My game is buggin'!

No, literally. My Final Fantasy V disc is bugging out.

I haven't played Final Fantasy Anthology in a long time and now that I come back to it, it's buggin' sonn. Every now and then, when the screen blackens, the game freezes on that black screen. Sometimes after a battle, when I return to the world map, the sprites are splattered and distorted. Colors are everywhere like an evil rainbow beam clashed right into my screen. At this point I just have to open up the menu a few times until the sprites get back in place. If that doesn't work, alternatively, I can just save the game and reopen the file to find everything temporarily better.

But if this problem gets worse, I don't want to resort to playing ROMs. I want to put my Anthology discs to use. Which reminds me that my Final Fantasy VI disc froze on a certain scene years ago. I wonder how that's going to be.

"Hey, its Bartz. You've been gone a long time. This is your hometown"
- Best quote in the game

You may need to either clean the disc, clean the console, or just buy the GBA versions.

I've had my copy of Xenogears do that before and I think CT (Chronicles version) also tended to freeze up occasionally on loading the battle screen.

I might have to resort to some virtual pesticides.
I'm not buying Skip Dr or any other "cleaning" products. That stuff is crap. And I've tried the toothpaste method on my Legend of Mana disc plenty of times. I think it's even worse now.

Any recommended methods for cleaning my console?

maybe the cdrom is old and degrading. does this happen to any other games when you play them on the same system?

No, not that I can think of. It's most likely a disc problem. My Ps1 plays fine, but I'd still like to know some console cleaning methods. I'll search that up

The PSX version is just buggy. This happens to me all the time. One time, I was in X-Death's castle, and the sprite distortion happened to me. I got into a fight with three monsters, each named "?????". They'd use an attack that would summon an angel and take my party members away! They were fat, too.

I believe the PSX version can't be run on PS2 or PS3. I remember mine would bug out whenever I tried to save.

Actually, it has never bugged out for me on a Ps2 Slim. On the original PSX, however, it goes nutty every time.