Yup, and if you get the Paladin Shield, your party Kefka can equip that, too, making him slightly less killable (I decided not to subject myself to obtaining that for this video). The SNES instance of Kefka that fights Red Ifrit also has much better stats, but it looks like Pixel Remaster just has the single instance of him and simply swaps around his equipment. His Paladin Shield in the Red Ifrit fight renders him immune to all its attacks, anyway, so his stats don't really matter. I do find it interesting that he can't equip the Flail or Ribbon, which is what his instances in the Imperial Camp and Sealed Gate had in SNES. Either way, the Leo glitch showed that their equipment doesn't come with them when you kidnap them, so even if you could kidnap the Paladin Shield instance of Kefka, you won't be able to get an extra copy.
Very interesting video and a very well done explanation of the glitch! Thanks to the UA-cam recommendations for showing this of and hoping of seeing more from your channel in the future!
I am sad that I cannot do this on my PS4 but I salute you Fast Moon! This is the kind of glitching that has been rumored since the dawn of this game(a way to bring Leo back!). I dare say you have achieved the equivalent of bringing back Aerithon PS1 and now with Kefka and Geshtal added to the roster, Legendary.
Incredibly complicated setup! The payoff isn't as good as I thought, but it made an interesting video! I give you credit. I bought the pixel remaster on Switch, I'm extremely happy with it. Thank you for the video.
Heh, yeah, since Kefka's party instance only exists for the purposes of animating him in battle window cutscenes, he has no stats or abilities, so it's not like you can run around with him casting Trine or Forsaken or such. He's mostly just a trophy you can do silly things with. Leo is a better catch since he behaves mostly like a normal party member and has good stats, plus Shock is nice for a free AoE attack.
Like, it's very on-brand that if you get Kefka in your party, he's a pathetic weakling who can't better himself at all, whereas if you get Leo, he's good at everything and is an absolute powerhouse. So really wanted to take the extra step to rub that in Kefka's face and force him to watch, lol.
At least Kefka works in the pixel remaster, I remember using gamegenie to get him in the SNES version, he had no commands and froze the game when his turn came up, also had terras portrait for some reason
Warping from the World of Balance to the world of ruin, back to the world of balance and then back to the world of ruin during specific scenes. What a wild glitch, lol.
Love stuff like this, it's so cool to see how on a technical level Kefka is sometimes treated as a party member and that you can even glitch him into the party, even if he is useless as such. I wonder if you could use hacks to allow him to level up (or just assign him level 99 or something), so that he can then actually be a functional party member rather than just being the class clown.
Kefka doesn't appear to have a leveling table, so I'm not sure you could hack him to a higher level in Pixel Remaster. Leo has a leveling table simply because he's level-averaged to your party's level and needs the table to calculate that, even though he never fights a battle where he'd gain experience. Biggs, Wedge, and the Phantom Train ghost I believe are similar to Leo in that they have stat tables, and they're all also kidnap-able via the same methods as Kefka and Leo in PR. But Kefka and Gestahl's battle window sprites only exist for cutscene purposes and therefore have no stats associated with them. In the SNES version, the battle scripts called party member slot IDs to execute sprite animations, which is why all sprites animated in the battle window had to be assigned a party member slot. You'll notice that every time Kefka appears as a sprite in the battle window, there's also an open party member slot for his sprite to fill (this is why Terra is temporarily removed from the party at the Sealed Gate, to make room for Kefka).
@@patches365 That makes a lot of sense actually. Instead of asking myself if Kefka could gain levels if simply hacked that way, I should have thought about why he isn't able to level up in the first place, that being the lack of a leveling table. Though I would imagine you probably could arbitrarily grant Kefka tons of stats anyway with the right cheats, I also imagine his stats would probably quickly revert back to the default values due to said lack of that leveling table. Also it's always fun to learn when certain story elements happen simply because the game required it on a technical level. In a way it's an artistic way to get around technological limitations and I think that's really cool. Thank you for the explanation!
