Ah, but what I'm saying is that each line in the above template proposal is already 32 bits. Having 32 bits where 3 are needed is indeed overkill. I just listed 'white or black' as that's all FF1 needs (could assign 0x0000 to white, and 0x0001 to black). Certainly this can be expanded to have 0x0002 for red, 0x0003 for blue, 0x0004 for summon, 0x0005 for gray/effect, 0x0006 for ninja, 0x0007 for whatever...) It's basically a menu-restriction. Point being-- 32 bits is still way too many, as you really only need 3, 4, or maybe 5 at the outside. You're never going to see 65000 different "spheres" of magic. Of course, if that is the case, each spell pretty much is a sphere unto itself, which may in fact be desired in some scenario (probably the designer is using that 4-byte value for something else though).

Each game would be able to define these bytes as it wishes though, or that is my understanding at least. That's the reason for making it so large. My thinking is that all of these are big enough except character, which I think needs to be larger due to having a spell book (and I'm afraid it's still too small, I'll post more in that topic later).