- I guess it's important to note that the Pantera battle works fine in the SFamicom game
- I agree the Wonder Wand is an oft-overlooked feature, but since it's there it should work.
- When one or more character(s) Hide(s) and the remaining party is a Zombie, the entire battlefield is unable to fight. It's not like !Jump where the character comes down regardless, a character can remain !Hidden for as long as he or she wants. In FFVI, there are no free run-aways; when one character is gone (via Sneeze/Snort or the like) and the rest is a Zombie, it's Game Over. So I still say bug.
Whenever someone here says; I've seen this bug, let's roll, I take that as a confirmed. We're not in this business to lie. We're in this business for the ladiez. I mean the truth. If a video is found that'd be nice, but I'd still try to reproduce it myself.
About the overworld in-and-out menu trick to keep away the random encounters: I wouldn't call it a bug, but it's certainly sloppy RNG coding that the player can exploit. It's not like FFVI's Slot command, where the player needs in-depth knowledge available only through direct code viewing to work the system; any fool can observe that Quicksaving leads to a fixed random monster encounter appearance.
A similair thing is how monsters will never appear when you've just entered a room in a dungeon. I don't know how FFV works out when a battle is triggered, but it seems to be (partly) based on how many steps you've taken in a certain room. You could tackle 500 small rooms in a row and never get a random encounter just because you're entering and exiting all the time.
Another form of sloppy coding that's not really a bug but still has major effects on the battlefield is that FFV loves to start at static ATB values. When you set Berserk or Confuse in-battle, the ATB is reset to that character's start value. This is also why you can fight such as fights as Archeoaevis and the Pages in the Library and never have them use any move; every time they call a new monster, that monster starts with a fresh ATB bar that has the entire way to go. Since you're already half-way with most characters, you'll always outspeed them and can destroy that form before it takes a move. The next creature befalls the same fate. Stuff like that isn't a bug, I think, when looking at the definition of the world, but it's certainly poorly executed.
I'm a big fan of dropping the semantic nonsense about 'bug' and 'glitch' and just talk about intended behavior and unintended behavior. The Quicksave "feature" has no faulty coding and isn't a bug, but since it allows the player to seek out certain very rare monster formations every other fight, I'd say it's unintended behavior and thus worthy of being listed.
As for the document itself, I feel a good example of how it (hopefully) can turn out is like Master ZED's Bugs 'nd Glitches guide for FFVI. It became a fairly big document, and the weigth of it eventually discouraged ZED from updating the thing when that faithful One-Hundred-Something Bugs topic was posted on mnrogar's forum back in the day.
With that document I mind, I think it's best that we set up some sort of WIP document that Jorgur initiated in the first post of the forum (good idea!). Seeing the size of ZED's document however, I think it's suboptimal to embed it in the first post of this topic. I'd personally rather see a quick free wiki we all have access to, or a Google document or something. Since I've never done anything like that, any input or experience on the subject is welcome.
Here's ZED's example:
http://masterzed.cavesofnarshe.com/GameDocs/ff3bug.txtJorgur asks about the scope of the document, let me post my thoughts:
Bugs and stuff is fun for a tremendous amount of players. Some can be used for gain (Vampire bug, item duplication, stuff like that), others are better avoided (game freezing bugs, for instance) and most others deal with tremendously niche scenarios that are just fun to read about. While the majority of the posters on this forum are code monkeys, not everybody is. I think that showing were the code makes a mistake and listing possible patches or CodeBreaker fixes will alienate a large catagory of casual readers. Again, I think ZED's got a good vibe going on when he describes the cause in such a way my friends would understand the problem and its cause.
We have EVEN MORE themes now, but some old ones are gone...