@@YosherYoshi Getting Leo into the same save file as Kefka was actually quite a bit more involved than the little compilation shown in this video. Sure, doing just those steps will get you Leo in his base state, but if you watched my other video specifically about getting Leo, in Pixel Remaster you have to pick up his equipment separately and have it in your inventory in order for him to come equipped with it. Which necessarily meant I had to go pick up the Master's Scroll from the Ancient Castle. But there's a problem. The Kefka save warped directly from Thamasa to Darill's Tomb. So even though Edgar is still in the party because he was still available at the time Thamasa happened, Figaro Castle isn't accessible until you run the Edgar re-recruitment event. So I had to do that first. But then there's ANOTHER problem. Because this save skipped the Floating Continent, the flag that tells the game you're now in the World of Ruin never got set. There are certain maps like Narshe, Zozo, and yes, Figaro Castle, that don't have separate instances for the World of Ruin, because they have no grass to recolor. So those maps use that World of Ruin flag to determine which overworld map to spit you back out on when you leave. So, I went back to run the Edgar recruitment event even though I already had him, went down to the Ancient Castle to get Leo's relic, came back out... and I was back in the World of Balance. With no airship because when I left the World of Balance it was still crashed at Maranda. So, that meant I had to run the Darill's Tomb warp AGAIN to warp my party back to the World of Ruin with airship access. All to get Leo's stupid relic so that I could have a 30-second punchline at the end of this video about how much more utility Leo has if you glitch him into your party than Kefka does, lol.
@@patches365 I tip my hat to your devotion to deliver that punchline then, that does sound like a whole ordeal. I did watch the Leo video after this one so I knew at least part of what you had to do to get him in here proper. Though even without all of his equipment he's still loads better than Kefka simply because Kefka cannot level up which is funny in its own way!
j havent heard of a setup so detailed and questionably HOAX since the olden days in the late 90s with things like "play as LUIGI" in Super Mario 64. and thats not an insult to OP, actually quite the opposite. the level of detail and (from my POV) research and (what id imagine) was trial and error and data diving and source code digging is is ? HOW and WHERE did you even begin research and finding all of these seemingly random "incidents"? BRAVO & PROPS TO YOU
Haha, thanks. Credit where credit is due, most of the legwork of figuring this out was done by Rain in the video linked in the description: ua-cam.com/video/D_JPRRMJmtg/v-deo.html. Their original video was a much longer run where they wanted to beat the game with a party of Biggs, Wedge, Kefka, and Gestahl. I was only interested in getting Kefka, so I gleaned the necessary conditions for just that portion from their video and did my own run in English to confirm.
Heh, just the two videos at the moment, since I'd found demonstrations of some Pixel Remaster glitches on Japanese channels that I hadn't seen anyone talk about in English, so wanted to share.
@@patches365 Thanks for the response! I can't believe it's been just over 30 years since I first played this game. Thank you for the memories, keep them coming!
Lots of trial and error. A lot of FF6 glitches both in PR and SNES were discovered by Japanese streamer Eddy, who spends hours just stress testing the games on streams. This is the stream where he eventually found the title screen glitch (at 31:50), and in later streams he experiments with all the bizarre things he can do with it: ua-cam.com/video/I11dtfCklHU/v-deo.html
It's likely that the Leo event is the only scene where this works, as it requires an event where Kefka is added to the party, then the view transitions to a different map before party control is restored. The only other places Kefka is added to the party are the Imperial Camp, the Sealed Gate, and the Floating Continent. In all those cases, there's no map change where you can trigger the resize bug in order to prematurely interrupt the event. As for Biggs and Wedge, yes, you can kidnap them by performing the resize bug in the very first screen of a new game when it's showing the cliffs of Narshe and the first line of the intro narration. When it transitions to the second screen of the intro, which is the town of Narshe, the intro will stop playing and Terra, Biggs, and Wedge will just be standing at the town entrance. After that you need to reset the game and reload the auto-save in order to get it back in a usable state. Then you can just leave town with Terra, Biggs, and Wedge. The issue is that you subsequently need to do a LOT of shenanigans to get all the necessary flags set to get them to the end of the game without losing them. Rain's video linked in the description takes Biggs, Wedge, Kefka, and Gestahl to the final battle, but I only did the Kefka part, due to the aforementioned even more extreme shenanigans necessary to keep Biggs and Wedge. However, because Biggs and Wedge were legitimate party members at any point, they DO have a leveling table and gear slots, so can be leveled up and re-equipped, unlike Kefka.
