Final Fantasy VI dummied content

The Super Nintendo version of Final Fantasy VI has a lot of dummied content. This includes sound effects, actors (characters), enemies, storyline dialogue, and graphic tiles, among other things. Some of this content was later restored for some of the ports and remakes of the game.

Story Dialogue
These unused dialogues are listed in order of appearance. The text is taken from the game's files verbatim, grammatical errors and all.

Bugged Story Dialogue
In the SNES and PSX versions, there are two instances where the End of Message control character is improperly used instead of the Page Break control. This has the effect of preventing the remaining portion of the message from being displayed.

In-battle Dialogue
It can only be speculated where some of this cut dialogue was intended to be used, or whom it was in relation to. The text is taken from the game's files verbatim, grammatical errors and lack of punctuation included.

Map Label
Within the game's code, one map label called Esperville is linked to the Esper World map, the place where the player explores the area via Maduin during Terra's flashback sequence. Since this place cannot be entered properly due to the player being sent there via an event, the name label never shows up on the screen like it usually does when the player enters a town or dungeon.

Events
There are seven placed sprites that can be found on the map of Narshe, specifically the map of the cliff above the snowfield. These sprites consist of six imperial soldiers and Kefka. An event would have played out when the player lost the Battle for the Frozen Esper, where Kefka goes to retrieve the frozen esper, but it never got put into the game.

Special Attacks
There's one special attack's special effect that goes unused, the animation is that of a rocket or missile that flies at the target from the attacker. The animation is the same as Missile, but with a different sound effect.

Special Attacks are the enemies personal abilities, but a few special attacks are never used. They do not appear within their AI script, nor do they appear on the Control list of abilities or being an available option when these enemies are sketched. There are many "default" special attacks placed on enemies, all named Hit, but some of them have different effects from the default (Level 1 = Attack x 1.5) and they will be listed below.

Characters
Sixteen dummy 'actors', or characters exist within the games files. All their stats, such as Speed and Stamina, are set to zero. They all have an escape success rate of 5 and come equipped with Daggers in all four equipment slots, as well as both relic slots. They also have four Attack commands assigned to their battle menus. There's no way these characters can be used as none of them have any sprite data. They're listed in the order they appear within the game's files.

There's also a character by the name of ?????? present along with the other characters; its data appears right before Wedge's. This character comes equipped with a Sakura, Mythril Shield, Mythril Helm, and Ninja Gear. Its battle commands are Attack, Magic, and Items, with no character specific command. Sakura can only be equipped by Shadow, so this character might have been a version of him to be used before the player had a chance to name him. Supporting this is the fact that all permanent party members have the Magic command, while Guest characters do not. There's also evidence to suggest that the player would have been able to change this character's equipment during combat.

Maduin's appearance as a Party Member in Terra's flashback has some actual set stat levels, as well as a pair of Sprint Shoes permanently equipped on him. He has no battle commands, not even the basic Attack or Items commands. The main menu is disabled, so the player cannot view the main menu or his status menu during the flashback sequence.

Both Maduin and ?????? have stats, as displayed in the table below.

Enemies
Three enemies in the game go unused, with some of them more or less complete. The first enemy is a weaker version of the Yeti battle. From the look of its statistics, it was likely meant to be battled in the World of Balance after Kefka's failed invasion of Narshe. The Yeti has a simple AI script.

The second is the Giant (Colossus), which uses the same palette as the Hill Gigas. The Giant has a complete AI script, counters Blitz and Bushido attacks with its enemy spells, and will focus its attack on Gau every turn if he is a valid target. It appears to have been a boss, as it uses the boss death animation. It has 18,000 HP.

The final enemy is the most well-known of them all, Kaiser Dragon (CzarDragon), a dummied boss with no significant AI script. This dragon, with a new design, would later appear as the Kaiser Dragon, an optional superboss in the Game Boy Advance version located within the Dragons' Den.

An enemy named "Kefka" also appears in the game's coding, but not in-game. Its original intention was to help switch between the phases of the final battle's gauntlet, but a different method was used in the final game. The enemy had the Guard sprite, the default sprite, as its representation.

In the mobile release of the game, the unnamed esper uses Ifrit's sprite instead of being a palette swap, although a palette swap version of the sprite is found inside the coding of the mobile release.

Enemy Spells
There are three unused enemy spells that do not appear in any enemy AI scripts, Rages or through the Sketch or Control command.


