[Bug?] Remove Death Status and "Target Dead Party Member" Intertwined

[C-Dude]

iirc, it's "Can target only living entities" and "Miss (Dead XOR Undead) entities" that get tied together.  also iirc, this is just for normal attacks/spells, so well-timed pre-queued items can do things like removing Stone from a Petrified enemy.

it seems intentional to me.  they derive one property from another for spells.  in contrast, i think Item's code checks for certain, terminal statuses being marked to be lifted, and will create an exception in the property.  i believe that's necessary because Items lack the expansive ROM data bytes possessed by attacks/spells.

a more robust way (for spells) would be to find a free spell data bit, and let one of the properties be directly configurable by it.

I've looked into it further, and you're correct.  It must be intentional, because vanilla Life 3 has this same property.  If you que it up to protect a near-fatal ally and they fall before you cast it, then the white magic intro triggers but no animation follows.  If it DID, then Life 3 would work like Life 1 on dead targets (which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I don't think that's what they wanted).

I guess because Magitek doesn't have the casting intro like white magic does, my making it target like that made the situation look glitchy.

So not a bug, but maybe something that could be addressed with a special spell effect (similar to Quake targeting?), having said effect check for and remove death first and then apply healing.

Thanks for the info.  I think I'll scrap the idea for now; it would have caused confusion anyway, since other healing spells wouldn't work in the same manner.  When I look into replacing "Zombie" status with the monster's Undead status, maybe I'll revisit this.