Part 22: Bonus Feature A2: Mr. S Explains It All—Whoops, We Broke Reality
Bonus Update A2: Mr. S Explains It All—Whoops, We Broke Reality
Welcome, welcome! While we're setting the stage for our next installment, I'd like to take a moment and address the audience. It appears we've received a lot of mail lately requesting a behind-the-scenes look at our Let's Play.
...we have? Shush. Chokes is a very demanding director, and, well, we end up with a lot of footage on the cutting room floor. For example, the fight with Venus was legitimately re-shot a total of 34 times. It's not my fault Sara didn't learn Teleport on her own.
You spent three hours on one gag! I don't like CGI, okay? It's an aesthetics thing. Now. One scene that was intended for production but ultimately scrapped involved our newest friend, Drago. As a benefit to our readers, I'll let Chokes explain what happened. Think of it as a Director's Cut of the LP. With that in mind... Chokes? Are you ready? Sure am. I'll relay my present day commentary over the lost footage. Since we're dealing with technical chicnanery, there's a wall of text up front to explain the background. If you're just here for the comedy, skip to the second picture. Now... LET'S! DO! THIIIIIIIIIiiis?!Two weeks ago...
The focus of this update will be on an exploit that's simple in nature but very difficult to set up. For those of you new to gaming, exploits are a particular joy among RPG players where you use shoddy coding and/or game design to your advantage. FFL1 was full of such exploits—mostly unintended side effects of the ridiculously complex combat engine. (A good example is the "Punch Master" glitch, where an expired punch skill can be chained to a new one with... dramatic effect.) Another type of exploit is the game breaker, in which you essentially reduce the difficulty curve of the game to paste. If you were here for the Wizardry playthrough (or just a veteran of the game), you may be familiar with the Bishop Hack. I won't go into too much detail, but suffice to say, if/then logic over numeric ranges is the bane of a rushed programmer's existence.
Then, there are sequence breaks. And these are the most interesting, because oftentimes, the game has no idea what the hell is going on anymore.
Sara wasn't kidding about reshooting the fight with Venus. I wanted to spawn a very specific ability, and Venus is the last monster of sufficient tier to learn it from. After about 30-40 fights (none of which produced any interesting ability, I might add), I eventually got sick of trying and forced the issue. We'll cover that first, because it's technically cheating, but only to achieve a goal that's normally possible. (If you have more patience than I do, anyway.)
Hex editing is a time-honored tradition in old RPGs. This isn't an exploit so much as all-out cheating—you're fudging your characters' ability/inventory/stats by hand in the actual code itself. In this particular case, we're using this guide at GameFAQs. I encourage you not to steal any of it from "thundergod," as he has multiple copyrights mentioned, and surely that'll hold up in the court of law. Plus, he's a god. A god of thunder.
I won't spend too much time on the how-to. The interesting points are:
- FFL2 doesn't use standard ASCII as its name storage—I assume it's because ASCII doesn't handle katakana, so they needed their own mapping convention. It also makes localization easier, since all you have to do is change the bit mappings. (Ish.)
- FFL2 also appears to store its save data with a checksum value. This means a particular sum/hash is compared against the data found, and if they don't match, the save is ignored.
This was unfortunate on two counts—one, it was really difficult to locate Sara's entry in the battery backup, and two, once I did locate and alter an ability, my save disappeared completely.
Fortunately, I had the foresight to back up my save data ahead of time. Anyway, long story short, it turned out to be a simple solution: look for the laser sword, and then alter a second ability so it and Teleport add up to the same value. After that, we kick Venus in the face and move on.But I digress! You don't actually need to know any of that to appreciate this next part; I just thought it terribly interesting and decided to share. The important thing is, Sara learned Teleport by any means necessary. And, with that in mind, we pick up with our deleted scene...
Ugh. My eyes won't stop watering.
Are you okay? Yeah. I think I'm allergic to something out here.
Is it dragons? I bet it's dragons. Wow. That's... really unfortunate.
On your mark... Get set... No sweat, I can still handle this. We just need to get a good staaah.... AAAAAH
NO NO NO CHOO
*bamf*
... We just lost the race, didn't we. Fer sure. ...guys. Oh my saw. I'm so, so sorry. Ah, it's okay. It's not like you can control it or anything. GUYS. Besides, maybe we can talk to the winner and see if he's willing to trade for the magi. Or just beat the crap out of him and take it! Heather, why do you always take the most violent solu— GUYS WE ARE MISSING AN IMPORTANT POINT HERE ?
WE HAVE OUR OWN DRAGON NOW
GLORP ... 
