You can defeat the Dream Devourer from Chrono Trigger using an int overflow

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I figured out that, in the early versions of Realmz for the Mac, there was an enchanted item (a helm?) that added a few points to the wearer’s stats when equipped, but when removed it took away more than it added (i.e. left you worse off). It only took a few seconds for my programmer brain to start me furiously equipping and then un-equipping it, and sure enough, when that stat went to -127, one more equip-and-unequip was sufficient to give me a +128 bonus for that stat.

I never understood how that particular bit of logic could have been coded that way - it seemed so unnatural.

A classic way of getting endless money in Transport Tycoon was to build a tunnel going from one edge of the map to another. The money counter would overflow and you'd get enough money to last you a lifetime.

As kids we didn't know why this would happen, we just knew that it did and used it every game.

Reminded me of SNES Shadowrun, don't remember if my English skills were weak or what the cause of me misunderstanding it was but when you encountered the Jester in the game, you're supposed to shoot him until you get a chance for a conversation and saying his name completes that bossfight.

However, I missed that this part was the key and after a bunch of deaths I went on to level up my character past what the developers had probably intended at that stage of the game and subsequently managed to kill the Jester (he was strong enough that it was hard even when fully powered up).

Killing him probably lacked proper codepaths so the game crashed/blacked out and wiped the savegame forcing me to start over (quite an unusual thing to see in a SNES game).

Deshittified link: https://breezewiki.com/chrono/wiki/Dream_Devourer

Similarly, you can defeat the Egg Dragon superboss in Lufia 2 by healing before attacking: it starts with 65,535 HP.

In Fire Emblem 3 Houses, the final boss of the Azure route has 199 HP and is standing on a 60 HP heal tile.

If you deal 3 damage, it goes to 196. 196+60=256.

This overflows to zero and you win.

A friend of mine and I played Secret of Mana until our money overflowed the bounds of an int (or whatever was backing it. It evidently caused save game corruption, and that was the end of our epic run.

I don't want Chrono Cross-contamination in my trigger, thanks.

Chrono Cross is a very interesting game on its own but it's a terrible sequel that is remarkably spiteful to its senior. (The thing with FATE and Robo, the Porre thing, the fate of Crono and co., it's a terrible fanfic made canon).

Trigger only worked because of Toriyama gathering the all-star staff (look up the interview with Torishima giving the details). Cross was out of his hands and it shows.

There's a live music concert for Chrono Trigger playing right now. That game had one of the best soundtracks of all time.

The elixir glitch works on a lot of bosses...

I recall my friend's older brother and his friends all loving chronotrigger some 3.5 decades ago.

Is it worth playing today? (I don't have any gaming consoles, and use macOS)

(I've never played an RPG, except for Disk 1 of the original Final Fantasy VII, which I really enjoyed).

Parallel rabbit holes if you like this stuff:

  - in Pokemon gen 1 you can wrap your stats back to zero by buffing them too much
  - In FF7 you can overflow the damage calculation to kill Ruby in one hit
  - Mario 64 has a mountain of usable glitches; "parallel universes" let you skip collisions at high speeds
  - GTA 3/VC/SA have crazy mission/wrong warp corruptions involving parallel game simulations
  - NES Mario can be corrupted to execute arbitrary code in TAS
  - OOT can be heap-corrupted so badly you can write a loader for an entire DLC via controller ("triforce%", my choice for most insane controller based hack of a game)

I think it could be an unpopular opinion, but I like seeing these completely stupid link-to-a-wiki with no context whatsoever posts. Things that force you to actually RTFA of some obscure bit of tech trivia feel a little bit more like how using the internet used to be all those years ago.

(I still need to finish the FoE romhack though)

This boss doesn’t exist in the SNES version right? I don’t remember it.