I haven't tried to get him, but it should be fairly straightforward since you don't have to do anything special to get him access to a save point or an empty treasure chest to warp him elsewhere. I've seen Biggs, Wedge, and the Phantom Train ghost recruited this way, too. Maduin might be tricky since he's in an area with no save points or exits, so he'd likely have to be warped out via the 3-party teleport like Kefka.
Kefka, leo and gestahl in party has been there since snes days. Missed opportunity from devs to actually make them fully functional characters, even if the way to get them is unconventional.
The issue is that in order to trigger the next step of the glitch, you need to be able to get from the save point to an empty treasure chest without triggering any other events along the way. Other events include getting in a battle, stepping on a switch, or doing something where the game temporarily controls a character's movement like making them jump or climb. And I don't think there are any treasure chests in the Phoenix cave where you can walk directly to them from the save point without having to do one of those other things first. And even if you can, your other party won't be right at the exit ready to leave after the next step. Party 3 in Kefka's tower can also reach a save point without having to fight any battles, but they can't get to an empty treasure chest from there, either. There's a treasure chest in the previous room, but returning to that room requires crawling through a pipe, which is an animation event and will freeze the game if you try it while the glitch is active. This is because the remaining steps of the event we escaped in the Esper Cave are still in the queue. Triggering an event that is only 1 step long (talking to an empty treasure chest, or an NPC that only has one line of dialogue) will execute that step, then continue executing the remaining steps in the queue. Triggering an event that is more than 1 step long will attempt to place the rest of the steps in the queue, corrupting the queue because there's already stuff there, causing the game to crash.
@@patches365 Thanks for the explanation on that. But you are right, you do have to take party two in the cave to help with party 1 even as early as entering the cave and stepping on a switch to let the other party in.
This whole video I was wondering if you can get Leo and Kefka. then you showed it. Then I went, "Ok, but can you make a party of Biggs, Wedge Leo and Kefka? Can you even get those two at all? would they even be able to do anything?"
Yes, you can get Biggs and Wedge, too! The (Japanese) video by Rain in the description that I used as reference has them taking Biggs, Wedge, Kefka, and Gestahl to the final boss. ua-cam.com/video/D_JPRRMJmtg/v-deo.html They didn't get Leo in their video, but getting Leo is just repeating the steps for Kefka, just using the three-party swap before he fights Kefka instead of after. I decided not to get Biggs and Wedge because it takes a LOT of shenanigans to get them to the end of the game. Kidnapping them from the intro is simple (just do the resize bug during the opening narration and the Terra/Biggs/Wedge party will get placed at the Narshe entrance, where after a reset to the auto-save, they can then leave). But getting them to the end of the game while making sure all the necessary flags get set and bypassing all the forced party changes is harder. Rain also ends up kidnapping the ghost from the Phantom Train to facilitate this since the ghost can insta-kill any boss with Possess, and in the PR version the ghost can be revived with a tent or an inn to do it again. They take Biggs and Wedge straight from Narshe to the final dungeon via Darill's Tomb and need the ghost to kill Ultima Buster to set up the three-party state needed to get Kefka. They also send Biggs and Wedge to Sabin's scenario due to that scenario containing event code to remove the party from Magitek armor, since they wanted Biggs and Wedge to have the Fight command instead of being limited to Magitek. But they repeatedly run into game freezes when the game tries to run a cutscene with a character they haven't recruited, so they keep needing to use the title screen glitch to pull the individual character recruitment events into their main save with Biggs and Wedge to get those characters initialized. Their video has even crazier stuff than mine, with flying the airship around inside a town, Celes floating in the sky, and Kefka confronting himself at the Imperial camp. But Biggs and Wedge have the same utility as Leo in that they can level up, learn magic, and equip anything. This is because Biggs, Wedge, and Leo's data exist as actual playable party members, whereas Kefka (and Gestahl's) data only exists for the purpose of battle window cutscenes, so they don't have any stats.
