game Freak consider one very important thing: "We didn't test what this thing can do, or what other unintended Pokémon can do". They find that the Hall of Fame data got scrambled beyond repair, and even if they know why that happened, they know that some other mons work in different ways. They have no time to check everything, but they know that there's no noteworthy prevention on the save function, so some other mons (like the ones with Super Glitch moves, for example) can absolutely break the game. Giving that kind of detailed explanation usually makes people go "it's okay, I just need to avoid the bad mons" and the problem with that comes from it being impossible to tell for sure how to do so due to lacking and even misleading information. People would simply try to exercise caution, and potentially trigger something no one was aware of at the time that made their save file so thoroughly corrupted that the game refused to read it. So, a simplified explanation, if a slightly incorrect one, saves them from any accountability.

Best part of Mario lore ever.

They are transformed fungiforms, not humans.

Or how the crescendo of 1812 Overture is cannon. Wait...

Its hard to tell if youre being sarcastic. That bit about the bricks in mario (toads though, not humans iirc) is in the handbook for the original release of super mario bros

@@littlevivigaming4822 Same with Robotnik's Speed Traps that softlock you due to bugs. They're in the manual too. To explain the joke, they were all only mentioned in supplemental English materials. Their status as "canon" is dubious to say the least. But if you want to believe Mario is a murderer everytime he breaks a block or that Zeromus cast a weird math spell on stairs, you can

That's what I thought too. Perhaps an unsigned integer could have also wrapped to signed through a casting mistake, given the presence of negative numbers. Or, as I've actually seen it happen, the other way around.

Poorly implemented stack that's closer to a resizable array, and then you desync the index and size to nudge the pointer out of bounds?

@@CaseyAnthonyVEVO You're talking C terminology, but assembly language has no concept of a type system (and thus no concept of what a "negative number" is), and I doubt 5A22 ASM is any exception. Plus, if the number is being used for a stack, then it's a pointer, or an offset to be added to a pointer, and applying two's complement to a memory address or offset is all kinds of wrong.

My first reaction to hearing it was a set of priority numbers, I thought it was specifically put in there to make the mechanics behind the Exit spell, which sent you to the last room you were sent. Guess it was a more in-depth technical thing instead. :|

My cat's breath smells like cat food

True randomness isn't really possible in a deterministic system like a computer, unless you use some random natural event to determine things, like having an atomic clock that measures the radioactive decay of an atom. It's much easier to do the seeding thing, where you take a variable (number of steps taken or something) and generate a series of numbers that are predictable in theory but which are beyond most people's ability to calculate, because that's random enough. After all, randomness is mostly just a word that describes the forces that we are ignorant of, the limitations of human knowledge. We call dice rolls random but in reality they are governed by Newtonian forces that we can't fully measure (effect of gravity at this point, smoothness of the surface you drop it on, air pressure and flow, the rotation of the Earth, etc).

Makes you wonder about the whole "human free will" thing, doesn't it?

@@Chad_Thundercock Your comment is old, but I realized this a while ago and it feels so obvious in hindsight. Free will is the ultimate illusion. We're just aware of the flow through time, and it's complicated enough it feels like free will.

Overflow and Underflow glitches are extremely common in games, it's just a matter of finding what numbers can be xflowed and seeing what happens when you do it.

Gotta be guys going through rom dumps

speedrunners are very stubborn

I get what they were going for, black KNIGHT= recklessly agressive meanwhile paladin means caring for self and allies. But the white mage lite with a sword did feel way too nerfed.

Only for a limited time. He becomes really strong later (the Avenger makes him back to his old days of ruthlessly killing everything in his path). But I thinking Ceodore does the White Mage/Fighter hybrid better (or Holy Kain)

I thought it was cool as a kid, mostly because Cecil just had fight and item in the English version on SNES so gaining white magic was cool to me I probably would've been peeved to lose darkness if he had it in our version

Just gotta level him up while still on the mountain. He levels FAST. Gear him up and he hits hard again. In the US version Dark Knight was sorta useless compared to Paladin anyway.

Just cast Berserk on him, and he's fine. All you're gonna do with him is attack anyways.

Hey, brossentia! :p

When it's broken it scare me... Nes and snes glitches are so much scary for me 😅

He sketched the invisible repo man in zozo

It’s like practically the same number

Only 64 units away!!!!

