Can monsters be made to display their status?

So, I've been looking into this and Assassin was very much correct; it's very impractical to add graphical indication to an enemy to indicate their status. The two patches I was hoping to use as guides to that effect change existing RAM infrastructure to modify how statuses display on players, but that data then points to undocumented draw commands. Additionally, monsters have no similar data structure in the RAM, and there does not appear to be space to add it.

Even if there was, my basic comprehension of hex editing lacks the skill to implement it.

All hope is not lost, however! Notifying the player of the monster's status should be possible with the monster script system. If the monster is given a conditional attack (through battle command FC) reacting to the spell Scan, that could trigger a status check, which in turn could trigger a message to display, then that message would be appended to the Scan display and tell the player if the monster has a status.
Also... if I can find out where the color for command FA's red flash is stored, maybe I can change it conditionally and have the monsters occasionally flash different colors based on their statuses (haste, slow, stop, shell, safe, reflect).

There are two flaws with this approach, of course; it'll eat up a LOT of battle script space _and_ if the monster is berserk or muddled the status messages will not display (since it causes the monster to ignore its script). Still, it's at least a start; going to see how far I can get with this.


I also had another idea which might work to display more statuses, but it would severely limit the possibilities during battle. If each formation was restricted to three unique monsters (no duplicates), the remaining three slots could be reserved for each monster's corresponding 'sleep' variant. When subjected to the sleep status, the awakened monster would be hidden and its sleeping variety (with a separate graphic) would be revealed (using variables to transfer HP and MP). Likewise, when sleep is removed (by timer, physical damage, or what-have-you) the sleeping monster would be hidden and the awakened monster would appear once more.
By limiting the roster to three unique monster types, statuses like Poison, Stone, and Frozen could be additionally represented by changing the monster's palette (there are only 3 per battle, by monster type, hence requiring uniques).
This idea introduces even more problems than the first, however, since it would not only eat up monster script space but also monster graphic space, halving the variety of battles in the game. It'd also probably require heavy scripting for multi-wave monster fights [scripted formation changes] to keep the battles interesting, considering the number of monsters on screen is severely limited. Finally, this wouldn't work in a patch that uses Leap for learning Rages because every monster formation would have six entities in it... it's really something to explore on a from-scratch project.

Anyway, I'm going to toy with the monster script editor and see if I can make something interesting with this.