no dont stop u ARE CORRECT in ff7 terms too.
qhimm and terrence will confirm this too, ive been testing ficedulas ff7music patch and i used the same save (on the world map outside corel towards gold saucer) and it takes EXACTLY indentical amount of steps to the next fight which is either with 2 joker/card dealing things or (more often) this sea horse dragon things that thru boomerang thingys (very BAD desciption ) and theres always 3 of em. yes the battle "formations" are loaded into memory, only prob is hunting them and changing them, then say record the value, make a patch or a trainer? then move to editing the formations etc till we now what that segment of the memory stores, and i bet the way its in the memeory is the way it is stored on disk? you ll notice the same for save files, they are simply uploaded to a certain portion of ram, my my, can u think of setting up your next fight with diamond weapon? THREE times in a row? with the boss music playing? sounds good doesnt it? thats what we want to acheive in terms of battle munipulation!