One of the more frequent load-bearing coconuts* in video games is the player character themselves: some quirk or limitation of the game engine requires that the player character must always be on screen, or at least loaded into the current map.
Most of the time, this isn't a problem, because when would you ever not want the player character to be present? There's one specific scenario where it becomes an issue, though, and that's when all of the following are true:
Your game uses in-engine cutscenes
At least some of those cutscenes occur on a different map from wherever the player character is located at the time that they're triggered (and the player character is not present for them)
Some limitation (e.g., of the game engine, of your targeted minimum system requirements, etc.) precludes loading multiple maps at the same time
Together this creates a problem: you need to load a map on which the player character is not present in order to run the cutscene, but the player character is load-bearing.
There are a variety of ways to solve this, but the customary approach is to make a note of the player character's current position, teleport them to the map on which the cutscene occurs, lock out their controls, turn them invisible, run the cutscene, then teleport them back to their former location when it's done. The upshot is that in every cutscene in which the player character ostensibly is not present, they're actually lurking invisibly in the background.
All this leads to what is possibly my favourite load-bearing coconut bug ever: Final Fantasy VII's disc 2 Midgar skip.
Basically, after you defeat one particular disc 2 boss, there's a multi-part cutscene where the action cuts to a conference room overlooking the battle; one of the NPCs present then calls another NPC on their cell phone, and the viewpoint jumps to that NPC's location (a mad science lab). The conference room map is used only in cutcenes, but the latter map, the mad science lab, is one the player can visit later.
Now here's the trick: for unknown reasons, that mid-cutscene jump to a different map re-enables the player character's controls. You're still invisible, and none of the NPCs present can be interacted with (i.e., because they're totally scripted); however, since the map on which the back half of the cutscene takes place is one you can visit later in the game, a bunch of non-cutscene assets get loaded along with it, presumably because it never occurred to the developers to disable them – critically including a boss fight trigger zone. This trigger is unconditional, since the only time this map can be visited legitimately, the fight is meant to occur.
This means that if you know what you're doing, it's completely possible to walk the invisible player character into that boss fight trigger during the cutscene. In spite of its other limitations, the game engine handles this without complaint, and play continues exactly as though you'd reached that boss fight legitimately, thereby skipping half the disc. From the player's perspective, it appears as though holding the joystick in a specific direction causes the cutscene to be interrupted mid-sentence by an inexplicable, out-of-context boss fight.
All because Cloud Strife is a coconut.
* To anticipate the inevitable well-actually, yes, I'm aware that the Team Fortress 2 coconut is a myth; somebody took a real phenomenon and falsely attributed it to a popular game for clicks, and now we're stuck with the term. If you don't like it, complain to whoever is in charge of how language works!
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