Overflow glitch

The Death Penalty Glitch in action 1ovxL1wdjtI The Overflow Glitch is a glitch that has appeared in various games throughout the series. It often is a glitch that rolls damage over from the maximum damage to either low damage, or instantly killing an enemy, when the player hits a certain amount of kills, Ability Points, or any other special requirements.

Final Fantasy IV
In the game's SNES and PS versions, when Curaja heals more than 16,383 damage on an enemy, the spell will heal the MP of that target instead. This is the only instance of the Overflow Glitch in the game.

Final Fantasy VI
The glitch in action 5MHcwObgZKc The maximum amount of damage a character can do is 65,535 (though it will always show 9999 damage). If a character were to do more damage than that, the overflow will start over from zero again. For example, if a character dealt 70,000 damage, the system will count up to 65,535 and roll over to zero, ending up doing 4,465 damage. The easiest way to trigger the glitch is through casting Ultima with a level 99 character who has over 140 Magic.

Final Fantasy VII
The glitch in action fyYIOROyGmM The Death Penalty Glitch, one of the most well-known Overflow Glitches in the series, is an aspect of Final Fantasy VII where a player kills enough enemies with Vincent Valentine's Death Penalty, or has enough AP on Barret Wallace's Missing Score, that damage overflows. When the damage overflows, the game registers it as a bug, and will instantly kill the enemy.

To perform the overflow, the player must either kill over 65,535 enemies with Vincent, or fill Barret's Missing Score with a mastered Knights of the Round Materia.

There are two ways the overflow may occur. The first is when the base damage of a character's Attack is applied to the enemy's Defense. If this damage exceeds 262,144 damage, the overflow will occur. The second danger occurs right when Random Variance is worked out, which is after all the things like Berserk, Frog, critical hits, and the like have been added. If the damage before Random Variance goes above a random value from 524,288 to 559,241, the damage will overflow.

Other overflow-related bugs involve rolling over AP (only on the Underwater Materia), rolling over Experience Points for characters, rolling over battle and escape counters, rolling over the gil counter, rolling over the timer, and rolling over the chance to cover with the Cover Materia. The maximum amount of battles and escapes the counter will hold is 65,535, and once the player goes over it will reset to 0. For the timer, it will reset back to 0 after roughly 136 years, 36 days, 6 hours, 28 minutes, and 16 seconds of playing the game (impossible by normal means of course, but can still happen). For EXP and gil, the maximum amount is 4,294,967,295, and once over that limit, it will overflow. EXP cannot be overflowed normally unless set to the maximum amount outside of battle. Cover percentage doesn't have a cap and can be increased by equipping multiple Cover Materia at once. The Cover chance overflows at 256%, reducing the percentage back to zero.

Final Fantasy IX
The glitch in action XysIF34CxmI There is a hoax overflow glitch was believed to have occurred in Final Fantasy IX with Freya Crescent's Dragon's Crest ability after killing 65,535 dragons. If the player kills over 65,535 dragons, the damage overflows and does only 1 damage instead. The YouTube video shown is not one of someone who had killed 65,535 dragons, but 0.

Origin
65,535 is a frequently occurring number in the field of computing because it is the highest number which can be represented by an unsigned 16 bit binary number. Some computer programming environments may have pre-defined constant values representing 65,535. In older computers with processors operating with a 16-bit address bus 65535 was the highest addressable memory location.

65,535 is the limit for many player variables in video games. In a computer, overflow is the condition that occurs when a calculation produces a result greater in magnitude than which a given register or storage location can store or represent.