 * Vanish (Clear in SNES): Inflicts Blind, Poison, Imp, Doom, Silence, Confuse, Sap, Sleep, and Stop on the caster. It costs 20 MP and can't be evaded.
 * Confusion: Inflicts Confuse on all targets with a hit rate of 68, cost 20 MP.
 * Digestive Fluid (Heart Burn in SNES): Inflicts non-elemental damage. Its spell power is 30 with a hit rate of 120. It cost 20 MP, and can target one or multiple targets.

Please note that the following dummied spells were placed within the current enemy's AI script to display the visual effect of the spells for the viewers and readers. It's currently unknown who these spells originally belonged to.

Spell Effect
The following spell effect goes unused, this effect randomly select a graphic animation from the following spells: Fire, Blizzard, Thunder, Drain, Poison, and Fira.

Status Effects
Enemies can start out with the Cover and Reraise statuses, but the developers never made use of them. If some of the enemies in the game would have had either of these statuses, Gau would have inherited these statuses when using the specific Rage.

Three equipment statuses, Sleep, Slow, and Stop, go unused. Both Sleep and Stop are temporary statuses on the wearer. The wearer of said equipment would have started off with either the Sleep or Stop status, which would then wear off naturally with time. The Stop status can be Dispelled, but the Slow status on the other hand would have been permanent on the wearer. Not even the Haste spell would have removed the slow status.

Another status related to equipment is the ability for the wearer of said equipment to start the battle under the Critical status. Unfortunately, as soon as any party member(s) or enemies either take HP damage, recover HP, or evade an attack, the Critical status will be removed from said character.

Some status ailments are "not named in-game", meaning they have no name entries shown within battle. They are Magitek (while riding the Magitek Armor), Dance (while Mog is dancing), Interceptor Guard (Interceptor), Hidden, Chanting (while Relm or Gogo controls an enemy), Morph (while Terra is in esper form), Freeze, and Normal (no status inflicted on character). All these status conditions were left unnamed, probably due to some of them being either character-specific or rarely used (e.g. Magitek and Freeze).

Battle Commands
In the final version of the game the player can summon espers within the Magic menu by pressing up at the top of the character's magic list, but an actual battle command called "Summon" exists in the game's data found within the battle command list. The Summon command would have allowed the player to summon their equipped esper as long as they had enough MP to summon it, with no limits to how many times it could be summoned. The Summon command summons the esper the character currently has equipped, but the command is vastly incomplete and there's no targeting. It targets the party on default, so the only espers that can be summoned through this command are those that target the party.

There is a bugfix patch that players can use to make the command work in the Super Nintendo version, but players will have to edit their ROM or save state to give their characters the command.

A select few commands are usable by enemies, but there are numerous other battle commands that go unused and work flawlessly when used by them within their AI scripts. These commands will have the same effects as those used by the player. These commands are: Attack, Runic, Mimic, Row, Defend, Pray, and Shock. The other commands not mentioned are incompatible with the enemy's AI script, resulting in strange and glitchy behavior. The Shock command is usable by Gau through the Yojimbo Rage, but the command itself is not used directly by enemies.

Items
There are many dummied out key items still in the game's files. However, they can still be obtained with the use of cheat engines such as Game Genie. The Scrap of Paper that can be found hidden next to the table in the Returner Hideout prior to the meeting that takes place with Banon is technically in the game, but it's associated with an event in which the player can either ignore it or toss it in the trash. Neither choice causes the item to be added to the player's inventory in the final game.

There's an unstealable Genji Glove in the Super Nintendo and PlayStation versions. Dullahan, who is fought early in the World of Ruin, has it set as a stealable item, but Locke and Gogo cannot be recruited before the battle, and nobody who is in the party at the time can equip the Thief's Knife. There is no way to obtain a Merit Award either at this point, because none of the items that lead to it at the Dragon's Neck Coliseum can be obtained yet. However, Dullahan does appear in the Soul Shrine in the Game Boy Advance version, providing a remedy to this oversight.

An inaccessible Sprint Shoes is found behind Arvis' house in Narshe, located one tile to the right near the back door. On the Phantom Train, there's an unobtainable Fairy Ring in the compartment right after the one where the player fought Siegfried. A Tent can be found by examining a completely inconspicuous spot on the floor in the small room containing a table. A Fairy Ring is right next to the Tent in this very same room, but it's completely inaccessible and therefore unobtainable without the use of cheats.

