I searched for answers about this online, but all I could find were the facts, not the reasons... So, I guess I had to return briefly to see what you guys thought.
One of the unique (and, IMO, stupid) aspects of Final Fantasy IX is that the "stop" status effect counts as death when calculating a game over.
I've always wondered how a temporary status effect could possibly count as death toward a game over. Stone, I understand. Stone doesn't wear off until you cure it. But stop wears off. Even if your entire party is stopped, assuming the game doesn't call it a game over, all you have to do is wait, and anyone who survives will eventually no longer be stopped.
To me, this is tantamount of having an entire party with the "slow" status counting as game over. At least slow won't eventually wear off (until the end of battle or you manually remove it), so this actually makes more sense than counting "stop" as dead.
I don't know. A battle system that calls a mildly inconvenienced battle party annihilated just seems like a game-breaking bug to me. Can anyone explain what possible reasoning the folks at Squaresoft could have had when coming up with this one? Because I just don't get it.