https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qS5MVntSt58

One of the greatest urban legends in all video game history was that there was a way to revive Ares in Final Fantasy VII, a series of special button presses. Use the desert rose. Get 100 tissues at the Golden Saucer's battle arena. Of course, nothing actually works besides hacks, but it makes sense that people would think it's possible. Although it wasn't the first time that a playable character would die in a Final Fantasy game, it was perhaps the most jarring. To a lot of people, it seemed like a foregone conclusion that she would fill the role of love interest that Cloud ultimately winds up with. And although the game mechanics allow for any character to play the part if you want, she's the only character that decidedly fills the role of White Mage. And because she dies so early, you really have to grind to see all of her limit breaks before it's too late. And all this makes it seem like maybe Square intended for you to have her longer. And with all that, you have to consider that Final Fantasy VII came out during perhaps the golden age of online video game hoaxes. This is a post-Tomb Raider Nude Code world, post-Getting Mew in Pokémon.

And this was a lot of people's first Final Fantasy game, a lot of people's first RPG at all. So it stands to reason that that might be held up as the greatest myth in all gaming history. But before Aris, there was someone who was subject to similar rumors, although perhaps not as large of a scale. That character is General Leo in Final Fantasy 6 or Final Fantasy 3, as Western gamers will remember. And although he was much more of a minor character than Aris, like her, it felt like he was meant for more. And maybe he was. Today's episode, Saving General This video is sponsored by Racon. Now that the weather is good again, I've been forcing myself to go outside, get some sun, and go on long walks listening to music. And of course, I'm doing that with my Racon everyday ear buds. Their optimized gel tips make sure they're comfortable and stay in your ears even when you're running. I know Now, before you guys have seen me talk about Racon's everyday ear buds before and thought, what do you mean the same audio quality I expect for the big guys, but at half the price?

Well, now is the time to check out Raycon because they've just launched their new upgraded model featuring an improved ergonomic design, multi-point connectivity, and active noise cancelation. The quick charge function is a lifesaver. Just 10 minutes of charging gives you 90 minutes of play time. Just click the link in the description box or go to buyraycon. Com/wang. You'll get 15% off your Raycon purchase plus free shipping. If you've been following this channel long enough, you probably know that Final Fantasy 6 is my favorite of the entire series. Probably second only to Chrono Trigger as my most replayed RPG ever. Even got a bunch of Final Fantasy 6 tattoos. This game is a big deal to me. But this General Leo myth is something I actually didn't learn about until years after the game came out. Final Fantasy 6 is a game where several characters join your party for a brief period of time, then leave. When the game starts, you're playing as Terra and the two Imperial soldiers who are joining her, Wedge and Vicks. Wedge and Vicks, of course, die almost immediately. And shortly after that, we play as several moogles who will only ever see for this one segment.

Then, of course, there's Shadow, who joins your party as a mercenary before randomly abandoning us in the middle of a fight, leaving us to rehire him again at pubs throughout the world. Actually, perhaps it's Shadow that primed players' minds for the myth surrounding General Leo. People who've played the game, of course, know about Shadow's role in the Floating Continent, a timed segment where at the end, we're presented with an option. You can wait for Shadow, or you can just leave and save yourself. And if you don't make it to the end in time, you don't even have the option. You just have to leave. And depending on the choice you make here, Shadow lives or dies permanently for the rest of the game. So if they put this mechanic in the game for one temporary party member who, unlike the other temporary characters, has his own unique unit portrait, why not General Leo? Let's first take a look at the importance of General Leo. So from the very start of the game, our enemy is the Empire. They are the ones who enslave Terra to use as a living weapon. They assassinated Edgar and Saban's father, then burned down Figaro Castle.

They poison the water at Doma Castle, killing most of its residents, including Cian's wife and child, before his very eyes. Almost every single character in your party has a personal grievance against the Empire. And of all the Empire's armies, the top general as a man named Leo. But despite his high rank, Leo isn't like the rest of the Empire's leadership. When his soldiers express that they're willing to give up their lives in hopeless missions, he tells them to think of their families. When Kefka plans to poison Doma, Leo instructs him not to, saying that although they're enemies, they're still humans. Of course, Kefka ignores him and does it anyway, leading to perhaps the most comical mass death sequence ever in a video game. Eventually, Vector, the capital city of the Empire, and Leo's hometown, is attacked by Espers, the magical beings whose power they wish to harness. And Terra, who's more or less the main character up to this point, is half Esper. She's living proof that Espers and humans can coexist peacefully. So the Empire convinces your party to have Terra help them broker a peace treaty with the Espers, or so they claim.

