Let's Talk Zombie (Status)

I've been looking at the Zombie status with scorn, lately, thinking about doing something drastic with it (changing it to work identically to the Relic Ring, IE: the status sets the Undead flag).  Before I dive into that, though, I thought it'd be nice to gather some opinions on the status in general.


Zombie first appears in Final Fantasy 5, where it works essentially the same way as it does in Final Fantasy 6: it sets HP to 0, muddles the target, and counts them as defeated for the purposes of ending a battle.

Zombie in Final Fantasy 8 and later, however, uses the Undead model in its entirety: it inverts healing magic, grants immunity to death magic, and makes life spells instant-death.


Both iterations have interesting applications.  With the modern version, it could be inflicted on enemies to make them vulnerable to curing attacks (unlike now, where it kills them and makes their invisible body randomly attack the party).  However, FF6 Zombie in particular has a neat mechanic... it can be cast by a monster on a dead party member to raise them as a muddled pain.  This tactic is only seen deployed by Hidon in the vanilla game, but it has potential.

So which do you prefer?