When I was a kid, I discovered a glitch in Final Fantasy where if you wiggled the cartridge in the NES at the intro screen just right, it would garble the text but keep the game running.

You could then get to the character creation screen and all the characters would be garbled graphics. One was a broomstick and if you made 4 of that character you would start out being able to deal 400+ damage right from the start of the game after you created the party and did a soft reset to fix the graphics.

Did it with a cartridge purchased in the UK if region matters.

Don't know how useful it can be now to everyone, but figured I'd let people know that it exists since I believe I'm the first and maybe only person to discover it.

You can talk about this in the Final Fantasy game forums

These types of glitches are generally disallowed on this site. From the rules:

“Manipulating the game hardware in such a way to affect the console's reading of the game medium is disallowed. A common example of this is 'Crooked Cartridge' on the Nintendo 64.”

Yeah, the general term I know this by is "cartridge tilting". It's effectively temporary corruption. A similar effect can also be achieved by overheating of hardware, something that you can trigger on the Atari 2600 by just resetting it enough.

Forms of external manipulation are usually disallowed for inconsistency and lack of verifiability; to what extent are you going to permit modifying the console? How are you going to verify these modifications? That and general fairness are just two of the reasons why the baseline for speedrunning is specifically original hardware.

Another big reason for this kind of stuff not being allowed is the damage to the hardware it can incur. While speedrunning is about trying to get the fastest time, it also has a strong relationship to retro gaming, of which the original hardware is no longer being made anymore. These sorts of tricks can damage the consoles or the game carts themselves, eventually destroying them and thus wasting a valuable piece of history. It's not limited to carts either, just look up the controversy about Battle For Bikini Bottom and the disc scratching. Don't get me wrong, the kind of stuff these methods can produce are fascinating, but I'd personally rather not see irreplaceable consoles and games destroyed for it.

As for controllers, well, many enter the graveyard thanks to speedrunners, but those are the acceptable sacrifices I suppose.

Probably can't do that with regards to a speedrun. Its funny the things we discover at times