Posted February 14, 2019
DivisionByZero.620: Usually, there's no balance problem with death removing all ailments because it's generally harder to resurrect a character than clear ailments. In most classic RPGs, any healer who's able to raise the dead was able to remove ailments several levels ago.
Surprisingly, your claim about being able to remove status ailments before reviving the dead is often not true. * In Wizardry 1-5, clerics can revive the dead before they can cure petrification (assuming the player didn't get strange luck with spell learning). In Wizardry 8, a few conditions can't be cured with a spell other than Restoration (level 7), but Resurrection is 6th level.
* In Final Fantasy, petrification requires a 6th level spell, and paralysis a 7th, but resurrection can be done with a 5th level spell. In FF2, reviving characters can be done more easily than curing many status ailments (Life 1 can revive, but you need Esuna 5 to cure petrification, and you need to be lucky or have high spirit if you want it to work during combat.)
* In many Dragon Quest games, you can't ever remove effects like Dazzle/Surround and Fizzle/Stopspell with a spell, but you can revive the dead. (There's also cases where a character learns Kazing/Revive but not Fullheal/Healall.)
* In games based off Dungeons and Dragons, Raise Dead is 5th level, but some status ailments require Heal, which is 6th level, to cure.
* In the NES version of Ultima 3, you can revive a character with a spell, but there's no spell to cure the common cold.
* In classic Bard's Tale, you can't cure Old as easily as you can revive the dead; furthermore, except in BT3 petrification is harder to cure than death.
I have a hard time thinking of any classic RPGs where curing all status ailments is easier than reviving a dead character. The Might and Magic series is the only example I can think of.
(Note that I exclude single character RPGs from this discussion, as well as RPGs that lack status ailments.)