Phantasy Star Cave Message Board

I have seen a couple glitches for PSII that are potential gamebreakers, one I have heard of before and one I have not.

First, an inventory glitch that supposedly only worked in the Japanese original... but here it is on the English version
(Note: this glitch was used by japanese speedrunners to beat the game in under 10 minutes)

Secondly, an equipment glitch that reminds me of the duplication glitch but doesn't delete items in the inventory.



If anyone can try to duplicate either of these glitches to confirm that these are actually possible in the English version, this could actually change the way how PSII will be seen by the masses.

I know I have done some equipment glitch in the past on real hardware. I think it was one where you lose one item too...

Here's detailed description of the run, which is actually a TAS, not a proper speedrun.

Characters can equip items from other character's inventories so long as the Inventory Glitch exists on that character. It's semi-useful in my opinion, but I don't use it in any of my runs.

The inventory glitch itself has different uses in English vs. Japanese. In the Japanese version, it can be used (iirc) to create a wrong-warp to Noah and finish off the game quickly. In the English version, you cannot do the wrong-warp, but you can still pull out every key item in the game and beat the game in under an hour (this is why Rolf's name is ABWX, as you can pull 4 of the Nei items from his name using the Inventory Glitch).

From what Jiseed told me (WR holder in Any% US and JP), the Xbox 360 version has even more options as you can use lower-case letters to name characters, so the inventory glitch opens up even more. I've been meaning to check that one out for myself.

There are a few glitches that spawn off of the main Inventory Glitch, including a Power-Up glitch that involves buying a bunch of Antidotes on a glitched inventory and the next person in line gets huge stats (for instance, if Rolf has the glitched inventory and you buy Antidotes, it will eventually override Nei's stats and she will have all her stats in the tens of thousands).

All of the important US version glitches I compiled https://www.speedrun.com/psii/guide/r4tjj about a year ago. It explains pretty much what you need to know.

What's interesting is that they figured out how to actually put event flags in PS3, which evidently didn't happen in PS2, or getting the Nei items wouldn't do you any good without actually setting the "all Nei equipment acquired" flag. I know that PS1 didn't have event flags, either, because hacking certain things into your inventory enables you to bypass parts of the game.

This is why PS2 is a 40+ minute speedrun and PS3/4 are around 3+ hours. You can get items early in a PS3 run, but it doesn't do any good without the event flag. The new glitch found in PS4 has the possibility of add items to your inventory, but it would run into the same problem, which is why Randomizer doesn't do much on key items.

As rushed as PS3 was, I'm somewhat surprised that they figured that out.

The Escapipe Glitch was pretty well known, even the devs put in that infamous line because they couldn't figure out (or just didn't have time) how to not make it happen. But, after some tinkering, people finally figured out how to use the Escapipe glitch and not softlock the game at the beginning. Then people figured out how to skip Gen 2 using the same glitch. Trying it on Gen 3 though will cause a softlock.

They could have just had Rhys not start with Boots. Pretty simple.

True, but it wouldn't have made sense for every other character in the game to have boots. I guess they wanted to keep footwear like in PS2, but it's sort of one of those underwhelming pieces of equipment. Probably why PSIV did away with it.

Another possibility would have been to make boots cost less, so their resale value would drop below the price of an escapipe.