Really? Leo would require "a broad definition" of Villian. So Beatrix and Edea are just pure evil? One was possessed and mentally not present being puppeted, while the other is literally in the same position as Leo. Though granted the transition doesn't do her any favors.
I suppose for Edea, "antagonist" would have been more appropriate, since you're right, she wasn't acting under her own will. But she is still used in the story as an agent of death and destruction and fights against the party multiple times before she's released, so she narratively serves that function for the first 2/3 or so. Beatrix may have the same job as Leo, but she willingly commits genocide against the Burmecians and also fights against your party numerous times. So even though she eventually comes around in the end, there is still a portion of the game where she is an agent of death and destruction and stands against the party. Leo never fights the party nor does he ever take action to impede or oppose them himself. Launching the assault on Doma is the only real "villainous" act he does, but he pulls back voluntarily once the human toll is too high. So compared to the amount of onscreen suffering that the other characters caused, Leo's only real "villain" cred is belonging to the same organization as people who do reach those levels.
Fun fact: The Kefka character slot that fights the Red Ifrit has a Paladin Shield
Yup, and if you get the Paladin Shield, your party Kefka can equip that, too, making him slightly less killable (I decided not to subject myself to obtaining that for this video). The SNES instance of Kefka that fights Red Ifrit also has much better stats, but it looks like Pixel Remaster just has the single instance of him and simply swaps around his equipment. His Paladin Shield in the Red Ifrit fight renders him immune to all its attacks, anyway, so his stats don't really matter. I do find it interesting that he can't equip the Flail or Ribbon, which is what his instances in the Imperial Camp and Sealed Gate had in SNES. Either way, the Leo glitch showed that their equipment doesn't come with them when you kidnap them, so even if you could kidnap the Paladin Shield instance of Kefka, you won't be able to get an extra copy.
Very interesting video and a very well done explanation of the glitch! Thanks to the UA-cam recommendations for showing this of and hoping of seeing more from your channel in the future!
Isn't this just the plot summary of Chrono Cross? Because those are some Belthasar, Guru of Reason & Prophet of Time-level machinations.
Oh my gosh?
I appreciate this exploit and/or bug. It's the sort of thing that playground rumors were made of.
incredible. Useless but neat. Thanks for sharing.
I am sad that I cannot do this on my PS4 but I salute you Fast Moon! This is the kind of glitching that has been rumored since the dawn of this game(a way to bring Leo back!). I dare say you have achieved the equivalent of bringing back Aerithon PS1 and now with Kefka and Geshtal added to the roster, Legendary.
Incredibly complicated setup! The payoff isn't as good as I thought, but it made an interesting video! I give you credit. I bought the pixel remaster on Switch, I'm extremely happy with it. Thank you for the video.
Heh, yeah, since Kefka's party instance only exists for the purposes of animating him in battle window cutscenes, he has no stats or abilities, so it's not like you can run around with him casting Trine or Forsaken or such. He's mostly just a trophy you can do silly things with. Leo is a better catch since he behaves mostly like a normal party member and has good stats, plus Shock is nice for a free AoE attack.
This was such an amazing video, love all the explanation, you deserve way more love for it
Oh wow, that ending was totally worth it! Bravo!
Like, it's very on-brand that if you get Kefka in your party, he's a pathetic weakling who can't better himself at all, whereas if you get Leo, he's good at everything and is an absolute powerhouse. So really wanted to take the extra step to rub that in Kefka's face and force him to watch, lol.
The orchestral version of kefkas theme is quite fitting for the chaotic nature of this hack
This is hysterical
This was insane for insane's sake. Incredible work!
really cool video Fast Moon! well done
It's kind of weird that you get a sadistic kick out of humiliating fictional characters.
You can use technology beyond their knowledge to force Kefka to fight against the Empire? Now THAT'S revenge!
At least Kefka works in the pixel remaster, I remember using gamegenie to get him in the SNES version, he had no commands and froze the game when his turn came up, also had terras portrait for some reason
Dude I love this girl. Earned my sub ❤️
Warping from the World of Balance to the world of ruin, back to the world of balance and then back to the world of ruin during specific scenes.
What a wild glitch, lol.
