Good Bad Bugs/Video Games/Role-Playing Game: Difference between revisions

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** [http://www.it-he.org/ultima.htm This fellow has the majority of his website devoted to making Ultima games do things they aren't supposed to.]

* ''[[Dark Souls]]'' Pre 1.04 had a pretty crazy exploit that involved the Dragon Stone you get for joining the path of dragons covenant that could net you infinite souls and humanity while using it.

* ''[[Star Control]] 2'' had the infamous "planet-lander" bug: In the original version, selling your planet-lander when you had none to sell would cause an underflow bug, leaving you with around two million or so planet landers, that you could then sell for cash.

* ''[[The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind]]'' has a bug with alchemy that can quickly prove to be a gamebreaker, on two fronts. First, while simple alchemy ingredients are available in unlimited supply for 1 gold each, the potion created by combining two of these ingredients with alchemy sells for substantially more than 2 gold, making for a source of unlimited money right from the start of the game. Second, the potency of potions is partially based on your intelligence score, which can be boosted by an effect called Fortify Intelligence... and it just so happens that you can find the ingredients to make Fortify Intelligence potions in unlimited supply in the first major city you reach in the game. By creating potions, drinking them, and creating more potions, the player could easily create potions of horrifying power (boosting statistics by tens of thousands of points, or restoring thousands of points of health per second for literally days) within minutes of starting the game. Combined with the first alchemy bug, the money needed to buy these ingredients was no object... the free master alchemy set lying around for the taking in the mage's guild of another town only made it easier.

** By 'juggling' weapons that grant stat bonuses, it's possible to have the effect stack with itself and render you nigh-godlike. This allows you to complete the game in a [http://speeddemosarchive.com/Morrowind.html matter of minutes].

** Alternatively, once you owned the spell Soul Trap, (or a piece of equipment that would cast it,) and a spell to fortify an attribute, you could create a spell to fortify your strength/speed/intelligence etc. for one second and then soul trap yourself to permanently apply the fortification. Doing so could allow you to increase your attributes, skills, etc far beyond the scope the game would normally allow, and make it so you could jump over Red Mountain or cross Vvardenfell on foot in a matter of minutes.

*** This works with spells other than fortify attribute, as well. Combining it with a spell to summon a golden saint, for instance, will summon a ''permanent'' golden saint to run around with. This can be done multiple times, to either slaughter them and take their gear or to stomp around followed by an army.

** Plus, rather early in the game (before the second dungeon or so), you find one elixir. What you are supposed to do with it is give it to a sick NPC in the town you find it in, and you get a rather impressive stash of treasure for giving it up. You won't find another for at least 3 dungeons, and even then, there are only 20 guaranteed in the game. It completely ruins any game difficulty, as that one elixir will last you for a long, long time.

** The original Japanese version of ''Final Fantasy III'' has some wonderful glitches, like the [http://tasvideos.org/GameResources/NES/FinalFantasy3.html item upgrade glitch] that exploits an inventory stacking overflow error to alter the types of items, making it very easy to obtain most of the Onion equipment.

** The Crystal Room Warp Trick from ''[[Final Fantasy IV]]'' for the [[Super Nintendo Entertainment System|SNES]], which allowed the party to skip the [[Scrappy Level|Sealed Cave]] entirely. Unfortunately, it was removed from subsequent rereleases and remakes.

* ''[[Final Fantasy VI]]'':

** A couple of nifty Slot glitches: Strago can learn L5 Doom from 7-7-7 Joker Doom, and, by muddling and unmuddling Setzer, 7-7-Bar Joker Doom, ordinarily a [[Total Party Kill]], can be reversed onto enemies (including ones which outright prevent a 7-7-7 Joker Doom, such as the very final boss).

** The Rippler spell, one of Strago's possible Lores, allows the user to trade status effects with the target. Normally, one would assume this means the [[Standard Status Effects]] and [[Status Buff|Status Buffs]]; however, it also includes things such as Gau's Rage, Mog's Dance, and Shadow's dog. With some Rippler maneuvering, Interceptor can be set (permanently) to guard whatever character the player decides needs the protection, instead of guarding Shadow.

