It goes without saying that nothing in this world is perfect, and video games are certainly no exception. Glitches are a common presence in any game and can range from harmless graphical bugs to traumatic sensory nightmares. However, it's understandable that even the most brilliant and able of game programmers can lose track of a few wayward lines of malicious code from time to time and, in some cases, the glitches result in some of the most hilarious and entertaining gameplay moments ever.
...unless the glitches in question are anything like the ones we have found in our beloved big name franchises. Without word or warning, the mighty grip of Count Glitch-ula will suddenly devolve the gaming experience from whimsical and amusing to horrible and confusing, as evident in games like GTA, Mortal Kombat, and even Minecraft. Today, we will turn our gaze to the glitches found in another popular game franchise: Final Fantasy. Yes, Square Enix's beloved brand child has undergone several evolutions through the years, but one thing still remains true: where there's a game, there's a glitch.
Got a glitch-ridden horror story of your own? Share your Final Fantasy freakouts in the comments section below!
15 Cid Jumps Through Walls (Final Fantasy III)
This delightful display of defying physics can be seen when you meet with Cid at his home in Canaan. After giving his wife an Elixir, talking to Cid will net you his gratitude, as well as an invitation to his hidden storage room. At the end of his spiel, he will actually hop over a couple spaces to the right, as if to show you where to go to access the storage room. Speaking to him again where he stands will repeat the entire sequence, including the hopping. Apparently no one told Cid how physics work because he will jump through the walls of his home as if they weren't there, even through the far wall and into the nondescript darkness of the side screen, never to be reached again.
14 Marooned On The Moon (Final Fantasy IV)
This Twilight Zone-level glitch is exclusive only to the DS remake of FFIV, so you classic cartridge carriers need not worry. After you exit the Lair of the Father and walk around the moon to return to your airship, the Lunar Whale, you will find that...well, you can't find it anymore. Curiously, the Whale still appears on your map, but does not appear where you originally parked it on screen. Online sources suggest walking back the same way you came in around the moon, but if you have been walking around for a while, that may not even bring the Whale back into existence. Your best bet is to try to reload an earlier save file, assuming you haven't already thrown your DS across the room in frustration.
13 Scumbag Save Crystal (Final Fantasy VII)
Among the many memorable moments in FFVII, this one (regretfully) stands out as a classic. At the entrance of the cleverly-named Northern Cave, you will come across a Save Crystal that allows you to make a save point anywhere in the cave. Sounds wonderful at first, but as it turns out, the Save Crystal is housing some very fickle lines of code. Using the Crystal comes with a chance of trapping you in the room you use it in by literally not allowing you to leave the room when you attempt to exit. Although this occurrence seems random, some players report that it is more likely to happen in rooms where the party members split up, sometimes even limiting you to one path and not allowing you to go down the other.
12 Ghost Car Drivers (Final Fantasy XV)
While it was expected that the demos of FFXV would have its fair share of bugs, a good number of insane things still managed to endure into its debut. This strange sighting was apparently a common one across all international releases of the game. Yes, that's an NPC driving an invisible car, casually waiting for an unseen traffic light to turn green in the middle of the wilderness, while you are slaughtering the local fauna for food just a few yards away. Perhaps we can chalk it up as one of the hazards of open-world games; codes and numbers are bound to get crossed somewhere. Still, despite all the amazing and monstrous things you could encounter out in the world, it is the displaced ghost drivers that continue to mystify and bewilder us.
11 Final Boss Frog-tality (Final Fantasy II)
What is most useless form of magic in any RPG game? Status spells. Heck, spells like Sleep, Blind, and Frog are hardly ever effective against normal enemies, so what are the odds they'll work against a final boss? Well apparently, in a spectacular display of developer oversight, the seemingly innocuous combination of the Wall and Frog spells is the key to one-shot any boss, including the big baddie known as The Emperor. It's a bit long-winded to explain, but basically the Wall spell is a hot mess of coding that bypasses The Emperor's spell defenses, and a technicality involving spell animations erases The Emperor off the screen and replaces him with a frog. It is perhaps the most literal and comedic cases of "seeing is believing"; the game sees the final boss disappear, and believes you actually beat him.