Love stuff like this, it's so cool to see how on a technical level Kefka is sometimes treated as a party member and that you can even glitch him into the party, even if he is useless as such. I wonder if you could use hacks to allow him to level up (or just assign him level 99 or something), so that he can then actually be a functional party member rather than just being the class clown.
Kefka doesn't appear to have a leveling table, so I'm not sure you could hack him to a higher level in Pixel Remaster. Leo has a leveling table simply because he's level-averaged to your party's level and needs the table to calculate that, even though he never fights a battle where he'd gain experience. Biggs, Wedge, and the Phantom Train ghost I believe are similar to Leo in that they have stat tables, and they're all also kidnap-able via the same methods as Kefka and Leo in PR. But Kefka and Gestahl's battle window sprites only exist for cutscene purposes and therefore have no stats associated with them.
In the SNES version, the battle scripts called party member slot IDs to execute sprite animations, which is why all sprites animated in the battle window had to be assigned a party member slot. You'll notice that every time Kefka appears as a sprite in the battle window, there's also an open party member slot for his sprite to fill (this is why Terra is temporarily removed from the party at the Sealed Gate, to make room for Kefka).
@@patches365 That makes a lot of sense actually. Instead of asking myself if Kefka could gain levels if simply hacked that way, I should have thought about why he isn't able to level up in the first place, that being the lack of a leveling table. Though I would imagine you probably could arbitrarily grant Kefka tons of stats anyway with the right cheats, I also imagine his stats would probably quickly revert back to the default values due to said lack of that leveling table.
Also it's always fun to learn when certain story elements happen simply because the game required it on a technical level. In a way it's an artistic way to get around technological limitations and I think that's really cool.
Thank you for the explanation!
@@YosherYoshi Getting Leo into the same save file as Kefka was actually quite a bit more involved than the little compilation shown in this video. Sure, doing just those steps will get you Leo in his base state, but if you watched my other video specifically about getting Leo, in Pixel Remaster you have to pick up his equipment separately and have it in your inventory in order for him to come equipped with it. Which necessarily meant I had to go pick up the Master's Scroll from the Ancient Castle. But there's a problem. The Kefka save warped directly from Thamasa to Darill's Tomb. So even though Edgar is still in the party because he was still available at the time Thamasa happened, Figaro Castle isn't accessible until you run the Edgar re-recruitment event. So I had to do that first.
But then there's ANOTHER problem. Because this save skipped the Floating Continent, the flag that tells the game you're now in the World of Ruin never got set. There are certain maps like Narshe, Zozo, and yes, Figaro Castle, that don't have separate instances for the World of Ruin, because they have no grass to recolor. So those maps use that World of Ruin flag to determine which overworld map to spit you back out on when you leave. So, I went back to run the Edgar recruitment event even though I already had him, went down to the Ancient Castle to get Leo's relic, came back out... and I was back in the World of Balance. With no airship because when I left the World of Balance it was still crashed at Maranda.
So, that meant I had to run the Darill's Tomb warp AGAIN to warp my party back to the World of Ruin with airship access. All to get Leo's stupid relic so that I could have a 30-second punchline at the end of this video about how much more utility Leo has if you glitch him into your party than Kefka does, lol.
@@patches365 I tip my hat to your devotion to deliver that punchline then, that does sound like a whole ordeal. I did watch the Leo video after this one so I knew at least part of what you had to do to get him in here proper. Though even without all of his equipment he's still loads better than Kefka simply because Kefka cannot level up which is funny in its own way!
j havent heard of a setup so detailed and questionably HOAX since the olden days in the late 90s with things like "play as LUIGI" in Super Mario 64.
and thats not an insult to OP, actually quite the opposite.
the level of detail and (from my POV) research and (what id imagine) was trial and error and data diving and source code digging is
is
?
HOW and WHERE did you even begin research and finding all of these seemingly random "incidents"?
BRAVO & PROPS TO YOU
Haha, thanks. Credit where credit is due, most of the legwork of figuring this out was done by Rain in the video linked in the description: ua-cam.com/video/D_JPRRMJmtg/v-deo.html. Their original video was a much longer run where they wanted to beat the game with a party of Biggs, Wedge, Kefka, and Gestahl. I was only interested in getting Kefka, so I gleaned the necessary conditions for just that portion from their video and did my own run in English to confirm.
