Pokémon: Full Heal
Comments(5) There’s an item in Pokémon called “Full Heal”. You can buy it at several of the stores in the game. What would you guess it does? If you said “Restores all of a pokémon’s lost hit points”, then you think like me. You’re also wrong. That’s what “Max Potion” does. “Full Heal” is Pokémon‘s equivalent of the Final Fantasy “Esuna” spell: it removes all status effects (such as “poisoned” and “paralyzed”) from a single pokémon. And this made me realize something: I have a strong preference about the terminology for these things. Wounds are “healed”, status effects are “cured”. Doing it the other way around sounds wrong to me, even though the words are almost completely interchangeable in normal English usage.
Even in the context of games, my preferences aren’t completely industry-standard: consider the “Cure Light Wounds” family of spells in D&D, and all the games that have similarly-named spells in imitation. Are my terminological expectations completely groundless? I don’t think so; the various Pokémon FAQs and hint sheets I’ve been looking at tend to favor my usage, even if the game itself doesn’t. Still, this is something worth bearing in mind as I look at other games.
I have the same preferences as you, and in my case they’re from early Ultimas (Heal for hit points, Cure for poison). Maybe this is an influence for you.
You’re probably right. Ultima has been part of my mental landscape for a long time, and was very consistent about little things like this (even as it completely retconned everything else, including the geography).
In the original Final Fantasy, CURE & HEAL were both HP restorers. (PURE fixed poison)
miegndakdkjdncndcnfnmfmjfnfnfnfnfn
Necrocommenting this, I think English usage supports your intuition. “Cure” applies to diseases and “heal” applies to injuries–you look for a cure for cancer, and your broken arm heals. Time heals all wounds, but an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
The other thing is that healing tends to be either passive or miraculous–injuries heal eventually, but if you look for “he healed” the results you find are generally about Jesus working miracles. Whereas if you look for “he cured,” well, it’s mostly miracle cures, but these are meant to be pseudoscientific rather than literal miracles.