Part 7: 1.21 Gigawatts

Drinking Game: Take a shot every time I say “World of Balance/WoB” or “World of Ruin/WoB”

(don’t, you’ll end up dead)


Unsurprisingly, because most of our glitching around happened in the World of Balance the bulk of the World of Ruin is fairly uneventful.


There are some interesting things however. South Figaro still has Shadow laying around.


And when we reacquire Kumama he comes with the best equipment we have. This is because Edgar is originally programmed to be forced to equip optimum before joining the fight. Kumama gets the same treatment. Now instead of punching baddies for 100 damage he can actually take a hit and do about 1500 back to ‘em. He’s still not useful but he’s much less awful.


The coliseum is a little buggy too when using the Moogles. Chupon will always be on screen no matter who you fight


And you’ll get to a semi-glitchy battlescreen. Kutan will constantly attack for maybe 30 damage while Shadow attacks nothing over and over. This battle is scripted to end so we won’t have to watch Kutan whittle down a Sr Behemoth or whatever.

Oh, Chupon still can Sneeze out the Moogles. I’ve tried.

Luckily glitching out Shadow kept him fully func…


Hey, wait!


but…. Well… maybe he’s in the airship.


nope…
The reason why this happened is because we didn’t let Shadow leave the party after changing Strago and Relm into ghosts. Getting off the phantom train enables the script for him to leave the party 1/32 of the time. The script is erased either once he leaves the party in Sabin's scenario or when you recruit him next. Because we never dumped him, the script is still in effect. If we were to fight around in the World of Balance for 5 minutes until he left this wouldn’t happen.


Most importantly, Edgar is still sitting on his throne. Castle Figaro is one of the few areas that hardly changes from WoB to WoR, so the characters originally scripted are still sitting around. Talking to him now would freeze the game because we need Terra and Locke, so let’s go get them and return later.






Skipping forward I get both Terra and Locke (along with Umaro , Gogo, and Sabin) and park the airship as far directly south of Castle Figaro as possible. The reason why will become clear soon – for now just trust me.







Edgar gets named during this scene, so he’s returned to his former glory. He’s considered forced into your party shortly after, even though you can’t take him into battle, therefore you can leave the castle and he’ll be completely normal. (If you’ve forgotten, name changes trigger portrait/sprite changes, and them joining your party forces stat changes and equipable-status changes)




Sabin gets named at this point as well, so he’s no longer a Moogle. However, he doesn’t join the party until later so if you go into your airship and select him, he’ll be visually changed and renamed but will still have awful stats and no Blitz. If we had gone to Vargas in the World of Balance, this wouldn’t be a problem. Unfortunately I turned back the clock ‘off-camera’ and never actually fought him because it leads to a glitch I wanted to show off. Therefore he’s still awful.


NOPE, we’re going on the airship.


I’m just want to swap out my party and bring along Setzer and Terra.


Side note – make sure you take the castle to Figaro. You’ll understand why later.


I continue the scene. Note that Terra has to be in front. Setzer isn’t scripted to move during this scene, and Locke is required to walk down some spaces. If Setzer’s in front, Locke will just get hung-up on him and we’ll have to restart.


What happens next is a bit hard to describe through images. Here's a video.







For those who hate moving-pictures - yeah. Time Travel. It’s how we do it.

The reason why is pretty simple. Because Castle Figaro is more or less the same location in the World of Balance and World of Ruin (everything but the downstairs prison and the sink/raise room), the script stays dormant. The game expects you to get here in the World of Balance, and at the end of the script it forces you to be placed on a Chocobo outside Castle Figaro in the WoB. Whether you’re in the World of Ruin or World of Balance is no concern to the magic of scripting!



Hey, our airship is also here! This is because we parked it in that far bottom-right hand corner on the continent in World of Ruin. This is the exact same spot on the map we left it in the World of Ruin, it just transformed into the WoB airship. I’m not entirely sure why to be honest, but I would assume the Airship is permanently stored in an X Y coordinate location. Because you’re never supposed to switch from WoR to WoB, the airship and where it’s located isn’t erased (while it does when you transition from WoB to WoR). By doing this you can put the airship on the mountains and the oceans, but you obviously won't be able to access it.

By the way, the overworld music is always the Veldt. Entering towns then exiting causes messed up Music queues too, such as town music playing on overworld and other oddities.


The airship itself once you enter it is still in its WoR style


With the airship comes the ability to switch out parties. Since we can get Gogo and Umaro in the World of Ruin before doing this, we officially have all characters in the World of Balance. Take that, rumor I heard about 13 years ago to get Umaro in the World of Balance! Take your 60 Green Cherry’s and suck it.


For the moment we’re going to park the airship over by Narshe. The more aware readers might be able to figure out why.


I’m going to be traveling through the game with 4 characters – Setzer, Terra Locke and Edgar, to enable scripts yet mess with them at the same time


Because we did an odd transition between WoR and WoB, when we enter the town, and exit a building


We’re brought back to the WoR map. Exiting the map brings you back into the World of Balance so this isn’t an effective portal forward in time, but it does give us access to WoR towns. A lot of the interior of buildings from the transition from WoR to WoB are exactly the same with different NPC scripts and maybe a changed palette, therefore entering the buildings will usually bring you to its WoR counterpart. When you enter the WoR building, the script is coded to bring you to the WoR town when you exit the building.