Is this a whole channel about FFVI? Where have you been all my life?
@6:30 nice Titans touch
I gotta admit. That’s sweet revenge at the end there.
Heh, just the two videos at the moment, since I'd found demonstrations of some Pixel Remaster glitches on Japanese channels that I hadn't seen anyone talk about in English, so wanted to share.
@@patches365 Thanks for the response! I can't believe it's been just over 30 years since I first played this game. Thank you for the memories, keep them coming!
Kefka was added to my party temporarily using the sketch bug in the original SNES game, but pretty much everything I did with him froze the game.
My husband waited his whole life to see this...
How does someone accidentally discover all of this?
Lots of trial and error. A lot of FF6 glitches both in PR and SNES were discovered by Japanese streamer Eddy, who spends hours just stress testing the games on streams. This is the stream where he eventually found the title screen glitch (at 31:50), and in later streams he experiments with all the bizarre things he can do with it: ua-cam.com/video/I11dtfCklHU/v-deo.html
I may have to try this at some point if it never gets patched.
Who's got these save files and wants to share???
New trophy unlocked
PS great use of Attack on Titan music
And I thought FFVI had too many characters before! 😅
Could you also use any scene that he's a party member? And if that's the case can you bring back bigs and wedge also?
It's likely that the Leo event is the only scene where this works, as it requires an event where Kefka is added to the party, then the view transitions to a different map before party control is restored. The only other places Kefka is added to the party are the Imperial Camp, the Sealed Gate, and the Floating Continent. In all those cases, there's no map change where you can trigger the resize bug in order to prematurely interrupt the event.
As for Biggs and Wedge, yes, you can kidnap them by performing the resize bug in the very first screen of a new game when it's showing the cliffs of Narshe and the first line of the intro narration. When it transitions to the second screen of the intro, which is the town of Narshe, the intro will stop playing and Terra, Biggs, and Wedge will just be standing at the town entrance. After that you need to reset the game and reload the auto-save in order to get it back in a usable state. Then you can just leave town with Terra, Biggs, and Wedge.
The issue is that you subsequently need to do a LOT of shenanigans to get all the necessary flags set to get them to the end of the game without losing them. Rain's video linked in the description takes Biggs, Wedge, Kefka, and Gestahl to the final battle, but I only did the Kefka part, due to the aforementioned even more extreme shenanigans necessary to keep Biggs and Wedge. However, because Biggs and Wedge were legitimate party members at any point, they DO have a leveling table and gear slots, so can be leveled up and re-equipped, unlike Kefka.
thank You
thats cool af
Banan playable? His free AOE heals was always badass
I haven't tried to get him, but it should be fairly straightforward since you don't have to do anything special to get him access to a save point or an empty treasure chest to warp him elsewhere. I've seen Biggs, Wedge, and the Phantom Train ghost recruited this way, too. Maduin might be tricky since he's in an area with no save points or exits, so he'd likely have to be warped out via the 3-party teleport like Kefka.
@@patches365 well i only have the ps4 version so i wouldn't be able to anyways lol would just be cool seeing a playthrough with him
❤
Kefka would ball on his clone 🤣
Kefka, leo and gestahl in party has been there since snes days. Missed opportunity from devs to actually make them fully functional characters, even if the way to get them is unconventional.
As a kid I’ve always wanted to win the Imp Robot at the auction and play it as a character. Can Imp Robot be playable?
Hmm. does this glitch not work if you go to the Phoenix cave? It's a two party dungeon and doesn't require you to do any fights to get a save point.
The issue is that in order to trigger the next step of the glitch, you need to be able to get from the save point to an empty treasure chest without triggering any other events along the way. Other events include getting in a battle, stepping on a switch, or doing something where the game temporarily controls a character's movement like making them jump or climb. And I don't think there are any treasure chests in the Phoenix cave where you can walk directly to them from the save point without having to do one of those other things first. And even if you can, your other party won't be right at the exit ready to leave after the next step.
