Random Battle

As a lot of other games, Final Fantasy has a limit of 255 for it’s character stats. You may have wondered why such an arbitrary limit? Limits of 99 or 999 (or any number of nines) make sense because they are limited by the number of digits used to display the value. 255 uses 3 digits, so why not go up to 999?

The reason behind this has to do with the way the data is stored in memory. Computers only understand binary numbers so every number or word of anything used to communicate with a computer is encoded in binary, each binary value is represented by a bit. The bit can either be 1 or 0.

Here’s how bits represent values:

0000 = 0
0001 = 1
0010 = 2
0100 = 4
1000 = 8
1011 = 11
...

Since only one bit doesn’t give much information, bits were grouped together to make a wider array of values available. This group was named a byte. Typically, one byte is a group of 8 bits. Every information transmitted to and from the computer or console is transmitted using this byte format. Nowadays, computers send multiple bytes at the same time to improve the efficiency of communications, a 64 bit computer transmits information using 8 bytes (8 * 8 bits = 64 bits) at the time.

Now let’s take a look at the range of values one byte gives us:

1000 0000 = 128
1111 1111 = 255

As you can see, 255 represents the biggest value that can be represented by a single byte and that’s why Final Fantasy (and other games) have used this value as the limit for stats. Nowadays, most information is stored using at least 32 bits at the time so we could technically use values up to slightly less than 4.3 billion, but that wouldn’t be so practical.