Part 2: Operas Don't Work That Way

There are a lot of issues I didn't mention in the last post with the airship. See, you have the airship, but you really DON'T have the airship, if that makes any sense. Even though you're flying it and can access the interior, you'll get stuck each time and can't access the control panel. This means you have to reset the game. This means you have to replay the entire World of Balance to re-access the airship. This means don't do that.



Even worse, whenever you land the airship it disappears from under you. That's right, landing the airship is a one-shot deal. It limits how effective this glitch can be, but with careful planning it's not a huge deal.


Let's land at the "golden spot", which is Zozo. Zozo is as a general rule as far as you can go without having an unrecoverable airship. If you go to any spot further on in the plot, either things won't trigger correctly and you'll be stuck, or you'll get access to an airship and when you land it'll disappear from under you. It's a little complicated to explain, but as an example if you were to land in Vector at this point you'll run into a problem. Celes isn't in your party, but she has a scripted event there. Therefore, the game will lock up before you can progress the story. Zozo is a perfect spot, because you can take anyone there. No specific character has a scripted event, and afterwards all missing members of your party are forced in. In addition, there's a trigger at the Opera House that allows you to use an airship without it disapearing under you when you land. It's very complicated and knowing when and where you can land comes with experience in doing this glitch, but Zozo is always a safe choice.

Landing here we skip everything from the first visit of Castle Figaro to everyone reuniting at Narshe. Technically those events never actually happened, which will lead to some shenanigans later once we get the Airship. For now, all we have to do is play through the game, er, "normally".


Oh, and from here no there's no reason not to save, so that restriction is gone.


I realize that since I only have Locke and Terra, I should head south and pick up some weapons for them. Of course only Locke has a new weapon available but that works, it's enough to get me through Zozo. Flying around with just Locke and Terra is pretty uncommon, so this won't be a regular step.

I should mention that all of the music is 1 stage behind. When I was in the Airship and the overworld I was listening to the Narshe theme. Entering the town played the Overworld theme, and leaving the Town and re-entering the Overworld played the generic Town theme. It fixes itself eventually.


Remember that we're not supposed to have Terra here, she was supposed to be turned into a half-esper back at Narshe. Well that never happened due to the sequence break. So having her in our party, you'd think would cause some interesting results.



Well, not really here. Zozo is pretty uneventful, which is a shame. But we have to do it.


I mean sure you get some odd scenes of Terra being with Terra


And I guess it's amusing


but not really "funny" or interesting. It'll come.


When we go south we see our entire team there. However when we talk to them...


Wait, you're not Kumama!


You probably don't remember him/her, but Kumama is one of the Moogles that come to help you in the beginning of the game. Remember, we never picked up Edgar, Celes, Cyan, Gau, or Sabin, and they're forced into our party at this point (Except Gau). I'll get more into why that happens later, but for now all you need to know is that skipping around the game causes some serious issues.

You can also see Terra sticking out of the ceiling. This is a heavily scripted event, and because she’s not scripted to move she’ll just stay stuck in the ceiling.


So all of the party members we hadn't met at this point in time are here, with the exception of Gau. Gau isn't programmed to come up here unless he's in your party since you can leave him on the Veldt. Instead we get the Moogle equivalents of Sabin, Celes, Edgar, and Cyan.


Luckily Terra isn't forced out of our party here. The game loves to take characters you're not supposed to have and throw them out in the Character Select screen.


Having character's we're not supposed to have causes things where the camera likes to screw up. It stays focused on your current character, which in scripted events obviously doesn't move. It doesn't matter here, because we're returned back to the entrance of Zozo afterwards, but I thought it was funny.


You'll notice that Kutan and Kupek (Kupek being Cyan, Kutan being Celes) have abysmal stats. They keep the stats they had at the beginning of the game when you're defending Terra. More importantly, they keep the "can't equip/deequip" property. Basically, they're useless. They still function as the character, but they're just plain old awful. Even worse they don't even adapt the levels from when you were at the Floating Continent, they stay the same level as when you defended Terra in the Moogle Cave. I hope you enjoy 5 useless party members! Because doing this method, that's what I have.


They suck and can stay dead.


Despite our characters being Moogles, the game still recognizes them as the original character. I'll explain why in the next update but the game considers them the same for every purpose but their stats. So the game continues normally, or, well, as normally as it could.