Here's the dragon warp exploit! It's probably the coolest unintentional state break in video games. Get Teleport from either Dunatis or Venus, hit the starting line, then engage Teleport after the other dragons run off. (Though, technically, you can do it any time after the race starts but before you cross the finish line.) Once you've done it, bam. You have your own dragon. It can fly over any square and bypass any magi locks, so you now have a free pass to go anywhere you damn well please. It won't shield you from random encounters, but if you hop off and come back outside, it'll still be there. Also, I suggest renting the faster dragon if you're going to do this. It just makes life easier.
Pretty keen, huh? Unfortunately, there's one tiny problem with it.
oh man oh man oh man WE NEED TO SHOW THIS OFF TO SOMEBODY Let's take him to Lynn! Hell yeah! Everybody wants to pet a dragon!
... uh... Chokes? don't look at the camera, just roll with it 
Huh. Apparently it has built-in camoflauge. nice recovery Makes sense. People would probably poop themselves if they saw a dragon zooming down the street. It's worth a change in underwear if you ask me. Well that's disgusting.
I can't wait to see her reaction. I've got a new pair of kid's underwear at the ready.
...
That's... that's some camoflauge. Yeeeeah.
Okay, everything should be under control now. We'll just get him out in the field, and he'll be back to normal.
Z...Zero? You okay, buddy? Okay, I don't think we can use this take. It's gotten pretty bad. KEEP ROLLINGYeah. The game's... not really ready to have this happen.
State breaks come from intentionally hitting the holes that sloppy coding and/or scripting leaves behind. Most old RPGs have a very specific story in mind with an equally specific progression of events. Even with first-person dungeon crawlers, there's still a chain of actions—go here, get this, kill this person, go here next. As always, the issue is with the person typing in the code. A lot of old games had a handful of programmers or, even worse, just one. Besides that, they were often stuck with some god-awful language like BASIC, Pascal, or (shudder) raw assembly.
Look, making an RPG is hard. I want to stress this, because the end result just looks like a dumb series of bonking enemies on the head, and there's actually a shitload of math involved. Then, you have to take spells into effect, and balancing, and item generation, and dungeon/map creation, and... yeah. By the end, I imagine the programmer(s) are bleary eyed, four cups of coffee surrounding them and one cup full of cigarettes, and they just want to get the damn thing out the door as soon as it's sufficiently playable. This mindset is not conducive to finding all the ways a player can screw with your narrative. Because let's face it: If there's anyone more creative at finding ways to screw people over than the designers, it's the gamers.
Hey, don't start none, won't be none.
So, yeah. Once you get the dragon off the race track, the game flips its shit entirely. You're not going to see your dragon sprite again, so this whole thing is basically unusable for a proper narrative. But what the hell, we're here, let's have some fun with it!
Okay, well. If we're just futzing around at this point, let's take Zero for a spin! You know it's not actually me, right? Meh.
Wheeeeeeeeeee
Shpace! I'm in shpace. Little somethin' for the Portal players, huh? Shpace.
Woohoo! It's the last dungeon! Let's take a look inside! Sure, why not.
Uh. Apollo? What are your legs doing here? 
And... and your torso
Oh. oh no. It's getting worse
THIS IS CREEPY
I AM NOT HAVING FUN ANYMORE C...cut. CUT. I take it back, we're just gonna drop this scene. Someone want to go get them down from there?
Hmpf. I wouldn't say I want to. It'd be appreciated, okay? So, yeah. That's the dragon exploit. I really, really wanted to spend the last update giving Roy and company their own dragon to screw around with... but as you can see, the game crapped itself so hard that we couldn't make it work.
If I may? Sure. Despite its... dubious... stability issues, this is actually one of the more well-known exploits in Final Fantasy Legend 2. In fact, for speedrunners, it's absolutely essential. As I understand it, the basic premise is to get four mutants, fight your way to Dunatis, use another RNG exploit—which we may or may not discuss later—and force repeated rerolls of mutant abilities until someone learns Teleport. From there, one gets to the dragon races as fast as possible, uses the Dragon Warp, then heads straight to the central palace. I must confess, I haven't the slightest idea how you're supposed to proceed from there. The final levels of this game are difficult, brutally so—even by SaGa standards. I can't imagine how an inexperienced party would survive them. ... Not... not really liking where this is going. It'll be fine. If worst comes to worst, we'll just reshoot until you win! 
So, there it is. A little bit of fun for the readers, and a warning to fledgling game programmers: Never make assumptions about the player's ability to follow the story. In fact, you should assume they'll do everything in their power not to. Programming a linear story is easy. Keeping people on point, without making it painfully obvious they're on rails? Quite a bit harder. Okie doke, that's it from us. We'll get you back to your story here shortly. Thanks for listening! Indeed. Hope to see you again!Next Time: Doumo Arigatou, Mister Roy-Butt-O
Man, I'm not even bothering to correct it anymore. 