I've managed to play past the part I had gotten stuck on when I first played this game (fighting Exdeath in his castle). From what I've heard he is actually harder in the GBA version because he can cast zombie on your characters but I had every party member wearing angel rings just in case so I couldn't tell if he's even able to zombify my characters in the SNES version. Either way he was easier than I remember and I did not even need to savestate or rewind, but I had put a lot of time and effort into preparing for him so I honestly wasn't expecting to need them. It is one hell of a castle though, and surprisingly I just stuck to the jobs I wanted to level as kind of a test of how hard he was, and we all know how that turned out now don't we. I did have to run back a couple times to heal up but asides from that it's pretty doable assuming you're over level 35 (for reference I walked into the castle at level 38 but had leveled up to 39 about halfway through, just in time for lvl 3 Flare, which I will get while recording because it is a great way to deal over 3k damage to Exdeath per turn).
For those curious as to my strategy, I used two samurai (both with XFight), a blue mage (with time magic and the blue magic spells lvl 3 flare and white wind), and I also used a white mage (with summon, in particular Golem). Because my blue mage was my fastest character and because she had time magic I took the opportunity to use Haste2 on all characters, and then immediately had my white mage/summoner use Golem. Then I abused Gil Toss on both samurai, hitting Exdeath for around 3600 a toss while my blue mage continuously cast lvl 3 Flare for over 3000 damage a turn (because apparently Exdeath's level is a multiple of 3). I then had the white mage either use her turn to heal or summon titan for additional damage, and had her re-summon Golem every other turn to ensure the protection lasted. I may have gotten a bit lucky as Exdeath only used one magic based attack the whole battle, and that was Bolt 2. Apparently vacuum wave is a physical attack so Golem absorbed those for me. Using this strategy I was able to down him in about 5-6 turns (he has around 35000 health for those wondering). Assuming I didn't bother healing it would have taken at least 4 turns dealing a bit over 11000 damage after each round of attacks, factoring in that half the first turn is used to cast haste and set up the physical damage barrier.
In all honesty I had more trouble when I swear to christ the game glitched or something and I had to fight a blue dragon that got 3 attacks per turn and respawned twice before finally dying. I'm thinking the programmers may have tried making a blue dragon triple battle but there wasn't enough room for it to the three sprites merged into one but had three separate health bars. I vaguely remember running into a similar problem involving a blue dragon on the GBA version, so I'm almost certain at this point that it's probably just a coding error for the random encounter generator that could probably be fixed by changing the code so that either blue dragons are limited to 2 per battle, or that the blue dragon is always paired with a red dragon (which is the more common occurrence anyways). That way, 3 don't merge into 1 while retaining separate health bars.
Further confirmation of this is the XFight anomaly, where it is well documented that if you use Xfight on the final boss, it can hit a total of 4 targets but only 2 targets are selectable at any time on the final boss. Because of this, they have no discernible health bar but it's been confirmed that attacking the unselectable parts has no effect on the health of the final boss. Since I was using XFight on this particular 3 in 1 dragon, I noticed that as I was scanning the dragon its health wasn't going down proportional to the damage dealt, but when one died and the other appeared, it was already missing health. I believe this missing health can be explained by Xfight attacking another unselectable target. From this, I believe that the final boss fight of FF5 was supposed to have 4 attackable parts, but for some reason the developers couldn't fit that many targets on screen, possibly due to a bug in the program, and thus made them unselectable. However, Xfight seems to hit any target available, regardless of whether or not they are selectable by the player. This would explain why the boss of the Flying Lonka Ruins only respawned twice for me, when he was supposed to respawn 4 or 5 times before dying. I guess the FF5 team had noticed this stacking of monster AI on top of each other and decided to incorporate it into an early game boss battle but I am certain they did not intend for normally encountered monsters to also take on these properties. Either way I can say that I'm pretty sure I've found a bug in blue dragon programming that most people who have played FF5 probably aren't aware of, so if anyone has found a fix for the final boss Xfight problem and wants to try applying a similar fix to blue dragon random encounters they can go right ahead (though I think this fix is probably just a matter of changing the limit for how many blue dragons can spawn in one battle).
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