The Paladin Shield, aka The Cursed Shield, is a game item in Final Fantasy VI. Its two names come from its dual nature: when the player first obtains the shield, it is cursed. Through a long process, it loses its curse and becomes the Paladin Shield.
To even acquire the Cursed Shield requires effort and knowing where it is. Once the player gets it, and equips it to a character, it has terrible defense and inflicts status ailments on that character, poisoning them, confusing them, and sentencing them to death. The player then has to fight and survive 256 battles with the Cursed Shield, at which point it loses its curse and becomes the Paladin Shield, which has great defense, absorbs elemental magic, and teaches the character holding it a super high level spell. There is one area of the game where the player can fight enemies that run away, and by walking around in circles, being attacked, and then having the enemies run away, the player can get through 256 battles. Maybe while making tally marks in a little notebook to make sure the whole thing is really working like the many online guides say it would.
Like much else in the level grinding formula, the Paladin Shield makes the game very easy, but in the time it takes to get it, the player could do something more useful in the game. Or in real life. But it is attractive to go and get, the completionist in us, by which I mean, in me, wants to prove they can complete the quest. It might have been twenty years ago that Narzos mentioned wasting an afternoon this way. And today, I did likewise. I might have invented a new emotion, a combination of pride and shame. Prame or shide, I might call it. That I did something so useless, but so faithfully. A contradiction, like the Cursed/Paladin shield itself. I now possess a Paladin Shield. Unfolded laundry and unread books are scattered across my floor. My stomach is roiling even though I have vague memories of going to the kitchen for carbs and cheese throughout the day. But I have a Paladin Shield.
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...remember to equip ribbons to nullify the status ailments