There are a select few item effects that go unused, despite the majority of them seeming to work as intended. The following list is of the working effects:


 * The user attempts to Steal from target.
 * Inflict Control on target.
 * Assigns a random elemental weakness (Debilitator's effect).
 * Inflicts Heat on target.
 * Golem's protection.
 * Metamorphose on target (Ragnarok's effect).
 * Nullifies a random element, but doesn't display which element was nullified (Force Field's effect).
 * Grants Cover on target.
 * Freezes the target's ATB bar while granting both the Regen and HP Leak statuses simultaneously. If an attack or spell is directed towards the affected, it'll be automatically redirected to another valid target. The effects last until the end of battle.
 * Removes a party member from the current party, the removed members can be found loitering around the airship for re-recruitment. This ability could also be used by the player to instantly remove an enemy from battle (treated as Death). Works on bosses.
 * Inflicts Charm on target.
 * Reduces the target's HP to a single digit.
 * Gives 1/2 HP/MP - if the healing item gives 100 HP, it'll give 50 HP to the target.
 * Gives 1/4 HP/MP - if the item gives 100 HP, it'll give 25 HP to target.
 * Gives the target two turns (Quick's effect).

Conversely, these are the effects that either don't work, or don't work properly:


 * The user Leaps and that ends the battle, the leaper will remain in the party after battle. Gau learns all the Rages from the formation that the user leapt.
 * Grants Jump on target, target will remain on the field and become un-targetable. That is until the sprite disappears and reappears above the target to perform the normal jump attack.
 * Forces target to run away. If the user uses this on an enemy, the enemy will be removed after the user has run away. But the user will still be able to execute battle commands normally and will be un-targetable until the end of battle.

Ragnarok's Metamorphose ability has three sets of four items that goes unused.


 * Potion, Potion, Potion, X-Potion
 * Potion, Potion, Potion, X-Ether
 * Potion, Potion, Potion, Gauntlet

Shops
Price modifiers exist within the game, but remain unused. They are similar to the modifier used when the party leader is Edgar, which halves the price in both Figaro Castle and South Figaro (World of Ruin only). These price modifiers are: 1.5x normal price, 2x normal price, 50% discount, half if male lead and everyone else is 1.5x normal price, and half if female lead and everyone else is 1.5x normal price. These price modifiers can be hacked into the game, and work perfectly. These modifiers consider Gogo to be male.

There are forty unused blank shops, and three unused shops each selling a single item: Dagger, Buckler, and Silver Spectacles.

Rages
Four Rages exist for Gau that can never be obtained. Only one of these was ever fixed.


 * Siegfried cannot be fought on the Veldt without cheating, as enemies fought in the Coliseum are not programmed to appear there.
 * Typhon does not appear on the Veldt for the same reason as Siegfried.
 * Death Warden cannot be fought on the Veldt because of an error involving duplicate enemy formations. There are two identical formations that he appears in, only one of which is ever used by the game; the one that goes unused falls within the range of formations that can appear on the Veldt, but the one that is used does not. This was fixed to some extent in the Finest Fantasy for Advance version; the battle in the Cave on the Veldt still uses the wrong enemy formation, but a later encounter in the Soul Shrine uses the correct one.
 * Tonberries is unusable due to a programming oversight that causes the last space in any list to always be blank. The Rage actually can be learned, but because it is the last of the 256 Rages in a list with 256 spaces, it is always displayed as a blank entry during battle and can never be selected.

Esper Related
Ragnarok's Metamorphose ability, if successful, will kill one enemy instantly, and transforms it into one of four items from a set. Each enemy is assigned one of these item sets, but three of them go unused.


 * Potion x3, X-Potion
 * Potion x3, X-Ether
 * Potion x3, Gauntlet

Four level up bonuses granted by espers went unused in the original version of Final Fantasy VI, two of the four were used in the Finest Fantasy for Advance release.


 * Speed + 2: A character will have a Speed boost of 2 upon level up, but no espers boost it by two. This effect was later used for Cactuar's magicite level up bonus.
 * HP + 100%: This will double a characters HP upon level up. Like the previous bonus, this was used for Diabolos's magicite level up bonus in the Gameboy Advance port.
 * LV + 30%: It does nothing when a character levels up. There's no helpful description for this bonus.
 * LV + 50%: A stronger version of the previous bonus, this one doesn't do anything either.

AI scripts
Two enemies are programmed to react to abilities which can never be used on them.

The Flame Eater is programmed to counter Gravity and/or Graviga with either Graviga or Flare. However, both Gravity and Graviga are considered classified as Death spells, which Flame Eater is immune to. Since the spell will always miss, it never has a chance to counter.