Party 3 in Kefka's tower can also reach a save point without having to fight any battles, but they can't get to an empty treasure chest from there, either. There's a treasure chest in the previous room, but returning to that room requires crawling through a pipe, which is an animation event and will freeze the game if you try it while the glitch is active. This is because the remaining steps of the event we escaped in the Esper Cave are still in the queue. Triggering an event that is only 1 step long (talking to an empty treasure chest, or an NPC that only has one line of dialogue) will execute that step, then continue executing the remaining steps in the queue. Triggering an event that is more than 1 step long will attempt to place the rest of the steps in the queue, corrupting the queue because there's already stuff there, causing the game to crash.
@@patches365 Thanks for the explanation on that. But you are right, you do have to take party two in the cave to help with party 1 even as early as entering the cave and stepping on a switch to let the other party in.
This whole video I was wondering if you can get Leo and Kefka. then you showed it. Then I went, "Ok, but can you make a party of Biggs, Wedge Leo and Kefka? Can you even get those two at all? would they even be able to do anything?"
Yes, you can get Biggs and Wedge, too! The (Japanese) video by Rain in the description that I used as reference has them taking Biggs, Wedge, Kefka, and Gestahl to the final boss. ua-cam.com/video/D_JPRRMJmtg/v-deo.html They didn't get Leo in their video, but getting Leo is just repeating the steps for Kefka, just using the three-party swap before he fights Kefka instead of after.
I decided not to get Biggs and Wedge because it takes a LOT of shenanigans to get them to the end of the game. Kidnapping them from the intro is simple (just do the resize bug during the opening narration and the Terra/Biggs/Wedge party will get placed at the Narshe entrance, where after a reset to the auto-save, they can then leave). But getting them to the end of the game while making sure all the necessary flags get set and bypassing all the forced party changes is harder. Rain also ends up kidnapping the ghost from the Phantom Train to facilitate this since the ghost can insta-kill any boss with Possess, and in the PR version the ghost can be revived with a tent or an inn to do it again. They take Biggs and Wedge straight from Narshe to the final dungeon via Darill's Tomb and need the ghost to kill Ultima Buster to set up the three-party state needed to get Kefka. They also send Biggs and Wedge to Sabin's scenario due to that scenario containing event code to remove the party from Magitek armor, since they wanted Biggs and Wedge to have the Fight command instead of being limited to Magitek.
But they repeatedly run into game freezes when the game tries to run a cutscene with a character they haven't recruited, so they keep needing to use the title screen glitch to pull the individual character recruitment events into their main save with Biggs and Wedge to get those characters initialized. Their video has even crazier stuff than mine, with flying the airship around inside a town, Celes floating in the sky, and Kefka confronting himself at the Imperial camp.
But Biggs and Wedge have the same utility as Leo in that they can level up, learn magic, and equip anything. This is because Biggs, Wedge, and Leo's data exist as actual playable party members, whereas Kefka (and Gestahl's) data only exists for the purpose of battle window cutscenes, so they don't have any stats.
How... the.... hell.. did anyone figure this out??????
im surpised that this is even possible to do its sad that he is useless becuase kefka is a god
That's going to get awkward halfway through the game
Really? Leo would require "a broad definition" of Villian. So Beatrix and Edea are just pure evil?
One was possessed and mentally not present being puppeted, while the other is literally in the same position as Leo. Though granted the transition doesn't do her any favors.
I suppose for Edea, "antagonist" would have been more appropriate, since you're right, she wasn't acting under her own will. But she is still used in the story as an agent of death and destruction and fights against the party multiple times before she's released, so she narratively serves that function for the first 2/3 or so.
Beatrix may have the same job as Leo, but she willingly commits genocide against the Burmecians and also fights against your party numerous times. So even though she eventually comes around in the end, there is still a portion of the game where she is an agent of death and destruction and stands against the party.
Leo never fights the party nor does he ever take action to impede or oppose them himself. Launching the assault on Doma is the only real "villainous" act he does, but he pulls back voluntarily once the human toll is too high. So compared to the amount of onscreen suffering that the other characters caused, Leo's only real "villain" cred is belonging to the same organization as people who do reach those levels.
Did you seriously call celes sell less? Lol