* ''[[Final Fantasy VII]]'' had the W-Item materia. It allowed you to use two items in one turn, but due to a glitch also allowed you to create infinite copies of any item usable in battle. Including rare items, expensive items that could be sold to shops for loads of gil, items you're only ever supposed to get one of, and items that are [[Game Breaker|Game Breakers]] in their own right when available in mass quantities. Done improperly, though, this can also result in ''losing'' items.

** By endlessly copying Elixirs you can spam them on Magic Pots, which drop the most EXP and AP in the game, thus allowing you to break the game even further

*** Another glitch that blurred the [[Game Breaking Bug]] line was a save corruption glitch in Gen I. Normally, if the Game Boy was reset while saving, the save file got corrupted and the game rejected it, insisting the player start over (or just go back to their previous save in later generations, which make back-up saves). But if the game is saved before receiving the first Pokémon and reset at the right moment, the game saves the number of carried Pokémon as 255 instead of 0. Switch a couple of Pokémon and now the item count is 255 when the normal limit is 20 items. What's in the other 235 slots? Pretty much everything else in the game, like the player's coordinates, the current area, the rival's name, etc. Switching items can lead to some interesting gameplay effects, including an [http://tasvideos.org/1860M.html extremely short game].

*** In FireRed and LeafGreen, there is the Nugget Bridge on which you can beat five trainers and then get [[Vendor Trash|a Nugget]], only for the guy giving the Nugget out to turn out to be a Team Rocket recruiter who will battle you when you turn him down. However, he gives you the Nugget ''before'' you battle him, so if you lose you get sent back to the Pokémon Center and the guy keeps acting as if you never talked to him, ''including'' giving you a Nugget, so you can keep losing and getting another Nugget each time. Contrary to popular belief, this glitch does not work in the original games, as you only have one chance to fight him, even if you lose.

** The cloning glitch in ''Gold and Silver'': You could get multiples of one-shot Pokémon by shutting off the power of one Game Boy during a trade with proper timing (because the link cables used in the first two games couldn't send and receive data at the same time); and whatever item they held was duplicated as well, if you needed more Master Balls to get the Legendary Beasts.

*** Another way to clone Pokémon in G/S is as such: go to your computer, pick the mons you want, put them on your team, and save your game, then put them in storage. Then save your game again. As soon as the saving message gets to the word "off" in "Please don't turn off the power" (ironic, no?), shut off your Game Boy. You will now have one of each Pokémon on your team, and one of each in the storage box, and they will have the same held items as well.

*** There's also two cloning variations in Generation IV; item (easy to perform, JP-exclusive) and actual Pokémon (hard to perform, requires Wi-Fi, not restricted otherwise). Seriously, I wouldn't be surprised if every generation has an item cloning glitch...

** And this picture wouldn't be complete without the Toxic Leech Seed glitch: use both of said attacks on your opponent, and as Toxic's effect of doubling damage from poison effects increases, so will Leech Seed's damage, in other words, twice as much damage each turn AND restoring a ''lot'' of your own HP.

** [http://www.youtube.com/user/kuriatsu This person] exploited the Pokémon bugs to hell and back.

** In the fourth generation, there is a glitch called Tweaking. The relies on the player cornering so fast that the game fails load the appropriate graphics of a new area, allowing the player to walk through a black void to any location in the game. It has potential to allow access to Event Legendaries.

** Another glitch with the GTS allows you to evolve trade-evolution Pokémon without actually trading them. Basically, put the Pokémon up for trade, but request an impossible Pokémon in return (like a Lv. 9 or under Mewtwo). While it's sitting there, engage in a trade in the GTS using another one of your Pokémon. Once that trade is done, retrieve the Pokémon you put up for trade, and it will evolve! You can combine this with [[Disk One Nuke]] to get the likes of Kingdra and Machamp as early as the THIRD Gym.

