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Magic bugs are a series of bugs found throughout the Final Fantasy series that is related to magic. Most of these bugs are related to how spells work in comparison to how they should work.

Appearances

Final Fantasy

These bugs only apply to the NES version and are fixed in later versions:

• TMPR - Does not work at all.
• SABR - Does not work at all.
• XFER - Does not work unless the target is the party.
• LOCK - Always misses.
• LOK2 - Instead of decreasing Enemy Evade% by 20, it increases Evade by 20.
• HEL2 - Works out of battle as designed, but works like HEL3 in battle.

A second glitch with magic involves recharging the charges for each spell. When using the House, the game will only recharge the party's spells after saving the game. If the player chooses not to save, the party will only recover its HP. Additionally, if one loads a game saved when using House, the party's spells will still be depleted.

There is also another glitch with spells, this one involving the enemy. When an enemy casts a spell that targets all allies, it will never be used on the caster. When an enemy grants protection from an element to something that is weak to that element, it never works either.

The Fear spell is bugged in the Pixel Remaster release stemming from the removal of the Morale stat. The effects of Fear are unchanged, but as enemies no longer have a Morale to lower, Fear has no effect.

Final Fantasy II

These only apply to the NES version:

• Aura - At level 8, the spell will not grant its extra bonus.
• Barrier - At level 8, the spell will not grant protection against Ice.
• Dispel - Does not work as intended at all.
• Protect - Has no effect on any target other than the caster.
• Sap - MP totals of over 256 are hardly affected by the spell, since the spell uses bytes instead of full words to calculate.
• Slow - If the number of successful hits of Slow is equal to the physical hit count of target, every time that target attacks from then on in the battle may glitch out due to the game trying to perform a 0-hit attack. This does not occur when the successful Slow hits is greater than the hit count, as negative numbers are correctly changed to 1. Effects can include nonsensical text or graphics in the information windows, massive damage from the attack, several status afflictions from the attack, and in the case of player characters, extremely long attack and hit animations.^[1]
• Ultima - It was originally meant to increase in power relative to the level of the other spells that the caster has, but will not even if all of their spells are at level 16. This in turn causes Ultima to do a measly 500 damage at maximum at level 16 to a single target.
• Wall - Wall blocks magic spells up to its own level. However, when the spells Toad, Warp, Break, and Death are used on monsters, if Wall would otherwise stop them, the monsters are removed from combat. Although no monsters use the spell, the player can use the spell on monsters to take advantage of the bug.

Final Fantasy III

These bugs only apply to the NES version:

• Drain - Will not damage or heal undead, but will still heal caster for an unpredictable amount.
• Protect - When cast on an ally that is using Defend, that character's Defense will be reset to pre-Protect values at the end of the round.
• Break from the Golem Staff will always have extremely low accuracy when trying to inflict the gradual petrify status.

All buff effects (e.g., Haste, Protect) are removed from the turn character if the player cancels out of the Item menu. It is possible to avoid this bug by confirming a selection and avoiding the B button while viewing the inventory.

Final Fantasy IV 3D Remake

The Mini-Reverse glitch in the 3D versions of Final Fantasy IV is activated by casting the spell Mini on a character or the party outside of battle, which will grant Reverse status to the characters or party for the next battle only. This glitch can be stacked with the "Toad-Faith glitch", activated by casting the spell Toad on a character or the party outside of battle, which will grant Faith status to the characters or party for the next battle only.

Final Fantasy V

If the caster targets themselves with the Blue Magic spell Vampire, they will be immediately healed to full HP, similar to as if they had had a single-target Curaga cast on them for a fraction of the MP cost.

In battles with a timer, the Return spell is supposed to reset the battle and, thus, also restart the timer. This is bugged in the North American GBA version and the now-discontinued 2013 versions, but is fixed in the European GBA release.

A minor graphics glitch prevents the player from seeing the Roulette cursor if they attempt to target a party member or enemy with any sort of action while Roulette is being used.

In the SNES version of Final Fantasy V, the Time Magic spell Mute will target only the player characters and not the enemies, nor will it only target one. Thus, casting Mute is pointless and will only hurt the party.

In the American GBA version, if a party member casts the Time Magic spell Meteor and then a Mime copies that spell, that Mimic will spend the 42 MP it costs to cast that spell. This Mimic and Meteor bug was fixed in the European GBA release.

Final Fantasy VI

In the SNES version, and possibly other versions, Celes does not learn Confuse from level averaging. If Celes levels up past or to 32 due to level averaging, but does not reach at least 40, she will learn Haste but not Confuse.

Both Haste and Confuse are supposed to be learned at level 32, but due to the way her natural spell list is ordered and the way the list is sorted during level averaging, Confuse is lost because Berserk is learned at level 40. This is due to Berserk being stuck between Haste and Confuse.

This is due to Celes's learning spell list order:

• Level 32 Haste
• Level 40 Berserk
• Level 32 Confuse

The effect of the bug is mitigated as every character can learn magic through magicite.

On the SNES version, casting Quick as the first spell of a Dualcast only gets one free turn and a fully reloaded action bar right after, whereas casting Quick without Dualcast would give two free turns and an empty action bar right after. However, casting Quick as the second spell gets two free turns and a full action bar, which means the player could cast (Ultima + Quick) + (Ultima + Ultima) + (Ultima + Ultima) + (Ultima + Ultima), or recast Quick as the last spell of the chain to play that character indefinitely, although enemies will get to act before the character casts Quick again: (Ultima + Quick) + (Ultima + Ultima) + (Ultima + Ultima) + (Ultima + Quick).

Final Fantasy Mystic Quest

If the player has Phoebe on Auto, she will randomly cast Aero despite not having the book for it. This happens when she is out of Wizard charges. At one point, she was probably meant to have Aero as a selectable spell in her list. Her Auto was programmed incorrectly and takes Aero into consideration for a possible attack, but she should not be able to cast the spell since she does not have it.

Just like the main Final Fantasy series, the Life spell should cause Fatal to undead enemies only, but a flag got mixed up in the North American version that causes the Life spell to instantly kill any non-undead enemy instead. This bug was corrected for the Japanese and European versions.

Final Fantasy Adventure

The Heal spell is bugged. When the player casts the Heal spell, Sumo's DP is set to zero until the next time the player pauses the game.

Citations