Sketch, Control, Slot, Dance: The Unreliable Four

Four commands in Final Fantasy VI come with a warning attached, and one of them supposedly ate save files. Sketch, Control, Slot and Dance are the abilities players quietly get told to leave alone — too random, too risky, not worth the turn. The reputations are real. The reasons behind them are mostly wrong. Each of these four does something genuinely strong, each has exactly one way it bites, and once you separate those two things, one of them turns out to be the best ability on the character who holds it. Here is a straight accounting of how all four work, where each one actually fails, and which is worth building a fight around.

What “unreliable” actually means here

These four share one design. Every one of them resolves partly outside your direct control. Sketch and Slot hand you a random outcome; Control is a coin-flip on whether it lands at all; Dance is a hand you can’t steer once it starts. Sketch and Control both belong to Relm — Control is Sketch wearing a relic. Slot is Setzer’s. Dance is Mog’s. And Gogo can equip and run all four, so calling them niche character commands undersells how far they reach.

What each of them also shares is a single, specific failure that earned it its bad name. Sketch has the save-corrupting bug. Slot has the reel combination that wipes your own party. Dance has the “stumble.” Control has the ways it quietly falls through before it even starts. Pick any of the four apart and you find the same shape: one real payoff, one real way it bites, and a reputation built entirely on the bite.

The trap is that three of the four hide a payoff most players never deliberately trigger, because they got a bad result the first time and benched the command on the spot. The Sketch bug only ever lived on the original cartridge and is gone from every version sold today. The Slot party-wipe is one combination out of eight, not the command as a whole. The Dance stumble is a terrain problem with a clean rule behind it. And Control’s unreliability is a level check on the way in, not a gamble on the way out. Four dares, four different reasons to distrust them — and only one of those reasons survives a close look.

Sketch — the one with the save-killing reputation

Sketch borrows a monster’s move. Relm paints a portrait of one enemy and fires one of that monster’s own attacks back at the field, for no MP. Most monsters have two attacks Sketch can pull, and the second one only comes up about a quarter of the time. It can miss, and on a miss in any modern version, nothing happens and the turn is gone. Landing it is a level check — high Relm level against low enemy level raises the odds — and the Beret raises Sketch’s success rate specifically. There’s one mandatory Sketch in the story: painting Ultros the moment Relm joins ends that fight outright.

The catch that actually matters isn’t the miss chance. It’s that Sketch fires the monster’s attack, not Relm’s. The damage scales off the enemy and takes nothing from her Magic, so the stronger Relm personally gets, the less Sketch is worth relative to just casting a spell. It’s a command that fades as its owner grows.

Then there’s the bug. On the original cartridge’s first revision, a missed Sketch made the game read the wrong slice of memory and draw garbage from it. The results ranged from a harmless graphical mess to a frozen game to an inventory suddenly stuffed with duplicate items to a save file wiped clean. It fired most reliably against Invisible enemies like the Intangir, and when sketching Gau where he reappears on the Veldt — which is exactly why “never sketch something you can’t see” hardened into folklore.

Here’s the part most players never caught up with: it was patched out one revision into the original’s life, and every re-release since has shipped without it. The version you are almost certainly playing has no Sketch bug at all. A failed Sketch costs you exactly one turn and nothing else — the rumour outlived the problem by about thirty years. The whole reason a generation was told to bench Relm’s command is a bug that no longer exists on anything you can buy. Gogo can borrow Sketch too, with the same rules, if you ever want it.

Control — the verb that’s secretly the best

Control is the quiet winner. Equip the Fake Moustache and Sketch becomes Control — the relic gives no stat bonus, it’s a pure command swap. A controlled monster cannot act. It’s frozen for as long as you hold it, effectively a permanent Stop, and while you hold it its battle menu shows up to four of its own abilities for you to fire at will. You take a threat off the board and pick up its moveset in the same motion.