On this mission, they're, of course, joined by General Leo, and on their way to meet the Espers, he expresses to Terra his regret for how the Empire used her as a weapon, and that the Empire citizens aren't all evil like Kefka. Terra, on the other hand, is slowly shaking off the amnesia caused by her slave Crown, and she's busy coping with being the only half human, half esper that exists, and she's never felt love before. It's not even sure if it's possible for her to experience the emotion, but Leo assures her that she's still young and she'll know how it feels someday. Then he just nervously leaves to the other side of the ship. Tara says to herself that she wants to know now, and then Shadow stumbles in having accidentally heard the conversation. He notes that there's people in this world who've chosen to kill their own convictions, and people have chosen to kill their own convictions. Perhaps this refers to his own mysterious past. But it also draws attention that General Leo is a good, honorable man who might have had an easier life had he simply abandoned his virtues. At this point in the game, it seems like this all might be leading up to some romance between Terra and Leo.

Eventually, the mission is a success, and a group of Espers speak to Leo and the rest of the party. Everyone even has a good chuckle like the end of an '80s cartoon with a moral lesson. But of course, this whole thing was a ruse. Kefka ambushes the party and kills the Espers, turning them into Magisight. And this is when you finally get to play as Leo. He's had enough, and he tries to put an end to Kefka. And in doing so, we get to use one of the coolest attacks in the game, his shock ability. It's an unblocked remarkable non-elemental magic attack that does a ton of damage. With this attack, you beat Kefka pretty easily. And after Kefka is defeated, he summons Emperor Gestal. Gestal, of course, is the leader of the Empire, so Leo kneels before him. But then Kefka reveals this is all an illusion, and he's just pretending to be Gestal. He stabs him and kills him. With the Super NES sprites, it's not as cinematic as Aris's death, but they did what they could with the technology. Kefka goes off to kill some more Espers, and we next see the party standing at Leo's grave, with Terra saying that she wanted to teach her so much more.

Of course, that never happens. And later in the game, Terra discovers love by taking care of orphans after Kefka destroys the world. In fact, you can even leave her with the orphans and beat the game without her. You see, the second half of the game is built around exploring this most apocalyptic world and getting your old party members to rejoin. And there's slightly different endings to the game depending on who you do and don't recruit, including the two secret characters and Shadow if you let them die. So this adds more to the idea that perhaps there was a way to get Leo back. One of the most prevalent rumors about getting Leo back involved the dinosaur forest. So the dinosaur forest is basically the place to grind experience points at the end of the game. At the forest, you'll encounter two different enemies. You got the tyrannosaur, which gives you a ton of experience, and more Clearly, you got the Braciosaur, who also gives a lot of experience and has a chance of dropping one of the best relics in the game, the Economizer, which makes all magic cost only one MP. There's no NPCs in the forest.

There's no quest that takes us there, and there's no key items. It seems like there's really no purpose to this place except to grind experience, which seems unusual. In fact, it's not even officially called the Dinosaur Forest. This is just the name that players have given it. There's only one character in the entire game who mentions it. A thief that you meet in the cave in the Velt says he encountered a fearsome dragon in the forest up north. The only forest up north of this cave is the Dinosaur Forest. And while the thief, if he encountered a tyrann dinosaur, the Braciosaur, might register it as a fearsome dragon, a lot of players thought there might be something more to this, a way to fight this fearsome dragon. And it wouldn't be unheard of for a Final Fantasy game to have a secret, more powerful boss. Some people thought it was a matter of getting really lucky with random encounters, not unlike how you'll very rarely encounter Deathgaze when flying around the map. But the most common theory revolved around killing enough dinosaurs. Sometimes they said you had to kill a thousand. A lot of times they said you had to kill 4,000.

After doing that, one of two things might happen. You'll encounter a secret dragon boss who, when you kill it, drops a potion that revives Leo. Or you start encountering a new enemy, the Gold Dragon, who has a chance of dropping this potion. Of course, no matter how long you play the game, no matter how many dinosaurs you kill, this never happens. But there actually was another dragon hidden in the game's code that went undiscovered for years. And he could never encounter it through normal means. While searching through the rom, Aero Star, a reader of the website Caves of Narsh, would eventually discover the Tsar Dragon. The Tsar Dragon was a dummy to enemy that was so complete, he even had a finished Sprite and a line of dialog. Wow. Ha ha ha. Humans and their desires. I'm free at last. I bring you destruction. I bring you terror. I bring you love. I am Tsar. Prepare yourselves. Perhaps this Tsar dragon was what the thief in the cave was talking about. But although the character was in the code with all its detail and its stats pointed to it being some secret end game boss, it's clearly unfinished and it has nothing other than a basic attack, and it's unknown where he was supposed to actually appear.

Of course, though, with this knowledge, people spread more lies about how you could actually fight him, things like petrifying a blue dragon. Eventually, a rom hacker named Rubikin would make a patch that replaces the boss' katana soul with the Zara dragon. This version circulated online somewhat without people realizing it, causing some people who played that version for the first time to think that they actually had fought the Tsar Dragon, and it was possible to fight them because they did it themselves. The Tsar Dragon would later actually be put into Final Fantasy VI advanced as the Kaiser Dragon, the boss of an optional Dungeon. It's unclear, though, if the way they use him was the original intention, and it's very likely that the way they implemented him was to please the fan base. And of course, it had absolutely nothing to do with reviving Leo. Ultimately, it would turn out that the thief's reference to a fears dragon was one of many mistranslations in the game. In later versions, he would refer there being huge dinosaurs. And as I saw, I90 East, a user of the caves of Narsh forums point out all the way back in 2004, in Japanese, they used the word for dragon to describe a dinosaur.