Something else really important happens here. As far as I can tell, naming Setzer is the trigger for having a flyable airship. If you never name Setzer, you're never going to have an airship that doesn't disappear when it lands. This is why Zozo is more or less where I'll always be landing after the airship glitch.


OBLIGATORY IMAGE TO SHOW WE'RE AT THE OPERA HOUSE BEEP BOOP





All the scenes prior to this are pretty much normal with Terra standing awkwardly in the background. Kupek is transformed into his Thou'y self, and everything looks normal


Except that Terra is still in our party. The script is there to remove Cyan, Gau, Celes - pretty much every party member we're supposed to have (plus Shadow, for some strange reason), but it's not there to remove Terra. Because this is supposed to be Locke solo, Terra causes some major problems. In fact, until we reaquire the Airship this is probably the most glitchy part of the playthrough. I throw her into the front.


Going into Celes’s room causes a huge oddity. It can't really be shown through screenshots, so let's let Youtube do the work shall we?













Something not shown in the video is that if we talk to Celes over and over the camera will constantly move up and to the right. Doing this enough will cause the camera to go way off screen. The reason why is the Camera is scripted to switch from Locke to Celes (which moves 4 sections up 1 section left). It never does, and you can keep restarting the script, so eventually you'll fly way off course.


The big thing is that normally Locke blocks the door when you talk to Celes. Because Locke's sprite isn't on the field, that never happens and the script gets messed up. We can use this to walk outside after talking to Celes, and she follows us outside.

The game loves to get confused when you have characters you're not suppose to have in certain sections and will just "plop" them whenever you enter a room. You'll see characters following me a lot as the play through goes on. Normally it doesn't effect anything, but you can't walk through them so it causes certain problems occasionally. I'm not 100% sure why it does this to be honest.


Talking to her initiates the same conversation


But eventually the script gets confused and stops working. Game's frozen, have to restart.

So yeah, don't do that!


Every room you walk in and out of she'll follow you into, facing right.


By moving Celes away from the door (which I did in the above screenshot), we're free to reenter Celes's room. When we do this....


She'll appear at the bottom of the door! Now, here's where things get a little confusing with this glitch. Every time you talk to Celes, a script initates. It's screwed up because Terra is in front, but the script is as follows with Terra:


1.) Whatever position Terra is in, she moves to the right of Celes.
2.) Celes then moves downward
3.) The script resets


After talking to her once, Celes is inside the door outside of view. The panels to the right and left of her can't normally be walked on. Scripting ignores that. When it says move right, your character damn-well moves right.


Because the panel to the right of Celes isn't normally walkable, we effectively phased through the wall. Yup, an out of bounds glitch. It's like the Crazy Duncan glitch, except interesting.


There isn't a whole lot to see, except how the game is constructed. You can see this part of the basement of Figaro Castle, which is in the same map-sheet as the Opera House. If you walk too far up or down, you'll be stuck and you'll have to restart. Left and right loops infinitely.


It's cool to look around, see how everything looks when the palettes are messed up. Oh, and I checked using Game Genie codes. You can't go up any passageways and there's nothing in those chests.

I should mention there's no way back inside, so I'm stuck anyways. Woopie!


Instead of Terra, let's try talking to Celes with Locke as the lead.


The script proceeds as normal, but it gets a little confused at the end. Technically it adds Celes in our party and exchanged the sprite sheet from her battle sprite to her Opera scene sprite, but since Terra is in the party the game gets confused. It's hard to show through screenshots but I'm controlling an invisible character. Trying to start the Opera Scene just does nothing. It's the same as the Youtube video, except you don't see Terra explode over and over. In order to continue I have to find a way to get Celes into that scene, which proved difficult.


Celes is still in her place, which is helpful to us. By talking to her again, the script repeats


This forces Locke to move 4-5 square south of his current location, out of the door-way. This means we can exit the room, and....


Cool, we're Opera-Celes.


Entering the room again shows Locke in his weird position since we reset the script. Poor guy.


Unfortunately having Celes in this costume outside the room causes nothing interesting. I couldn't get her outside the Opera House no matter how hard I tried. I've Game Genied her out and it's just what you expect, nothing interesting. Oh well.


I reenter the room, go through the door, and proceed with the scene as normal.