Part 1: An Introduction
First thing's first. Start up the game completely normally.
Something I should mention is that I recommend this is done on an Emulator. I’ll explain why in a moment.
As soon as you reach outside, save. We’re going to be activating a glitch that allows us to skip entire portions of the game, so allowing us to do that right from the moment we’re on the overworld makes a lot of sense.
Here's the #1 reason why this glitch is a pain in the ass: After you save once, you cannot save ever again until the glitch has been activated. That means without turning off the console, having a thunderstorm pass by, and most importantly - dying - you have to get to a certain area. That certain area is beating the Floating Continent. As you could guess, good luck trying that on a cartridge. I've done it, it's possible, but I strongly don't recommend it. Instead, save states are your friend.
Right, so from here on out you play the game as you would before. This, until we get to the Floating Continent is going be a completely normal playthrough. Nothing changed, no glitches. I recommend grinding out levels both early on (the Recovery Spring and the house north of South Figaro being my favorite early spots).
Of course the easiest spot is here with a turbo controller with the button taped down, with the cursor settings set to Memory and Banon set to use his ability Health. For those unaware, you will ride the raft in an infinite loop as Banon heals you for no MP. It's a great way to get levels early on, and while it doesn't effect a critical party member (Locke), his level gets averaged later. It's not required you do this but considering how your death will cause you to have to start all over again, it's in your best interest.
I stop at about level 25. You can go past that if you'd like.
I should also mention that Banon is the most important character when glitching the game, but we'll get into that much later.
And this is the most important screen. As the Let's Break goes on, you'll be seeing this constantly.
Oh. And do yourself a favor, don't glitch out the game by getting Kutan. I'll be showing off what I mean for those who don’t know later, but you want the game to be as easy as possible for yourself.
After traveling all the way to the Floating Continent, you're ready to start the process. Providing you haven't saved, go to the floating continent and do the generic beating-up-bosses shtick.
Be careful not to die here - even though the rest of the game has most likely been a cakewalk from the powerleveling it won't be here. Continue through the dungeon normally
Once you get to this point, return back to your Airship. It's right near the end of the Floating Continent.
Once back in your airship, instead of returning to the Floating Continent, chose Lift-off and fly around for a good few minutes. I'm sure you could fly around for half a second and the glitch would still work but it's better safe than sorry.
Without landing on the ground, return to your airship and chose "Find the Floating Continent". This part is obnoxious, if you do things out of order you have to return to the Floating Continent and repeat the process over again.
Get to the Continent,
and die.
Now remember, the last time I saved was in Narshe, so logically that's where I'd appear. But there's a reason why we went through all the trouble of getting to the floating continent, never saving, doing seemingly random events once there, etc. The reason why?
We have our airship
And it's just Locke and Terra, right after they left Narshe!
And our stats are the same! Sort of?
The glitch works like this: By doing that series of events at the Floating Continent, the game still registers you as having your airship when you return to where you last saved. By doing this process and saving at different points in the game, you can get the airship from any point in the game’s story in the World of Balance, so long as you never save before arriving at the Floating Continent. Believe it or not keeping experience and levels is intended by design. That's a normal feature of the game, though you probably never noticed it. No, that's not what's important. Most importantly, the events of the game are completely reset. They never happened. But we have the airship. Obviously this means we can, well, break the game. We can get to areas with characters we're not supposed to have, skip entire sections of the game and come back later - the possibilities are endless (about 10-11 updates).
After every update, I usually post an explanation as to why this happens. While I'm not a coder and don't have in-depth knowledge of how SNES games are created and coded, I do my research and have the ability to figure things out just by knowing how games function. I have no idea why this happens. Nobody does. In fact, almost nobody knows of this glitch, even though it's probably the biggest one in the entire game. There is a FF6 glitcher called ZED who did a lot of exploring into FF6's glitches who discovered it. He was in the process of building a huge FaQ to explain what can be done, however the project was abandoned after (apparently) conflicts with friends he was writing it with. He kept the secret as to how to do the airship glitch and some certain things that can be done with the airship under wraps, and released them in a forum post nobody read on gamefaqs some-odd years ago.
I've taken this glitch and expanded upon it, discovering some entirely new things he didn't know. Almost every glitch I show off in this thread will involve the Airship in some way shape or form. The glitch opens up a whole new world of broken scripts, characters that aren’t supposed to be there and more, and I plan to take full advantage of it.
To clarify, here's what you need to do to activate the glitch:
1.) Save where/when you want your airship activated
2.) Go to Floating Continent
3.) Jump Back to Airship
4.) Choose Liftoff + Fly around for a bit
5.) Return to Airship without landing on ground
6.) Return to Floating Continent
7.) Die
Next update, the adventure begins