Regarding Spell Levels

Knight and Ninja gain their spell levels all at once

If you have been reading my notes on character level ups, and you are an astute veteran of Final Fantasy, you may ask me, “Your level up information is all well and good, but Knights and Ninjas gain their spell levels all at once (not one at a time)! How does this work?” Glad you asked

The Fighter and the Thief are scheduled to receive a spell level at 15th experience level. Without getting into the nitty gritty of the actual code (mostly because it’s immaterial, and partly because I’m too lazy to show all of the code), the Fighter is hard-coded to gain 3 levels then, and the Thief is similarly hard-coded to receive their 4 levels then. Of course, this makes no difference until they receive their class promotion!

The Warrior/Knight’s gain is hard-coded like this:

0×06a300: 2603 — mov r6, 0×3Places “3” in register #6, if Fighter has spell level of 0 and is gaining a spell level

And here is the Thief/Ninja’s gain:

0×06a30c: 2604 — mov r6, 0×4Places “4” in register #6, if Fighter has spell level of 0 and is gaining a spell level

Therefore, if you only wanted them to gain 1 spell level, you could replace the “2603“ at 0×06a300 and the “2604“ at 0×06a30c to “2601“.

Spell Level caps

Ten of the twelve character classes require a spell level cap. The White Wizard and Black Wizard can reach the 8th and final spell level. Any other character is limited to a certain spell level. I won’t painstakingly note the actual code, or interpret it line by line (use Visual Boy Advance to help you here), but the code to limit the other ten classes are to be found as follows:

0×038c64: Limits Warrior, Thief, Monk, and Master to Spell Level 0.

0×038c6a: Limits Knight to Spell Level 3.

0×038c94: Limits Ninja to Spell Level 4.

0×038cc0: Limits Red Mage to Spell Level 5.

0×038cec: Limits Red Wizard, White Mage and Black Mage to Spell Level 7.

Pointers to these algorithms are found in 0×038c3c — 0×038c63. These drive the output for characters in the status screen.

As it has been some time since I edited spell levels in the ROM and I did not make coherent notes on this, I am not sure if more needs to be edited if you are editing the spell level masteries for characters. For instance, I don’t remember if additional edits are required for actually casting a spell of a certain level, or buying a spell. My apologies.