** A bug in Pokémon Stadium 2 allows you to get infinite continues in any cup (but not Gym Leader Castle). Just have a suspended game, then start any cup (not from the suspended game), and make sure that you have at least one continue. After that, whenever you lose, choose "Suspend" then choose "Continue without Suspending". Et Voilà! No continues are lost. This is very useful because [[The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard|the game is heavily rigged towards the CPU]], especially in Round 2. This bug doesn't work in the original Stadium because if you try this, the game would just take you back to the screen with the Continue/Suspend/Quit options. But the original Stadium is easier anyway if you use loads of Psychic-types.

** The same glitch is accomplished in the SNES version of ''[[Final Fantasy V]]'' by combining the Steal and Throw commands with the 2-Handed ability and some inventory management. Furthermore, because the shops aren't programmed to handle quantities higher than 99, you can sell your newly stolen items one at a time and never run out, yielding infinite cash as well.

** A similar bug occurred in ''Pokémon Colosseum'', being the first game in the series where you could catch Pokémon in Double Battles. One could use their first Pokémon's turn to throw a Master Ball, and on the second turn, switch the positions of the Master Ball and another ball. The Master Ball would catch the Pokémon but stay in your inventory, so you could catch every single Pokémon in the game from that point on with the Master Ball. Naturally, this was fixed in ''Pokémon XD''.

* Many of the spells in ''[[Baldur's Gate]] 2'' were broken, making mages godlike, even more so than they are supposed to be. For example:

** 'Mislead' would create an illusory image of the caster and turn the caster invisible. The invisibility would not be dispelled as long as the image lasted, so you could beat everyone to death with a stick at your leisure, with the enemies being none the wiser.

*** One of the Wild Surges could lead to the cap of five summoned allies being completely ignored, as an Area Effect on your Mordenkainen's Sword led to you being surrounded by seven or eight razor-edged death engines. (One [[Let's Play|Let's Player]] had this happen on an elemental summoning spell and ended up reloading the game because it happened in quite a small room, meaning he had no idea what was going on.)

** The 'Talk and Fight' bug was another useful, though very situational, bug: Any non-hostile character whom you are currently talking to or have a character lined up to talk to will have their AI disabled and will not go hostile while the character ordered to talk to them is underway. This allows you order one character to engage an NPC in dialogue, while ordering the other members of your party to, well, engage the NPC in less courteous modes of communication (like, say, a sword to the shin). The NPC, still waiting to be talked to, will sit there and take it as long as the would-be talker is still en-route and for several seconds afterwardse. While it will not work on any enemy that requires a scripted event to die (such as the [[Big Bad]] and the most difficult [[Bonus Boss]]), it does wonders against the game's literal dragons who are not hostile towards you by default. AI mods were eventually released to kill this problem.

* One of the skills that can be learned well into ''[[Lufia|Lufia: The Ruins of Lore]]'' is Sacrifice, a free move that deals 999 damage to a non-boss enemy but kills the user... unless you target ''yourself'', in which case Sacrifice is an awesome skill that fully heals yourself without cost.

** There are also two easy ways to get huge sums of cash quickly. The first uses Blue Tea, an item found only in Ordens (limited time offer!) that can be bought in bulk for 100 each and then immediately sold back for 150. Later, when the blacksmith in the beginning area becomes available, a simple bug can be used to get a limitless amount of whatever item he just made (except the last), creating an even quicker supply of cash. Stock up on cash when you get the chance, and you can buy the very expensive and (at that point in the game) [[Game Breaker|game-breaking]] Zircon equipment later.

*** The other [[Bonus Boss]], the Master Slime, is more of a case of [[Puzzle Boss]] disguised as a [[Good Bad Bug]]: you need to either kill him through pure damage or kill your own party to win the battle properly. However, neither option is easy, since you only have 3 turns to kill him and the first thing he does is heal your party to full, and if the 3 rounds pass without him dying, he attacks himself and kills himself instantly. Either way you can't really lose the battle ''per se'', but not doing the above causes him to say that you've failed and he won't give you a key to a room with a bunch of [[Bragging Rights Reward|Bragging Rights Rewards]] inside, forcing you to redo the entire [[Bonus Dungeon]] from the beginning for another attempt since it has no save points.

