Statuses in FFZ are a class of special effects that are placed on creatures via specific abilities. They are ongoing effects that characters acquire (or have forced on them) that last for an extended period of time (usually, until the end of a combat, but sometimes even after that, and most can be removed in some manner before then). They are a major strategic dimension in the game — every combat will likely involve them in some form or another, and applying, removing, and laboring under or flourishing with statuses will be things every character becomes familiar with.
Statuses come in two basic varieties: positive statuses (called enhancements) and negative statuses (called ailments).
Statuses are vaguely associated with level, in that they begin fairly weak and merely annoying, and graduate to powerful and devastating by the end of the campaign. This is not a hard-and-fast association, and depends more on whether you are low-level, mid-level, or high-level. Like many things with a level rating, a status can be found out of context, but it tends to be very binary when it is too far out of context (either devastating or irrelevant).
Removing Ailments
If you have any Luck, you can try to remove ailments early in the same way that you would achieve a critical hit: by a Luck roll opposed against the person that inflicted the ailment on you. You can trigger this roll by taking the Defend action and spending one Luck point. When you Defend to remove an ailment, you don't gain any of the usual bonuses of your Defend action. If you win the Luck check, you throw the ailment off early.
Only ailments that end with the combat can be removed like this (so you cannot remove Petrify, for instance, but you can try to remove Stop, or Eject), and nothing stops them from applying the ailment again (except that you may throw it off with another Luck check, assuming you have Luck to spend).
