Square's Weakest Link

A parody of the game show The Weakest Link, staged on the Final Fantasy VI opera-house stage with Kefka as host and eight Square protagonists as contestants: Bartz, Cecil, Crono, Edgar, the Black Mage, Edward, Kain and Terra.

Written, produced, directed and animated by Kristopher M. Toops; music written and provided by Shawn Overn; special thanks credited to Lord Clodelroth and Comet Green. The end card reads MMI -aka 2001 kmt.

It is usually described as a fan game. It isn't one — and that is worth stating plainly, because the file settles it. There is no scoring, no state, no branching, and nothing anywhere in it that evaluates an answer. It is a click-advanced comic: 273 timeline frames, 164 of which stop and wait for a mouse click. The entire ActionScript content of the 1.1 MB movie is 154 stop(), 10 stopSounds(), and a single button whose only behavior is play().

The joke it is built around is that Crono never speaks. He is a silent protagonist, so every answer he gives is an empty speech balloon — a frame that places a balloon and no text at all. Kefka rules every blank correct, and Crono wins the show without saying a word. Edgar gets the last line: "I object! He never answered a single question the entire time he was here!!"

The .exe is a Macromedia Flash 5 projector — the stock Flash Player 5.0 r30 with the movie appended and an eight-byte footer. That means the executable is disposable: the SWF inside plays identically in Ruffle, and it is the part worth keeping.

Originally distributed through Dream Horizon Software (DHS), a small American Final Fantasy fan-game group of the early 2000s, and hosted on their domain dhsrpg.net as a self-extracting executable (archived on the Wayback Machine). DHS's April 2001 staff roster lists a DarthTOOPS in its PR department — almost certainly the same person. Rediscovered via a personal fan site that credited DHS, then traced back to the original source through the Wayback Machine.

A complete static teardown — the container, all 41 sprites, the six sounds, the 252 shapes, the full recovered script, every frame re-rendered, and the off-stage art the movie never showed anyone — is in squares-weakest-link-readme.txt in this folder, and served raw at /apps/flash/weakest-link/squares-weakest-link-readme.txt.