10 Cyan The Angry Imp (Final Fantasy VI)
Dubbed the "Psycho Cyan" bug, this one-man murder spree begins with Cyan's bug-tastic Bushido skill, Sky. This ability basically functions like a counterattack, setting Cyan in a state of "Sky status" that is triggered and expended when he is attacked. Some very screwy coding makes the "Sky status" not go away if something affects Cyan's state of being. Like say, getting turned Imp with a status spell. Because Imps can only use basic attacks, the Sky skill's specific counterattack is never expended, leaving Imp Cyan in permanent "Sky status." On top of that, the same screwy coding for the Sky ability also causes Cyan's own attack animations to trigger the counterattack, causing him to endlessly attack all enemies on screen until they are dead, all on the same turn the bug is triggered. And believe it or not, this trick even works in boss fights.
9 Land Of Mass Suicides (Final Fantasy IV)
Yet another example of how coding continues to be the bane of a game developer's existence. To track your location between the overworld, underworld, and moon, the game continuously stores several memory addresses as you go along, and uses this data to load the different monster encounter tables for each realm. As you can imagine, this can lead to some horrific data processing mishaps. Several locations, including the basement areas of Troia (which can only be exited via the Exit spell), have memory addresses that are very similar to the point where even when you leave them, so the game thinks you are in the overworld when you are actually in the underworld. As a result, the game is prone to load the wrong monster table, resulting in random encounters where enemies are forced to use the Stone spell on themselves and each other until they are all dead.
8 Surprise Sky Dives (Final Fantasy XV)
Imagine that you're stalking through the wilds, hungry for your next meal/bounty. From over the ridge, you spot it: a mighty rhino, ripe with fresh meat and valuable hide. You hurl your sword, channeling the power of your family's ancient kingly ancestors to pull yourself to your prey. Closer and closer and closer you get, until -*WHOOSH*- you suddenly find yourself several stories high in the air, and only have a few short seconds to reevaluate your life choices before plummeting to your death. Such is the case for several players who, during their time in the world of FFXV, have experienced what we like to call the "Spontaneous Sky Dive Effect." While its exact cause is unknown, its frequency coupled with its hilarity kind of softens the blow. For the player, not for Noctis. It still sucks for Noctis.
7 The Edge Of Oblivion (Final Fantasy VII)
If there is one thing in FFVII that is scarier than Bizarro Sephiroth, Hojo's experiments, and the fashion sense of the franchise as a whole, it's the edge of the world. More specifically, it is the blacked-out edges that appear on the screen randomly as you're flying around in the Highwind. This is reportedly a phenomenon caused by an error with the game disc, though we think it's more likely the influence of an entity from the Outer Realms for the following reason: attempting to fly into those blackened areas will sometimes cause the entire screen to black out, with only a disc reading error icon and the world map music to keep you company. The only known solution for the PlayStation version of the game is to hard restart the game, but that probably won't do much for your newfound fear of random dark edges on your screen.
6 Surreal Sketches (Final Fantasy VI)
Relm's artistic abilities certainly are a force to be reckoned with when she successfully replicates an enemy using Sketch, but enough uses of it will eventually uncover a horrifying secret: her Sketch skill is capable of breaking reality. A missed or failed Sketch attempt often has catastrophic, Fourth Wall-breaking results, including but not limited to: filling your inventory with random items, freezing the game, and even erasing your data. Whether or not this was intentional by design, what's even scarier is how easily this glitch can happen while playing. Aside from the inherent miss/failure chance of the Sketch skill, enemies who render themselves invisible, such as the Gabbldegak, also have a high chance of Sketch failure. Seriously, if Relm is the spawn of some Cthulhu-type monstrosity, a warning would be appreciated.
