Noncompositional

At the risk of exposing myself as a video game geek as well as a linguistics geek: I am a fan of the Final Fantasy series of video games, which are console-style role playing games developed by the Japanese company Square Enix (formerly SquareSoft, and at some point involved with Electronic Arts). The series began on the Family Computer System (Famicom) in Japan in 1987, and released for the Nintendo Entertainment System in America in 1990. The basic premise in these games is that you are (or control) some hero (who may be reluctant) who ends up having to save the world from some magical, political, or politico-magical force. The hero is also accompanied by a group of companions who tag along for various reasons, including possibly being heroes themselves.

Without getting into the gruesome details of how the gameplay works, one important aspect is called status effects, or simply status. A status effect is some temporary or curable altering of a character’s normal condition. That is, normally a character is able to take any of the normal commands (attack with equipped weapon, cast spell, execute class-specific action [e.g., steal from opponent]), etc.), and execute them in a timely fashion with the desired effect. Characters also never randomly tire, drop dead, or get second winds, etc. on their own. However, any number of things can change this. A character may be “poisoned,” meaning that they will “die” (go out of commission) as their body is gradually weakened; or they may be “blinded,” and be unable to connect with physical attacks; or they may be “confused” and execute random commands on random targets; and so on. For each status, there is usually a particular way to cure it without waiting for it to stop on its own. To cure poisoning, one can use an antidote; for blindness, eye drops; for confusion, whack them with something.

One question I have is the origin of the term status. In my experience, a status effect is generally a temporary, negative affliction that affects video game characters in adventure/RPG games. But surely (?) the usage is slightly wider, and probably older. But I just don’t have the experience that lets me know if, say, it is widely used outside of console and computer RPGs - pencil and paper RPGs, action games, anything? I recently became aware of the terms buff and debuff, apparently common in the MMORPG community for positive and negative status changes on a character. I think status effect, too, can apply to a positive effect, like haste (execute actions faster) and regen(erate) (gradually gain back health; the opposite of poison). Though this is the marked case, so we can talk about positive status effects for the good guys, but just status effects for the negative ones. (Though this is not to rule out negative status effects, or using the unmarked term as a cover category.)

Now, Final Fantasy has an interesting nomenclature when it comes to the magical spells. The one part I want to look at is the status-inflicting and status-curing spells. These are generally limited to names that can be written with four or less kana (now due to convention, earlier due to limitations on word lengths, I suppose), and they are usually modeled on English words. So the spell for poisoning is ポイズン po.i.zu.n, the one for blinding is ブライン bu.ra.i.n. The spells that remove such effects are sometimes similar-sounding to the inflicting counterparts, but with a -na ending, which I suppose is basically an extended use of the Japanese negation suffix of the same form. So we have ブライナ bu.ra.i.na, which removes blindness, ポイゾナ po.i.zo.na, which removes poisoning, and ストナ su.to.na, which removes “stone,” or petrification. Okay, it’s cute.

But what is going on with the all-purpose spell esuna? It removes a wide range of negative status effects. But why the heck is that what it’s called? A few months ago, I finally realized: it’s the letter S with the -na ending. That is, it negates Status effects. Very clever. Of course, in Japanese, status effects are called 異常状態 i.joo.joo.tai (I think; I suppose it’s always possible that ステータス is common as well). At least, I think that’s why the spell is called what it is. Maybe it’s all explained somewhere on some website. Interestingly, esuna is sometimes the only spell not given a transparent-ish English name during localization.