FF6: Messing with the final battle lineup

"Initialized characters" is probably set when a main character is initialized for the first time. "Available characters" is set when a character is recruited, including the first time in WoB. After the FC all those bits are cleared except Celes I think and re-set when you recruit them in the WoR.

That was my guess based on what the data was called in the documentation, yeah. So, what I tried to do was take a savegame at the final savepoint with some "normal" looking parties, and I first took every character but Relm, Locke, and Terra out of those parties. Then I set all the bits to 0 for initialized and available for every character but those three, and played through to Kefka. Terra flew in from Mobliz in morph form, giving me two Terras in the cutscene, which was pretty great. After beating Kefka, though, I still had some characters show up that I had zeroed out, namely Strago and Umaro. 

I think I'm going to do some more investigation maybe with a savegame that only has the expected minimal characters to see if I can do a before-and-after of what happens.