If you blew yourself up, would you still be alive afterwards? 
Yes! Just remember to give it a very low probability of survival. 
That's one of the things that always bugged me about blue magic. A lot of enemy attacks are only useful because enemies are expendable -- another group of them is just 10 steps away, whereas if your party dies once, you lose. Even if you just lose a member, he gets screwed out of the exp (and if you cast exploder, that's really unfair seeing as how he did all the work 
).
In FF5, they had more specific uses.. although on the other hand I felt they were not very good against regular enemies for a random/fun kind of way. FF6 makes this worse, given when you are able to obtain the Lores. There was one hack (I think the most recently released FF3/6 hack on romhacking.net) that redid the instances where you obtained the Lores, and did a pretty good job IMO. You could learn forcefield earlier, before even going into the WOR.. and a number of other Lores.
yeah I must admit I used it more in FF5
I'm also like Entroper in that I didn't use those characters much in FF6, even though I did use those abilities in FF5, I'm hoping the new balancing will change that.
as for exploder, I'd be curious to know how it varies. what does it depend on? it can't just always do 9999. this is why I suggested that it use the number that is his max health, rather than his min, or 9999, a kind of half way between the two.
We have EVEN MORE themes now, but some old ones are gone...