Landing it runs the same level check as Sketch — your level times 256, divided by the target’s level, rolled against a random number — and the Hypno Crown skews that math in your favour by treating the target as though it were far lower level, roughly two-thirds of its real one. Control simply refuses to start against a target that’s Invisible, Zombie, asleep, Confused, or Hidden. It ends the instant Relm is knocked out or disabled, or the moment the controlled enemy takes damage — so you don’t attack the thing you’re holding. And while she’s controlling, Relm can’t act herself. That’s the entire cost: one character standing still.

The signature use is to hold a dangerous enemy and rob it blind in total safety.

Control is also the clean way to fish a specific attack out of an enemy, which is how it helps Strago pick up Lore — hold the monster, let it show you the move, learn it while it’s helpless. The Fake Moustache itself is a treasure inside Zone Eater’s belly and can also be stolen from a Still Life. Gogo can run Control with the relic equipped, freeing Relm for other work. There’s even a famous edge case where a controlled enemy made to Snort itself triggers a bug — but that’s a party trick, not the reason to bring the command.

Add it up and Control is the one of the four with no random downside once it lands. It’s reliable the moment the check passes, it removes a threat and weaponizes it at the same time, and the only thing it asks in return is that Relm sits out the turns she spends holding the leash. Nothing else in this group offers a deal that clean.

Slot — the biggest ceiling and the biggest landmine

Setzer’s Slot spins three reels. You stop them one at a time, and the combination picks one of eight results; the damaging ones are unblockable magic that scales off Setzer’s Magic. Miss the combinations entirely and you get the Mysidian Rabbit — a small party heal that also clears poison, blindness and silence. That’s the floor, and it’s a soft one, which is the quiet reason you can afford to spin aggressively: the worst common outcome still helps you.

The eight results run from that heal up to instant death for an entire side of the field.

The two faces of Joker’s Death are the whole story of Slot’s reputation. Line up three 7s and it kills every enemy on screen, straight through death immunity — it deletes bosses. Line up 7-7 and miss the last reel into a Bar, and the same move turns on you and kills your entire party instead.

What makes Slot more than a gamble is that the reels aren’t truly random. Each is a fixed loop of sixteen symbols in a set order that never changes. Two results — Chocobop and 7-Flush — dodge the result-rigging entirely and can always be lined up by hand just by watching the reels. And the jackpot itself is reachable on demand.

One honest note to close the section: Slot isn’t even Setzer’s best damage. His real endgame weapon is the Fixed Dice LATE GAME from Kefka’s Tower, whose damage is three dice times his level, ignores defense, ignores the Master’s Scroll penalty, and needs no stat investment at all. If you want reliable Slot-style output without the gamble, the Heiji’s Jitte swaps Slot for Gil Toss — throw the party’s gil for guaranteed damage at a steep price. Slot looks like pure luck, but two of its results are free and its best one is repeatable. It’s the most manipulable “random” command in the game — which is a very different thing from a good one.

Dance — the misunderstood one

Dance runs itself once chosen. Mog learns a dance by winning a battle on its home terrain — plains, forest, desert, mountains, and so on — and from then on, pick a dance and he performs on his own, choosing one of that dance’s four moves each turn until the battle ends or he’s knocked out or petrified. You can’t stop it or change it mid-fight, the same way you can’t steer Gau’s Rage. The four moves inside a dance don’t come up evenly either — the odds run 6/16, 6/16, 3/16 and 1/16, from the common move down to the rare one.

The “stumble” is the entire reputation, and it has exactly one cause: dancing on the wrong terrain.

So a dance that matches the ground you’re standing on never stumbles — it lands every single time. A dance on the wrong terrain has a flat 50% chance to stumble and waste the turn, but when it does succeed, it rewrites the battlefield to its own terrain, and after that first success you’re on home ground and won’t stumble again. The fix for “Dance is random” is simply to dance what the ground supports, or to eat one coin-flip to convert the terrain. Nobody reads the stumble as a terrain rule, so they conclude the command is unreliable and shelve it — when it’s one of the most dependable things Mog can do.

And the payoffs are genuinely good, all for no MP. Sunbath heals the whole party and turns up in two different dances. Meerkat gives the entire party Haste. Antlion and Pitfall are flat instant death on one enemy, and they land even on undead. Snowball, Sonic Boom and a cave-in move deal damage as a fraction of the target’s current HP and pile on Sap — brutal against the high-HP enemies that shrug off flat numbers.

