Game Genie: Final Fantasy IV

My brother had a Gamie Genie for the SNES when we were kids. It came with a book of codes you could enter to modify how games worked. Infinite lives, access to all the guns at the start of the game... Things like that. I don't know how it worked (I am curious though) and I don't remember ever actually using it on any game. Any game, that is, except for Final Fantasy IV!

I remember there were codes you could enter to change how much experience you earned at the end of a fight. Make each monster worth 1 xp. Or 10 xp. Or 100 xp. And so on. There was an obvious pattern to the codes and we toyed around with making things bigger and bigger. Eventually we stumble on a code which seemed to break the game. A fight would end and your characters would stand around doing the victory dance but it wouldn't list how much experience/gold you'd earned for the fight. Eventually we turned off the Game Genie (it had an on/off switch) and suddenly earned a ludicrous amount of experience. It was like the game was stuck in an infinite loop while it was turned on and it was constantly adding on the experience for the monsters over and over. Hello tons of levels!

We figured this out in the antlion cave near the start of the game when your party is Cecil, Rydia, and Edward. Gaining a ton of levels at once had two interesting consequences...

First, Edward has an auto-hide ability where if he's at low health he runs away from the fight. In the Japanese version he has a healing ability which he can use while hidden (in order to get enough health to actually stick around and fight) but in the NA version he just screws around hidden. Gaining 80 some odd levels raised his maximum health a lot. So high, in fact, that I couldn't heal him out of low health. It might have been a problem if I didn't have a super high level dark knight!

Secondly, Rydia learns spells as she gains levels so when she gains a ton of levels she learns all the spells. All the spells, that is, except fir1. She learns that spell as a plot point at the start of the next dungeon (you need Rosa to convince her to get over her fear of fire and burn down the ice blocking the party from walking to Fabul) so it makes sense that she wouldn't learn it from just gaining levels. What doesn't make sense is she does learn fir2. And fir3. So the scene where she's too afraid to melt some ice with a fire spell doesn't real gel with the fact I've been exploding enemies with fir3!


I don't remember actually playing very long with the stupid amount of experience. Cheating just isn't very fun it turns out.