Curse you, status effects, stop confusing my heart

For part one of this three-part status effect miniseries, head over to this post, Status effects are poisons that turn my silent heart to stone

The nightmare continues. What, you thought that it was over? Unfortunately, this is not the case, as status effects are nearly as numerous as the hitpoints of a high-level Final Fantasy character. I don’t want to talk about all of them, as some of them actually make sense. But where’s the fun in that? It’s not the JRPG way, man!

So, instead, let’s take a look at some of the other bizarre, nonsensical, and pointless status effects from the world of RPGs. Is it going to be a fair and accommodating look at them? No. No it is not.


Curse



Voodoo shit. Execration (not excretion). Hexing (not Hexen). The fine art of cursing is something that we’ve probably all tried at some point. That dick stole my money in the lunchroom, so I’m going to recite a curse that will cause his head to be replaced by his ass while he sleeps. They never work, unfortunately, not even with the use of a voodoo doll or an elaborate ritual site crafted in the luggage closet.

However, the world of Final Fantasy does not play by our rules. In fact, a curse is a very dangerous thing to even the greatest of heroes, as a curse spells certain doom for someone who does not act to nullify this terrible affliction. How so? Well...that’s the tricky part. Sometimes, it kills you after a certain number of turns.

Or it makes you unable to use special attacks.

Or it lowers your stats until it is cured.

Or it just up and fucks your whole party with poison, disease, confuse, and sap.

Seriously, can’t someone standardize this shit? I mean, calling it “curse” is pretty damn vague anyway. How about “Bullshit?” It’s far more representative of the actual spell, especially for the last one.

Honestly, what the fuck kind of shit is poison, disease, confuse, and sap all at the same time? For everyone in the party! It basically means that you’re going to slowly lose health in three different ways, and cast random shit on your fellow party members. Good god.

No matter the particular version of curse, it can die in a fire, which would probably be more effective than trying in vain to get one of your characters to heal it.

Confusion



As long as we’re on the subject of stuff that makes no sense, let’s have a chat about confusion. The basic concept behind a confusion status is that a character’s brain got rewired temporarily, and he’s no longer able to tell who is a friend and who is an enemy. He’ll often respond to this with plenty of sword swipes, fire spells, and sometimes even beat the shit out of himself.

Holy hell, where to begin.

First off, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a JRPG enemy, but let’s have a quick look at this guy:



FUCK. OK, now let’s have a lookie here:



What is enemy? I do not know! How do I tell? Is it the one that I most want to have sex with? Hmm, still can’t decide!

Not stupid enough for you? OK, how about this? When you get confused about something, what’s generally your instinctual response? To attack the thing nearest to you? Or to, I don’t know, maybe take a step back for a second, reevaluate the situation, maybe have a nap? I typically don’t get cast-happy when I’m confused, but maybe that’s just me.

I also don’t start cutting myself with a sword. Is this some sort of psychological doppelganger response here? Oh god, I’m confused! I think that perhaps this enemy has replaced the real me with an evil twin, and to defeat this evil, I must defeat myself! I suppose it isn’t that farfetched considering how often you have to fight an evil shadow version of yourself in JRPGs. But, come on man, in that case you don’t actually have to try to light yourself on fire!

How do you cure confusion? In a way that’s more likely to cause confusion than anything: by smacking the afflicted character in the face.

Here’s what the game assumes:

Party member 1: “Oh no, I’m confused! Better start punching myself in the crotch!”
Party member 2: “I’ll save you!” *smacks party member 1 in the crotch*
Party member 1: “My eyes have been opened! You are a gentleman and a scholar.”

Here’s what the situation would really be like.

Party member 1: “Oh no, I’m confused! Better start punching myself in the crotch!”
Party member 2: “I’ll save you!” *smacks party member 1 in the crotch*
Party member 1: “What have you done to my fucking crotch? You’ll die by my hand, you evil bastard!”

The best part of confusion is that you lose all control of your character, which is awesome when your healer gets confused and you happened to be all about of panacea bottles. It’s even better when your whole party gets confused and you get to watch some ultra-violent version of The Three Stooges play out in front of you. Dammit Curly, stop spamming firega.

Stop



Remember playing “Red Light/Green Light” as a kid? When someone yelled “red light,” you had to freeze in place; if you moved, you were out. You could only move when the leader yelled “green light.”

Stop, otherwise known as temporal stasis (I guess), is very similar. Someone yells stop, and you stop. You can’t move, attack, use items, or do anything. You just stand there.

“Oh, you mean like paralysis?” you say. Yes, just like that, except that it doesn’t make any sense! No matter how you understand stop, it’s total bollocks.

Let’s say that it’s just as simple as someone stopping because they’re servile and they were told to, just as in “Red Light/Green Light.” Maybe they just really like that game, and they couldn’t really get over it as a kid. Either way, as their friends die around them, you’d think that they’d say, “Hey, maybe I could recite a healing spell under my breath and still win the game!”

If temporal stasis is more to your liking, you’re going to be disappointed. Temporal stasis means that a person experiences no passage of time, even though the passage of time continues around him. To him, massive amounts of time would pass in an instant. Now, to achieve stasis, the actual space around that person would have to be affected, as would anything that entered that temporal field. So, let’s say a jackass tries to swing a sword at the stopped character. Nope. Impossible, because as soon as that sword enters the temporal stasis field, it would be subject to the same rules as the person in stasis. No movement would be possible, not even that of inertia, so a sword stroke that began outside of the stasis field would still stop instantly.

Also, my scientific logic is as impenetrable as my conception of a stasis field, so step off.

And with that, friends, the prosecution rests. There is nothing left for me to say about status effects, and I hope you’ll agree that we should cast petrify on those little bastards.

But the fun isn’t over yet. This is but part two of three in this series of happy fun. Part three will be a great time, of this I am sure. What could it be, you ask? Well, I’ve talked about all of this existing status effects that I hate…but what about new status effects? A new star is born every day, right? Let’s give birth to some stars, baby.

Gross.

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