My guess is that the level counter was stored in 6 bits, which can go from values 0 to 63.

FOXXO DETECTED

A 6-bit unsigned register does underflow to 63. It’s just that, even in an unsigned register, it’s sometimes useful to call that number “-1”, because it’s what you get when you decrement once from 0. The weirdness is probably from Floor 63 not existing in memory.

I think Golbez has his own slot, which is a holdover from an early build where he was a playable character. (There's remnants of it in the game, and there's also remnants of Kain having had a White Magic menu, too, once-- you can reactivate it via hacking, but it's empty. After Years' Holy Dragoon is probably what Kain would have had in his magic index, but no one can be sure if the Holy Dragoon class was planned, scrapped, and recycled for After Years or not.)

I can't find any this, or maybe I'm just struggling to find the right search terms. Can you explain and/or point me to where I can read more about this?

@@DemiImp for my post it was because if yang is in the party, edge appears in the cutscene when you get fusoya and cid appears in the final battle if fusoya doesnt leave so he acts as his character. For the other guy. You can find the rom data on pirate sites for the game and data mine it by reading the code. You go in the code and activate all true events or just flat out switch them out for the pc version.

@@azinyefantasy4445 To expand on this, for anyone still confused, what's happening is that there isn't sufficient space allotted in RAM for the entire cast to have their stats stored at once. Instead some of them are assigned to slots that get shared with other characters. As an example let's have characters 1 and 2 share a slot. Character 1 joins and their data is loaded into RAM. It gets changed as the player does things. Once character 1's time in the party is up and character 2 is about to join the data for character 2 overwrites that of character 1's in RAM. If you never trigger that event script for character 2 to join up then that slot will remain character 1. Any script that calls the slot uses what is there at that time. Scripts that load specified sprites without checking slot data can operate in ways that become hilarious when sequence breaks occur. My understanding of Golbez is that he is his own slot because he needs to appear in the player side of the battle against Zemus but his class and abilities were only coded insofar as was needed for cutscenes to work properly. If he was ever intended to be a playable character is was dropped early on. The same thing was done with Kekfa in FF6. He's got a slot in the character roster dedicated to him so he can appear as needed in certain cutscenes but there is no indication of it being anything other than a workaround to make events work as desired. Same with several other NPCs although there is slot sharing/overwriting involved.

As far as I can tell, in this case 64 is just an arbitrary "good enough" number (64 floors ought to be enough for anyone..). When the counter goes above 63, it's manually set back to 0. You can't cast Warp when the counter is 0, so in theory this is fine. But return doors ignore this check, and let the counter go negative.

It's more probably that it uses 5 bits to store this data, so the max value is 63

@@AtKiba It actually uses 16 bits, because that ends up being more convenient for accessing the map history array. The devs used a lot of neat bit tricks to save ROM space, but in RAM most things seem to be optimized for ease of access. There's a lottt of bytes that only get used as booleans.

@@WylemRotMG that's why I sait it's stored in 5 bits, they can use memory as they please, they can even use just 1 bit for boolean flags. They wouldn't use 16 bits when the data they want to store fits into 5 bits

@@WylemRotMG oh I didn't read your first answer, the value really is set back to 0 manually in the code?

I came looking for this comment.

Hex is just a numeral system, you can represent data in binary or hex and it will use the same amount of storage space

@@AtKiba Yes and way they used it for SNES was amazing.

5 is very close to 4 so I would assume it is coded similarly but resources are different so the way you can exploit it may differ. I can't speak for 6 though

I believe I mention it during the Rivers’s segment. Runners overflow Kain’s Iron shield or the shadow shield to get a stack of 65535 and sell the stack in mist right after

The english team named it 2 though

At about 4:52 I explain it. Basically the system they use records your previous location when you enter a go door for your current counter, then when you return to that counter, it knows where you need to come back in at It’s speculated that the devs used this method to make it easier on the game with handling that process

@@DoctorSwellman thx so much

The enter/return stack exists entirely to support the spell Warp, which sends you to back to the previous floor/room you were in. In Final Fantasy 5 this spell was finally removed and there's no longer any distinction between "enter" and "return" doors/stairs, nor are there any stack overflow glitches.