Cure vs Heal
 

IN the majority of Final Fantasy games you heal HP buy using cure spells, and heal status effects using a heal spell(though that verys).

Isn't that backwards? You don't cure wounds you heal them. And you don't heal sickness you cure it.

Discuss.

Good observation...I'm guessing it's a mistranslation to English, but I could be wrong...

Probably a D&D conceit... The healing spells are called Cure spells, and the healing spell that removes all status effects is called Heal...

Then again, Heal sounds better when you're saying you want o heal somone of his zombification/confusion, rather than "curing" it (Images of curing status ailments witha hammer leap into my head for some strange reason).

It's not. Cure is the best translation you can get, which is why all of the translations use it, even the horrible ones like 2a and Tactics.

As for 'heal' the spell is called Esuna and the item is remedy.

Not always. It changed somewhere to Esuna, but in some RPG's it was called Heal.

Yes... but the TheZeroMan specifically stated Final Fantasy, in which the status-healing spell should always have been translated as Esuna. I don't know what the deal with any other RPGs are.

Yeah, I noticed that.
I don't really care.

But, to be honest, it did cause me a great deal of trouble because I really didn't understand what heal did until I used it on somebody who needed healing AND curing.

in Chrono Cross the status ailment removing item was called Panacea, which is probably the best name you could have for an item like that. look it up on www.dictionary.com

personally, i like the set-up they have now, if just for familiarities sake. if they suddenly changed it, i would be struggling to remember wat spell to heal wat ailement, be it damage or disease. however, panacea was definately a good name for the cure-all in chrono cross, but alas it would disrupt the ff style of magicking, causing all hell to break loose over the change of the name.

Something ain't right if people make a huge deal over the changing of a name...