Dadaluma is programmed to whistle for two Iron Fists to join him if he is silenced, but there is no way to silence him since the party does not have access to Espers at this point, and Celes, the only available spellcaster at this point, cannot learn Silence by levelling up.

Enemy formations
Gau cannot Leap when he's alone, and if the player tries to do this, the miss graphic will appear on the enemy while a message will appear at the top stating "Can't dive!!" (SNES) or "Can't leap!" (GBA). But there's an unused bit that is associated with enemy formation which can affect the Leap command as well. If this bit is activated on a enemy formation, when Gau tries to leap a enemy from that specific formation, he will fail regardless of how many party members are currently present. This was likely intended for enemy formations containing enemies that had no Rages, like the Proto Armors.

When a battle starts, enemies are introduced in numerous ways before the fighting begins; some come out of the water, while others drop down from the sky. But there are three introductions that go unused, and they work if hacked into the game. The first is the enemies coming down from the sky while swirling down. This one looks like it would have been intended for flying or bird-related enemies. The second one has the enemy's sprite blink in and out until it eventually appears in solid form, possibly for ghost-related enemies. The third one has the enemies appearing in a puff of smoke, possibly for ninja-related enemies. A fourth introduction also exists; this one renders the enemy or enemies completely invincible. The enemies in this formation will have their sprite blank out just like if they were under the Invisible status, and the party will not be able to target them.

A number of unused enemy formations exist, including eleven blank ones. Some of the enemies are too big to correctly fit in the screen without clashing with other sprites and appear as glitchy graphical errors. Other formations have enemy placement that looks a little odd, and others looks fine. Unused enemies such as the alternative Umaro, Kaiser Dragon (CzarDragon), and Giant (Colossus) are not included in the list below.


 * Baalzephon, Murussu
 * Lenergia, Flan x3
 * Chimera, Lenergia
 * Ice Dragon, Kefka
 * Guardian x4
 * Gamma x2
 * Metal Hitman, Gamma, Junk x2
 * Prometheus, Fortis
 * Fortis x3
 * Duel Armor, Death Machine, Fortis
 * Outsider x2, Dark Force, Cherry
 * Muud Suud, Mover x3
 * Daedalus x2, Ahriman x2
 * Daedalus x2, Outsider
 * Yojimbo x2, Ahriman x2
 * Fiend Dragon x2 (alternate position from the formation used in the final product)
 * Vector Chimera, Primeval Dragon
 * Great Malboro x4
 * Vector Lythos x6
 * Ice Dragon x5

Removed Content
In the Japanese version, there are two extra menus that were removed from the North American version. The first allowed the player to rename Cyan's Bushido techniques, but only in Kanji, not Kana. The Bushido renaming screen was found inside the Bushido menu. It appeared when a player pressed the confirm button while selecting an ability. This menu was removed entirely from the US version, as well as all other English versions of Final Fantasy VI. The second menu allowed the player to customize the buttons on the control pad.

The Super Famicom version had Character Classes viewable in the main and Character Status menus; this was completely removed from the SNES version, but it was restored in the Finest Fantasy for Advance release.

Equipment
Another ability associated with equipment is one that casts Reflect when HP is low; it works similar to the Mythril Glove, Barrier Ring, and Princess Ring relics.

There is also the condition associated with equipment: Once Critical, always Critical. What this means is when a character falls into a Critical state, he/she will stay in that state regardless of the amount of HP that character gains or loses after entering it. This would have allowed a character to be fully healed and remain in Critical status until the end of battle, allowing the character a chance to perform a Desperation Attack without putting that character at risk of being KO'd due to having low HP.

A number of available equipment/relic protection, such as protection from Magitek status, Invisible, Doom, and Image are available, but go unused. All of them work as intended.

Sprites
The game's PlayStation port includes a menu portrait of Terra in her esper form, which later appeared in the Gameboy Advance version.

This unused book sprite can have a variety of palettes associated with it.

A number of character sprites, such as Esper Terra, Merchants, the Ghosts, and General Leo have a complete set of sprite animations like the main party, such as turning their heads, wagging their fingers, angry, surprised, laughing, and so forth, most of which cannot be seen in the normal game. For example, they all have sprites for casting magic, even though none of them can do so normally. The only exceptions are Biggs and Wedge. They use all of their animation sprites on the field. For example, they use their magic casting sprite in the pub found in Albrook.