This basically gives us access to the outside of buildings in the WoB and WoR version, the interior of buildings in WoR version, and all areas that don't exist within WoR.

If it makes it easier, think of the WoB worldmap with WoR towns and dungeons, with the exception of places that don't exist in the WoR



You’d think that renting a Chocobo while in the World of Ruin building would place you on the World of Ruin world map but no. Still World of Balance.


Remember, I said that I didn’t fight Vargas during this and rewound the clock a bit from last update. The reason why is that it forces Sabin into my party, giving me a Party of 5. Because of the extraneous member, whenever we enter and exit doors the 5th member (Setzer in this case) is dumped on the first space you occupy. It’s identical to what happened with Celes in the Opera House. He’s solid and can’t be walked through, so this makes most rooms a 1-way path.


Once again, the Returner’s Cave.


The scenes proceed normally despite using having 5 members.


The raft + character sprite are combined to create this effect, and no matter what character boards the raft this will always occur. Normally the script changes the sprite back to normal after leaving the river, but for some reason…



uh

This is sort of haunting.

Let’s just pick Banon’s scenario and do what most of you figured out already we’re going to do.


AIRSHIP


Banon on the Airshi- jesus christ is that going to stay there forever?


Most of the areas in WoB are pretty boring with Banon, but because entering buildings and exiting them takes you to the WoR version you can take him to some WoR dungeons. For those curious, they’re Mt Zozo, Owzer’s House, and the Narshe Caves. You can also fight the Dragons in Narshe and Opera House with him as well.



The raft-sprite glitch is really fucking weird and it doesn’t transfer how odd it is to play with through screenshots. Where you’re actually walking is 2 spaces below where the character’s feet actually appear to be, so it your party constantly clips through objects and in certain spots just looks ridiculous. Whenever you move there’s a haunting hover-motion, so basically you just float throughout the rest of the game. The reason why it looks so awful is that it pulls its appearance from the palette of the world around it. In 99% of the game it just looks atrocious.

You can get rid of it by renting a chocobo then dismounting, but that’s no fun.


By the way, the raft persists through scripts. You can transfer the raft by switching a character in your party to the front, and if you do this for every character you’ll have an army of glitchy-rafters.


Using a Tent with the Raft causes this to occur. I both hate and love this thing.


Right, well back to the airship. I really don’t recommend switching party members if you want to keep Banon. Problem is that there’s no script in the game that adds the 15th member (which Banon occupies) to the selectable party that I know of, so doing any action that removes him from our party (aka creating a new party) will remove him for good. We’re stuck with a party of Edgar/Terra/Banon/Setzer, which isn’t a half-bad group.



There’s an oddity that occurs after the scenario sequence, however it loses Banon. By talking to Umaro, we find out he went through an identity crisis and transformed into Mog.


Another Moogle! However Umaro’s Moogle is unique. Unlike the others where they’re normally playable, this Mog isn’t. He’s the Mog that is available at the scenario selection scene, and he joins your party for the same reasons the Ghosts did. They had to use two different Mogs because you encounter the first back when you’re rescuing Terra, and they needed one you couldn’t equip.


He’s unplayable in battle however. He’s not meant to be played and therefore has no commands. When his turn comes up, the game straight-up crashes. This is a game restart.


Some areas don’t function as well with the world-switch. Mobitz is one of those areas.


The town is totally devoid of NPCs. They’re all simply gone. The reason why?


Oh, right. The town was destroyed and the script to remove the NPCs was enacted.


South Figaro, however has a much more interesting function


It’s always been my dream to ride a raft while riding on a boat.


OH! We’re back!


We now have safe passage to the World of Ruin! Unfortunately the script to get back the WoB has been eliminated, so this is a one-way ticket back. This works for the same reason we got back to the WoB, the captain we’re talking to in South Figaro exists within the World of Ruin, and therefore places you on the World of Ruin map when you board the ship. Either way, we have Banon back in the WoR without any hacks! Now all we have to do is go back to South Figaro and get our airship.



oh… It’s gone. Gone forever, and there’s no way I know of to get it back. The airship by default is coded to be removed from the standard WoB->WoR map switch. This means that the game is unfinishable and you need to restart which sucks. There are still some things we can do in the WoR with Banon though.


Providing you transferred the Castle to Figaro way back before you teleported to the WoB, you can take it back to Kohlingen, giving us access to another continent with Banon.


The Coliseum works fine with Banon. Surprisingly well, actually.


When you die in the Coliseum the “YOU LOST WITH A CHARACTER WITH A SPAMMABLE FREE HEAL SPELL” message displays but the game doesn’t actually end.



However entering a battle without reviving him will immediately trigger the Game Over screen.

And with that, that’s the end of this playthrough unless I discover some additional things to do with the Terra+Locke starting point with the airship glitch. We'll be starting a new airship glitch relatively soon.




v
Next Time:








BONUS VIDEO:

Didn't really realize how funny the raft was until you guys started to commentate on it. Here's a bonus video to show it in action a bit better