** Watch out for enemies that can drain your stats, including constitution, in the second half of the game. If they drain constitution from you while you're exploiting this bug, you won't be able to have it restored until your current constitution wraps back around and drops below the level you originally set it to.

* Although both have been fixed, ''[[Diablo]] 2'' had a couple of fun ones for a while. The big one was the homing/pierce bug, which let Amazons with the Buriza-Do Kyanon unique crossbow and the Guided Arrow skill strike an enemy up to 4 times with said skill, with obvious results. The other one was the Marrowwalk glitch. Said item gives charges of Bone Prison at level 33 (when the skill level cap is 20 without items). If a Necromancer, who can learn the skill naturally, equipped the boots but had yet to put an actual point into the skill, the game used the 33 given by the boots for synergy purposes. That means over a 150% increase in synergy power compared to actually leveling the skill, which meant a lot considering how all the bone skills tend to synergize with each other.

** The first ''[[Diablo]]'' had a cloning glitch: if you picked up an item off the ground at the exact same time as left-clicking a potion from your belt, the item would appear in your inventory and the potion would be replaced with the same item. Extremely useful for fast cash or online item trades, as rare items sold well, but you could also have duplicate rings (the only item that you were allowed to wear 2 of the same thing).

** Could be easily abused to create a level 1 character with maxed stats, as well, as the game included elixirs that each permanently increased a primary stat.

* The strange way ''[[Mother 3]]'' saves and loads data can cause an accidental [[New Game+]] in which you begin with the best equipment and all PSI.

* ''[[Tales of Symphonia]]'' had an interesting skill system where each skill basically had two different skill trees, but the skills from each tree were mutually exclusive. There was a glitch, however, that allowed characters to learn the highest-level skills from both trees at once, which was especially useful for the resident magic-user, Genis. Sadly, this glitch was fixed in the PS2 remake.

** As buying and selling earned you experience in your Skill exp pool, spending an hour or so abusing this not only gives you near-limitless cash, but also makes you into the ultimate archer.

* ''[[Knights of the Old Republic]]'' and its sequel are packed full of these, from infinite money and experience exploits to infinitely powered up lightsabers to item duplication to leveling up any follower as a Jedi.

*** Zaalbaar will appear from nowhere on Kashykk, though, and later, when your whole team has a pow-wow in the ''Hawk'' after the escape from Malik's ambush, the game glitches and will not continue. Bummer.

** It's allegedly possible to [[Video Game Cruelty Potential|break Hanharr the Wookiee's will, reducing his intelligence but increasing his strength]] in the second game. This becomes a bug when you do it several times and drop his INT below zero - causing it to ''pull a loop-the-loop'' and turn Hanharr into a [[Genius Bruiser]].

** Another glitch in the second game involves cheating at the Handmaiden's training game and then [[Break the Cutie|berating her for calling you out on it]]. Like the Hanharr glitch, this is only supposed to happen once or twice, but it can be done over and over for infinite [[Karma Meter|dark-side points]] and influence with the Handmaiden if you do it right.

*** By switching weapons during one of the Handmaided sparring matches, right before she becomes "hostile," it literally turns it into a [[Duel to the Death]]. That's right. You can ''kill'' the Handmainden on the Ebon Hawk. If you exit the ship, she will not be available for your party. If you re-enter, however, she will be back.

** An interesting quirk in ''[[Knights of the Old Republic (video game)|Knights of the Old Republic II The Sith Lords]]'' is that you can get equivalent results by making your party-members ''hate'' you as you can by making them ''like'' you, including conversation benefits and Jedi training. It is also arguably easier than getting everyone to like you. This allows you to have a team of both Dark and Light Side Jedi, and access to the full selection of buffs and debuffs therein at maximum potential. Want a Sith Exile with Atton Rand as her dedicated Jedi healer? No problem!