So which one should you actually use?

Control wins, and it isn’t close. Rank the four honestly and one of them separates from the pack immediately, because it’s the only one whose payoff is both reliable and free of a downside once it lands.

Control is the pick because its single cost — Relm standing still while she holds the enemy — is the entire price for taking a dangerous monster off the board and firing its own abilities back. Everything else in the group asks for more and gives less certainty.

Slot has the highest ceiling of all four: triple-7 Joker’s Death ignores death immunity and deletes almost anything you point it at. But it’s only reliable through an input exploit, it carries the party-wipe on the neighbouring combination, and it isn’t even Setzer’s best damage — the Fixed Dice does more, more reliably, with no setup. Leaning on Slot for damage is a mistake dressed up as a jackpot. Dance ranks above Sketch because its backfire is fully avoidable: match the terrain and it never fails, and the payoffs are free heals, Haste and instant death. Its only real limit is that you can’t tell Mog which move to throw. Sketch sits at the bottom because its effect ignores Relm’s stats, gets weaker as she levels, and its one historical claim to fame is gone from every version you can play. The only reason to keep it equipped is to hand it the Fake Moustache and turn it into Control.

Three of the four are dares. Only one is a plan — and it’s the one wearing a fake moustache. — Pierre

None of the four is truly useless — each hides something real — but only one is something you’d deliberately build a fight around. And since Gogo can run any of them, that ranking doubles as advice for building Gogo: give the Mimic the Fake Moustache before anything else on this list.

If you want to take this further, the next layer is all setup. Get the Fake Moustache and the Hypno Crown together and Control goes from a coin-flip to a near-certainty. Bring Strago along so every enemy you hold feeds his Lore list while it sits helpless. Learn the home terrain for each of Mog’s dances so he never stumbles a turn again. And when you want Setzer to actually hit hard, reach for the Fixed Dice, not the reels — Slot is the party trick, the Dice are the plan. Sort those four things out and you’re no longer gambling with the unreliable four. You’re running the one that was worth it all along.

Common Questions

Does the Sketch bug still work on the modern versions?

No. The save-corrupting Sketch bug only ever existed on the original cartridge’s first revision, and it was patched out one revision into the game’s life. Every re-release since — the Advance version, the mobile ports, the Pixel Remaster, the Steam release, anything you can buy today — has no Sketch bug at all. On a modern version a failed Sketch simply wastes Relm’s turn and nothing else happens. The rumour outlived the problem by about thirty years.

What’s the best of the four commands?

Control. It’s the only one of the four with a reliable, no-downside payoff once it lands: a controlled enemy can’t act at all, and you can fire up to four of its own abilities back at the field. It removes a threat and hands you its moveset in the same turn, and its only cost is that Relm stands still while she holds it. Slot ranks below it because its best result is exploit-gated and its worst result kills your own party. Dance ranks below that because you can’t steer it once it starts. Sketch is last: its effect ignores Relm’s stats and only gets weaker as she levels.

How do you get Joker’s Death (three 7s) on Setzer’s slots?

The reels aren’t truly random — each is a fixed loop of sixteen symbols in a set order. Two results, Chocobop and 7-Flush, can always be lined up by hand just by watching the reels. For three 7s, pause and unpause while the reels spin to line up the combination you want. The index the game rolls from resets to zero each battle, so playing a cheap animation first — an Echo Screen is the usual pick — bumps that index far enough that triple 7s become reachable on demand. One warning: line up 7-7 and miss the last reel into a Bar and you get the other Joker’s Death, which kills your entire party instead.

Can you still learn Water Harmony after the world collapses?

On the original release and the Pixel Remaster, no. Water Harmony can only be learned in the Serpent Trench, which you pass through before the world collapses, so if you want it you need to recruit Mog early and pick it up then. The Advance and mobile versions are more forgiving — they give you a second chance to learn it during the Leviathan fight later on. If you’re on the Pixel Remaster or Steam, treat it as a one-time window.