Uploaded August 2021 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago

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This is a sort of "continuation" of my previous upload (see link below), where I used a bug explained in that video's description to replace the final boss with an encounter against 5 Goblins.

For the previous video, check the card in the video.

I wanted to see how much of the game could be beaten without actually finishing a single fight -- turns out you can do all of it if you allow yourself to use a separate save until you gain access to the ship.

This remaster of Final Fantasy only has 20 battles that cannot be directly skipped with the bug, 18 of which can be 5Gobbed without using other saves (or any saves at all, theoretically). With enough patience, you can skip every random encounter, though for this playthrough I did flee/5Gob a lot of the encounters instead.

For gear, I sold the knives/clothes and used the starting 500 Gil to buy armor for three of my lads, spending the rest on 4 Potions and 3 Sleeping Bags. The Potions proved unnecessary, but the Sleeping Bags helped after Mt. Gulg and Cavern of Ice.

I opted to not open any optional chests, but as far as I know, the Caravan visit is mandatory, meaning I needed to get 40000 Gil from somewhere. I chose to open Gil chests for the money. 4 of the 6 south chests in Cavern of Ice B3 give you a total 28254 Gil and are untrapped. On B1 you can get the rest by opening the chest in the southern room (10000) and the leftmost from the trio (9500) before you drop for the Levistone, giving you enough for the Fairy. The rest of the game is pretty uneventful by comparison.

So yeah, this was pretty fun. I'd imagine if there was some way to consistently know the amount of steps needed for an encounter, you could probably use this for some sort of speedrunning.

There's no save/load needed to use the bug unless you need it for the pre-ship part. You can trigger the glitch as simply as just holding OK on the controller, opening the menu, letting go of the OK button and closing the menu. Check the other video's description (linked above) for more on the bug, it has to do with the ship's 15 Puzzle minigame.

I like the trailing effect that happens if you trigger the battle skip on the world map, but the only way I know how to get rid of it is by restarting the game, which stinks.

In case the Goblin count gets confusing, I had it increment the moment the Goblins start sliding onto the screen. I regret that choice in hindsight, it maybe should have been timed at the start or end of each crossfade.

There's a little bonus at the end that I wanted to see and figured that maybe others would want to see too. I can see someone make a winning scenario out of it but I don't have that kind of intuition.