** During a duel to the death in the original KOTOR, it is possible to stop combat just to ask your enemy if you can have his autograph. This happens if you challenge Bendak Starkiller to a duel but don't ask him for an autograph beforehand. In the opening seconds of the duel you click on him to attack, but the game makes you run up to him and starts the dialogue sequence that stops him from attacking you. This bug can be used to get close to Bendak before he has chance to shoot at you and thus avoid damage that you would suffer if you ran up to him.

** In the second game, if you choose to fight in the Mandalorian battle circle, breaking the rules of the duel (such as bringing a lightsaber or Force powers to a fistfight) counts as forfeiting. However, the developers forgot to check if the player had planted mines in the dueling area beforehand...

** Another very useful exploit is the fact you can carry objects in your arms (well, floating in the air) that cannot be put in your inventory. While that would normally be useless, you can carry enemies. While that would still be useless (because enemy corpses encumber all but the strongest of characters with no gear), you can also simply carry an enemies head. You can then access the corpse for the items later. This led to a hilarious scene where, after killing a huge number of enemies, you stuff multiple chain lasers, rifles, foodstuffs, and essentially [[Hyperspace Arsenal|everything you could find]] in the wasteland into a raider's head, carrying it around everywhere as a second inventory. It's the modern [[Bag of Holding]].

** The game also has just plain wonky physics bugs. Sometimes if you approach the Deathclaw Sanctuary, you are treated to the sight of the mutated superpredators streaking up into the sky like rockets, never to return. Other times, jostled objects ricochet around at mach speed, causing you to take damage from a flying femur. And then, occasionally corpses just fall out of the sky at your feet when you exit the building. Of course, such bugs become less fun when a quest object spawns but gets launched over the horizon before you can interact with it...

** The infamous Gary 23 exploit. Using the dead body of a Gary clone, it is in fact possible to ''take items into the real world from out of a computer simulation''. The glitch is lucrative due to the fact that the weapons inside the simulation have special scripts attached to them, giving them infinite damage resistance and rendering them [[Incredibly Lame Pun|virtually]] indestructible. Then there are other bugs, such as an exploit that enables a player to harvest unlimited amounts of ammunition from ammo dispensers. And then there's another well known bug that allows a player to zoom to level 30 by killing endlessly re-spawning friendly Chinese soldiers. All of these bugs combined can result in a major [[Game Breaking Bug|Game Breaker]] (or not, depending on whether or not you like fantastic bugs).

*** Also related to Operation Anchorage, the Winterized T-51b Power Armor you receive after completing the simulation is a glitched version of what the devs had intended you to get. However, you won't mind, since instead of the 1,000 HP the armor was supposed to have, it instead has nearly '''ten million''' HP. The helmet adds another million. This is easily the best armor in the game, as it never, ever breaks down or needs repair.

** In the ''Broken Steel'' DLC, you get a device which will set hostile Enclave-controlled Deathclaws friendly, and will follow you around. However, it may disappear or de-spawn. There is a chance it will later spawn when you when you enter a friendly environment like the Rivet City Market or the Citadel. The Deathclaw is friendly to ''you'', but not ''anyone else''. [[Hilarity Ensues|Hilarity--and carnage--ensue]].

** If you shoot the Aqua-Cura salesman outside Underworld before completing "The Amazing Aqua-Cura!", he and the crowd will turn hostile. But if Fawkes is there and not a companion, shoot the salesman with a dart gun while hidden. Fawkes will go berserk, slaughtering the crowd and the salesman.

** Another bug from ''Point Lookout'' involves the Ghoul Ecology perk. The perk is supposed to increase your damage against ghouls by five points per shot, but because the "ghouls" target is misplaced, it provides its damage bonus against ''everything''.

** Let us not forget the infamous "Junk Shop Glitch". Simply put, go to the shop in Scrap, which normally sells junk (hence the name Junk Shop) and works by letting you buy 3 items at various prices (depending on the main character's current strength). Normally the game only lets you pick out the three items, but if you go back to the shopkeeper and attempt to sell the last item in the list of stuff they buy from you (even if you don't have any), you can go back into the junk room and pick out 7 more items. You can do this infinitely. Better yet, the quality of the items you can get will actually increase as you sell RepairKits, which is conveniently one of the items you can find at the shop (unless you're T260G), meaning you can potentially have some of the best gear in the game (like LethalGuns and ExcelShields) less than an hour into it.