Going further, dinosaur roughly translates to scary dragon or, you know, fearsome dragon. Another theory about reviving General Leo involved the Phoenix Esper. So in the second half of the game, after the Apocalypse, we spend a lot of time learning about the character's past through various quests. And in the case of the treasure hunter, Loc, we learn about a deep regret that's basically the driving force behind his character. Loc was involved with a woman named Rachel, who would eventually join him on one of his treasure hunts. On one of these missions, Loc doesn't notice that he's standing on a bridge that's about to collapse. But Rachel sees it, and she rushes onto the bridge to push him off of it, sacrificing herself to save him. And as a result of her injuries, she suffers from amnesia. She doesn't remember him, and Loc's kicked out of town by her father. A year later, she dies in an attack by the Empire. Having returned when hearing about the attack, Loc has a zany old man in town preserve her body with herbs in hopes that he can someday revive her. It's not quite cryonix, but it'll do. And in a flashback, the old man tells Loc about a treasure that might have the power to revive her.

That treasure turns out to be the Phoenix Magisite. After getting through the Phoenix Cave and acquiring it, you get a screen that says, The Village of Kalingon, and he returned to town to revive Rachel. In his damaged, weakened state, though, the Magisite can only revive Rachel very briefly, as she tells him that he has to move on with his life. But she also becomes one with the Phoenix, restoring it to its full power and giving you what some people consider to be the best esper in the game. I don't, but some do. And of course, there were rumors that the esper could be used to revive General Leo. Leo. One theory was that during the screen that says, The Village of Collingen, there's a sequence of buttons you could press that would revive Leo, which makes absolutely no sense. This is in Grand Theft Auto. This is Final Fantasy 6. And even if you ignore the fact that this would completely derail a locked story in the game, Leo isn't buried at Collingen. He's buried literally on the other side of the world at Thomasa. But this rumor about reviving General Leo at Phoenix would actually get a second life in the time leading up to the release of Final Fantasy 6: Advanced.

Specifically, this was stirred up by an article on Silicon era. On November 27th of 2006, Silicon era published an article entitled General Leo and Gestal Playable Characters in Final Fantasy 6: Advanced. According to this article, in the remake, you'll be able to permanently revive General Leo and have him join your party at the cost of the Phoenix Magistite. It wouldn't be unlike how when you get Ragnarok, you get the choice between the sword or the Magistite. According to the article, there was also a new quest that would eventually give you control of Emperor Gestal, which I guess that would give you quicker access to one of the most useless spells in the game, Merton, which I only recently learned Merton is supposed to be meltdown, and it's a Japanese translation. The article also supposedly contained images of Leo and Gestal in your party, but the images are broken and they haven't been archived. It would be really easy to fake anyway. And of course, this turned out to be complete nonsense. It would almost seem like an April Fool joke had it not been published in November. Of course, there's no legitimate way to get General Leo to permanently join your party in any version of the game.

Why would there be? It would completely undermine the narrative. Or they would have to completely rewrite a second version of the plot that almost nobody would see, that nobody has ever seen in the history of the game. And as cool of an attack as shock is, unlike all the other characters special abilities in this game, there's no real extra layer of strategy that's added by having it. That being said, though, there actually is a way to get Leo back in your party that doesn't involve hacks or Game Genie or anything like that. On August sixth, At the beginning of 2011, a user of the Something Awful forums named Elephant Gun created a thread entitled Let's Break Final Fantasy 3. A lot of the thread revolves around the glitch that allows you to bring the airship to any point of the game after dying on purpose on the floating continent. Without getting too into the technical aspects of the glitch. Correctly going throughout all the steps will allow you to have the airship back at the last point you saved, which if you don't save for a long time, can be basically anywhere. And there's a lot of interesting stuff she was able to do with this.

You got Terra looking at her own transformed comatose self in Zozo, where you got temporary ghost party members from the Phantom Train one-shotting bosses later in the game. You got Banon riding his raft all over the world. Of course, if you can get these temporary characters back in your party, surely you can get Leo back, too. And you can. There's a problem. When you get these characters back in your party, they disappear as soon as you look in a menu. And at the part where you would normally be able to get Leo, the game forces you right into a menu. So you can get them back, but you couldn't really use them. Or so people thought. In April of 2013, A speedrunner named Hannibal Graham posted a video to YouTube that shows by how exploiting some things with how the game stores temporary characters, you can actually keep Leo for most of the game. Of course, this is just a glitch. So you have Leo, but you don't really have Leo. It's just an illusion. There's no way to make him really not dead, although he does make a few cameo appearances in other Final Fantasy games.

But anyway, that's a story of reviving General Leo in Final Fantasy 6. If you haven't played Final Fantasy 6, play Final Fantasy 6. And if you like this video, turn on notifications and check out my video about Streetfighter: Rainbow Edition. I'm out.