Part 13: The Adventure Ends

We’ve shown off Maduin and are currently in procession of his trophy. I wonder if things could have turned out differently? Perhaps we don’t resurrect an esper?

Let’s rewind the clock a bit, back to a normal playthrough and return to our favorite screen.





Instead of doing the initial jump to Locke, we’re going to be heading to Sabin’s scenario. The reason why is that we want to avoid this glorious screen:




We’re going to be utilizing his scenario later on, so it’s important we finish it before activating the Airship glitch.






NOW let’s repeat what we did for Madiun. Select Locke’s scenario, and save outside the cave.







Can I just say that every time I get to this screen I have no idea what to say? Airship glitch, you know it by now.





Right, so we do the usual. We have the airship, let’s fly to Zozo.

The game here on out plays relatively normally, and we still have Banon’s scenario selection at our disposal at any time. Instead of going back to the Figaro Cave right after playing as Maduin, we’re going to delay it a bit.






Instead, we’re going to wait until the end of the World of Balance. This will give us slightly different results with our glitch.





With everything taken care of, let's back to the cave and finish what we started by reactivating Banon’s scenario




Selecting Banon. What wonderful prize do we get?

















General Leo. For those who are unaware of the significance, resurrecting General Leo has been one of the big internet video game rumors. Back in the day when you had “how to unlock Mew by activating the truck behind the SS Anne” being told by kids on the playground, “How to unlock General Leo” was told to each other by 14 year olds at the lunch table. It was never as popular because FF6 wasn’t as sensationalist as Pokemon, but even now if you go to rumor sites and Gamefaqs you will find some remnants of how you can fight 1000 Dinosaurs in the Dino Forrest to get an item that resurrects Leo. It may be one of the most popular video game rumors that come from the schoolyard gossip era. And we managed to solve it. Sure, you can do it with a GameGenie simple enough, but this was done without any code-manipulating software, which is pretty neat.




Naturally, the reason why he appears here is the same reason as Maduin. I was avoiding saying exactly what characters inhabit slot_15, and it’s nearly all of the temporary characters. To be more specific, Wedge, Banon, Maduin, and General Leo all exist within the same character slot. At a certain point in the game, you temporarily gain control of Leo and fight Kefka. At this point, Maduin and Banon get substituted with his character data, so reactivating placing Character_15 into your party will slap him into it.





Now that we have General Leo, there’s not much we can do with him at the moment. Just like with Banon and Maduin, we’re trapped in a Narshe Prison.

Before we continue on, let’s go check out how glitchy he is on a Chocobo.




OH MAN THIS IS GUNNA BE SO MESSED UP




Oh? Oh! This is actually pretty interesting! General Leo has a functioning Chocobo sprite, and aside from the mounting sprite he’s not glitchy at all. I’m going to let everyone else theorize about why that is.




Now we can’t have Leo overkilling Rhobites for hours. It’s a cool novelty, but not really useful. Luckily, we have the means to break him out of this small area of the map. How? An Airship Glitch double feature.








Luckily because we’re already so late in the game, we have access to the Floating Continent already. This is nice, because I’m starting to hate the World of Balance after playing it so much. Oh, and this is also why we completed Sabin’s scenario. If we hadn’t, after finishing Banon’s we would have been sent to him, and gotten stuck at Castle Doma. Which means we’d have to completely restart, play for another 6-7 hours, and then get back to this point.

You can see why I got really frustrated while experimenting with this glitch.





Regardless, we finally have Leo on the airship, and are free to roam the World of Balance with a mythic character.




Before we venture off, there are some limitations. Because General Leo was never officially added to our party roster (just placed into our party) we cannot go to any character selection screen.





Most unfortunately, the Floating Continent has a character selection screen as well, meaning we cannot progress without dumping General Leo off.

But what is important – what can we do with Leo?




Well, not a whole lot. You can go clean up the World of Balance, grind out some Magic Points, and in general mess around with a character you’re not supposed to have. I know it sounds like there’s not a lot you can do with him – and that’s partially true. But the novelty of running around with a legitimate General Leo is, for me, more than enough.




We can however go slightly farther. If we go back in time a bit and go into the Figaro Cave with different characters, we can create different teams. The characters that we can bring with us are Strago, Setzer, and Relm. Because they are not scripted to be removed during the scenario select screen (we saw this earlier) you can take them alongside Leo.




Relm is obviously the most interesting, because you can combine the Sketch Glitch with General Leo to create a creative mix of things-not-meant-to-be. Having Leo in your party doesn’t affect the Sketch Glitch in any real way, and it works just as fine with him than without him.




Unfortunately, without access to the Floating Continent, there is no way to go farther with General Leo. All we can do is break the game’s logic over its knee, and know that we have proven an internet rumor true.





While this is the last official update, I will post some more experimentation I go through in an attempt to do more with General Leo, but I have not found any way to take him past the World of Balance. You’ll see this more in a few days when I compile my leftover experimentation screenshots into something coherent, but I cannot see any way to do it without the use of code-manipulating software. It’ll be interesting, but ultimately fruitless. Perhaps we can do some sort of mass problemsolving together, however I’m pretty sure it’s impossible. You'll see why soon enough.

In addition, I am in the process of testing a glitch, that if it works, will extend this thread by numerous more updates. How many more? Literally no idea, but it would take the airship glitch and flip it on its head. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. If it does? Expect more.




So what are my thoughts on this game and its glitches? I love it. I love it dearly. Having gone through this game being coded like garbage, its enormous amount of gamebreaking glitches, and overall unstable yet highly exploration-based hijinks, it has greatly improved my appreciation for this game and other SNES games. Glitches are an interesting game within a game, with the airship glitch being a puzzle that was a challenge to solve. Sure, it’s proof that the coders were working with limited playtesting and often made mistakes critical to their game, but in a certain way I love it because of that. You can only play FF6 so many different ways (read: 1), but you can glitch it endlessly. It’s a shame, really, that this type of glitch exploration is going away. With the evolution of non-sprite based, highly structured and non-exploitable coding dealing a significant blow towards the crazy things you can do with video games, these types of world-exploring, horrible messes have essentially gone away. And now in the current generation, where glitches are typically small scripting bugs or your game freezing up alongside constantly patched video games, the final blow to glitch exploration has been dealt.

I’ll always enjoy going back and doing things like jumping off Death Mountain in Link to the Past, making Terra explode in an Opera Sequence, or equipping a dark hole beam in Super Metroid and watching the world collapse upon itself. It's a shame that new experiences like this will probably never be made again. Thy're more fun to me than the game itself. And I’m sure, even through my countless explorations with the Airship, that there’s more to find out there. I’m both frustrated and excited by that. Frustrated in that I wish I could have figured it out, excited in that its 20 years after the fact and people are still finding cool shit out about one of my all-time favorite games. Maybe one day someone will find a way to permanently add Leo or Banon to your party. But resurrecting him using a method that would have been laughed at in a schoolyard alongside a 12 year olds “press every wall in the Phoenix Cave with the B button” fantasy 15 years ago is a pretty good damn good start.





I’m Elephantgun, and thanks for reading.