Possible solution to the sap death bug

Bropedio: ah, glad to have clarity on the origins of that.  so it's the discrepancy with $B1 and $33FE checking we discussed earlier in the thread.  while i agree it's odd and does provide a loophole, i'm not quite convinced it's a bug.  that is, i'm on the fence enough to defer to Square and preserve existing behavior.  i provide some of my reasoning in Item #4 of this post:
https://www.ff6hacking.com/forums/thread...l#pid39449

am interested in your thoughts on those reasons.

My gut tells me that it's a bug, or at least an oversight. As I mentioned above, the countering-counters issue doesn't really arise in vanilla, primarily because `FC 12` death conditionals short-circuit them. I understand your point about "Counterattacks" being conceptually different than "Periodic Damage", but that doesn't square (pardon the pun) with the fact that they only behave differently when their target dies. And it doesn't make sense for Square to program an exception that promotes counterattacks to "fully fledged" attacks in the context of fatal hits, but then for that exception to (practically) never arise in normal gameplay. It seems far more likely to be an oversight that was simply never addressed because it never materialized during testing.

My guess is that the "sap death" bug cropped up during their testing cycle, so they inserted the $3A56 and $33FE variables to fix it up. It would have been very easy to overlook the $B1 conditionals, or to insert the $3A56 conditional on the wrong side of the counter-duplicate conditional $33FC. Their development timeline was very short, after all.