"Cheats" were left in intentionally or from testing?

I wonder if the "cheats" of selecting and de-selecting commands to raise levels were left in on purpose. Perhaps the game designers knew that leveling by directly fighting monsters is a major pain in the ass and threw in an easter egg to reward those that paid close attention to their stats and figured it out.

I also think it's possible that they commented out some piece of code that prevents this trick from happening so then their testers were playing various scenarios in the game they wouldn't have to waste time in inane battles just to see their sword level raise. The only problem is that they forgot to uncomment it and now we all get to enjoy it. Silly Nasir.

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Originally Posted by Flying Mullet

I wonder if the "cheats" of selecting and de-selecting commands to raise levels were left in on purpose. Perhaps the game designers knew that leveling by directly fighting monsters is a major pain in the ass and threw in an easter egg to reward those that paid close attention to their stats and figured it out.

I also think it's possible that they commented out some piece of code that prevents this trick from happening so then their testers were playing various scenarios in the game they wouldn't have to waste time in inane battles just to see their sword level raise. The only problem is that they forgot to uncomment it and now we all get to enjoy it. Silly Nasir.

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Well, indeed that FFII was the first FF with a different growth. Different as in you fight monsters to level up some stats, no exp is gain. Anyways, the developers thought that glitch maked the game easier so they decided to take it off.

Just bad programming, pure and simple. The first three NES games were riddled with various bugs when it came to their battle systems. In FF1 not only were most of the spells broken, some severely, but some of your characters stats did absolutely nothing. Case in point Intelligence, despite being the primary stat of spellcasters, does nothing whatsoever. FF2 of course had the select+cancel trick, but there were also issues with the row system bugging out at certain points. FF3 had the least amount of bugs of all, but there were still quite a few, including a method to get any item in the game very early on.

To understand why it's just bad programming, it's necessary to understand how programs in general work. Most series of commands are logic based i.e. if a certain condition is true, do this, then this etc.

The logic of the stat gaining in FF2 seems to do it's check for experience growth (i.e. adding +exp onto a weapon/spell) after the command has been selected. To correct this all you would need to do is have a single flag that detects whether or not a spell or weapon is used, flag it on once a command has been selected, then flag it off if that command is cancelled, and tally up the experience at the end of all four characters being commanded.

I don't think testing was that good back then, it's just a programming error and nothing else.