"Gravity based spells; these hurt when they hit."

I realise that this is a silly thing to start a thread about, but it's fairly recently dawned on me how silly this line is, and how it's clearly a translation error. Cloud says this line (not necessarily word-for-word) when explaining the elements in the Beginner's Halls, but all he really does is state the obvious - of course gravity spells hurt when they hit; all offensive magic tends to. I remember thinking that Cloud meant that the gravity attacks do a lot of damage compared to other elements, like they were the most damaging or something, but as most Final Fantasy fans should know, the Demi spells just lower HP by a certain amount - they can't even kill you.

It is from this I deduce (and I'm sure someone has actual evidence of this, and it is, in fact, old news) that Cloud was supposed to say something like "These reduce your HP" or words to that effect, but the translator saw that line and took it literally as "These attacks make you lose HP" which could be viewed as "These attacks hurt you", as losing HP equals getting hurt in Final Fantasy, so they simply thought that gravity attacks caused a lot of damage, as opposed to the actual point which was "These attacks lower your HP, but don't kill you."

I know this is a silly topic, but for some reason I kind of like how this happened, assuming that's what did.

Well technically, Gravity spells would likely do more damage than regular spells unless we're dealing with hitting elemental weaknesses, so the phrase is not entirely wrong. My guess is that the original line was "These attacks will do a lot of damage, but only if the spell lands" which is pretty truthful since the Gravity spells usually do percentile damage.

That sounds plausible, thanks. :)