5 A Rodent In Time (Final Fantasy VI)
Cockroaches may be capable of surviving a nuclear event, but the rats in FFVI are malefic wielders of time and space. To test this theory, simply leave one of the rats in the rafters of the Opera House in the World of Balance alive, then return to it in the World of Ruin and allow it to defeat you. Without rhyme or reason, when you regain your senses, you will find that you are back in the World of Balance, unable to return to the World of Ruin forever. Not only does this prevent you from ever completing the game, but there is also the possibility of the game freezing when you reload, as if to illustrate how definitively destroyed your save file is. Thankfully, this glitch only exists in the Japanese Super Famicom version of the game.
4 The Head And The Horror (Final Fantasy XV)
By now, random appendages and body glitches in games probably don't phase you. But it is screenshots like this from early playthroughs of FFXV that remind us of the dreadful reality that something watches us from beyond the mortal coil. These disturbing double-headers look like Square Enix's tribute to The Grudge. The fact that everyone looks so jolly in Prompto's nightmare-inducing selfies only adds to the disturbing story. And these ungodly conjurations aren't limited to just Prompto's photos: at any given moment, a head can appear through walls, doors, and even people's stomachs, peeping at you lifelessly. At least it's just the heads; random arms and legs would probably make it worse. Though based on how glitchy the game has proven to be so far, we wouldn't count out that terrifying possibility either.
3 The Ghost Of Aerith (Final Fantasy VII)
One of the most infamous glitches among the FF community as a whole, this shocking sight has been the subject of many theories regarding our beloved flower girl. The "ghost" in question is a split-second appearance of Aerith in the Sector 5 Church in Midgard some time after her demise at the hands of Sephiroth (I sincerely hope that's not news to anyone reading this). Some suspect that this one-time occurrence, coupled with certain items found in game and lines of code found within the game's programming, teases at the possibility of resurrecting Aerith. Still others maintain the (more likely) stance that it was an intentionally evocative tribute meant to resonate with the players. The cynics, meanwhile, tout that it is just a coincidental bug, since character models are prone to freak out or disappear throughout the game anyways.
2 A New World? (Final Fantasy XV)
The world of Niflheim was already huge before the recent release of DLCs, but a bit of Christopher Columbus-style exploration by players has revealed an entirely new area within the game. It has since been identified as the island of Angelgard, the island where Noctis awakens after his 10 year slumber, though the most anyone ever sees of it during normal gameplay is the path to the getaway boat, as well as the occasional landscape sighting from the windows of the train. The only way to access the area for exploration is to use a Chocobo to swim to it. While the exact purpose of this zone has yet to be determined, its completeness and polished appearance suggests that it may be the setting for future DLC releases. The presence of colossal swords and the island's wing-shaped coastline also seemingly allude to Bahamut, adding more intrigue to the speculation surrounding Angelgard.
1 Exploit Causes Mass Player Bans (Final Fantasy XI)
While all the previous entries have had significant effects within the game, this one tops our list for its effects outside the game. Known as the "Salvage Duplication Bug," this glitch had a severe consequential impact on the game's integrity and economy through exploiting an oversight in the Salvage event's treasure system. Understandably, Square Enix, in an attempt to conduct damage control surrounding this issue, released a patch to do away with the Duplication Bug. However, players had been reporting this issue for several months following the release of the Salvage event, yet Square failed to patchfix the issues until they "discovered" it two years after the Salvage event's release. But wait! There's more! They took it a step further by investigating a year's worth of game logs, determining which players exploited the bug and to what degree they did so, then proceeded to carry out some retroactive retribution against the exploiters. This resulted in the suspension and/or perma-banning of nearly a thousand players, and by extension destroying any shred of faith and credibility they had left. Rarely does an in-game issue have massive implications that go beyond the mouse and monitor, but apparently it's not just an anime-only occurrence anymore.