FFVI: Veteran Edition

The game only checks to see if the character ID is higher than gogo (since he's the last playable character) when deciding who can use espers, rather than checking each character individually.

The game checks for all characters up to gogo to see if they can be equipped with espers. If you want umaro to have an esper equipped, simply find the address and change the character ID from gogo to umaro. I would have posted the exact code you need to change, but the slickproductions website seems to be down for some reason.

Be careful if you want to equip temporary characters -like banon, biggs, wedge, the ghosts or leo- with espers. If you equip them with an esper, and they leave the party forever, you can kiss that esper goodbye for the rest of the game.

IF you want to give temporary characters espers, you would need to edit events in order to have the game unequip the espers before the characters leave your party for good.

But if there is a way, I'm sure I'll find it once I get good at event editing.

What you want to do is straightforward, you'll do some hex editing and there's no need to edit events.

Can I test it with a save state, or would I have to make a new game and get all the way to where you get Umaro? Or maybe I could just make the game start you with Umaro instead of vicks or wedge just to test him. hmmm...

You can test your changes with a save state, since these are simple ones. Or with a game save it should work. The only time you must restart a game to see specific changes is when using FF6usME and giving a character some new commands. For example, if you give Leo the magic command, you need to start a new game for the changes to take place.