** The well-loved "Overdrive/Stasis trick is a glitch as well, despite the way the skills work making it seem intentional. By using Stasis as the last move of Overdrive, the character can have up to 8 turns for the duration of the fight. It can also be performed by either using a Snake Oil or casting "Grail" at any point during the Overdrive, which is part of what outed it as a glitch.

** In earlier versions, drakelings' speed would increase without bound when they were affected by heat. Drakeling + fire immunity + temple of elemental fire + time == a base speed as high as you like. This speed would slowly decline once you left the tower, but it was still enough to let you win the game by taking 50 actions for every one NPC action.

* Not as epic as some of the above, but rather satisfying: in the old [[Action RPG]] ''Ancient Evil'', undead enemies, when slain, would get up again after about ten seconds. The tougher undead could permanently drain your EXP if they hit with an attack, so the best response was to run like hell. However, if the game was saved and loaded, any bodies on the ground would be converted into bones, and this included the bodies of undead. Bring one down once, save and load, and it's gone forever, [[Demonic Spiders|probably to your relief]].

** On the minus side, equipping one of these items will render a character unable to move, although equipping a second one will nullify this effect.

** Oh, and if you enter the Item World for one of these items, every enemy will be a Laharl clone.

* A glitch in ''[[Secret of Mana]]'' on the SNES enabled a player willing to risk game save corruption the chance to fight the very first boss all over again - provided they made use of the cartridge's in-built soft reset feature - and obtain a ninth sword orb. As other ninth-level weapon orbs were dropped by enemies in the final dungeon, this was the only way to obtain the last forged incarnation of the game's legendary blade.

* A programming oversight in ''[[Baten Kaitos]] Origins'' can make a large portion of the game much easier. Mountain Apples raise your entire party's HP by 5% each. The effect will stack if you take multiple. Given how you have about twenty free inventory slots and never need more than two or three slots open at any time, you can carry around fifteen or so apples and get tremendous boosts to your HP. Considering ''Origins'' is very [[Nintendo Hard]], this is a ''godsend''.

* The little-known "11th Chip Glitch" in ''[[Mega Man Battle Network]] 3''. Used properly, this trick allowed you to use any chip in your folder ''at least twenty-one times'', or ''as many times as you want'' if you only use that chip and know the secret. This included Mega Chips and Giga chips, which you could only use once, in addition to using this to break the four-of-the-same limit on Standard chips. This gets especially broken in White Version with the Balance Giga Chip, which cuts the [[Hit Points]] of everyone on the stage in half and cannot be blocked by ''anything''. Combining this with the Woodstyle/Undershirt/SetGreen [[Game Breaker|game-breaking tactic]] (referred to as "[[Fan Nickname|Cardboard Immortality]]" in some circles) allows you to reduce the Final Boss (and, for that matter, his powered-up form) to a simple matter of using Balance every turn while dodging attacks, then delivering a [[Finishing Move]] of your choice. The only downside to the 11th Chip Glitch is that it takes up a considerable amount of Navi Customizer space (at least three squares on the Command Line) and your backup programs are limited to Plus Parts, what little you can squeeze into the remaining Command Line squares, and [[Guide Dang It|EX Codes]].

** There's also 2's resident [[Game Breaker]] bug, the Gospel Duplication glitch. Anything you got between saving before the final battle and the end-of-game save was added to your pack in the end-of-game save when you picked it back up at the save point. However, one-off items were not considered taken by the game (with the exception of Power Ups), and so you could get multiples of the same one-off chip repeatedly. Common things to do this with were the very useful Roll 3 and Area Grab * code chips, both of which had set locations and were otherwise single-instance chips. This glitch also appears to let you buy chips for free, or at least those that are bought with Bug Frags, as the supply of Bug Frags is finite in this game, and you can buy multiples of the same chip (otherwise one-offs there) without taking a hit to your Bug Frag supply.