The "Super Soft" Myth

No, you can't un-stone Palom and Porom

The "Super Soft" or "Unstoning the Twins" side quest rumor is a very old, and completely debunked myth about Final Fantasy IV. I am including it for those who still continue to believe the rumor. The myth came to life regarding what was either a cruel joke played by the programmers of Final Fantasy IV or, simply an unfinished artifact that was not properly removed. However I believe it was simply a cruel joke.

Specifically this myth deals with the self-petrification of the Mysidian twins Palom and Porom. Where they sacrifice themselves in Baron Castle to stop Caignazzio's room-crushing spell. After the twins do this, if you walk up to their "statues" a small item menu will pop-up, as though if you had the correct item you could remove their petrification. Unfortunately there is NO item in the game that will do this. I repeat, there ARE NO ITEMS in the game that will remove the twin's petrification. There is not and never has been a item in any version of Final Fantasy IV called "Super Soft". There is no side quest in any version of the game that allows you to either find an item that I just told you does not and never did exist, or to un-stone the twins.

So why is the menu pop-up there?

As I said it's a cruel joke. In the original version of Final Fantasy IV, and all remakes since (except for the SNES FF-II version...more on that later) the game contains a plethora of healing items for various status ailments. There is an petrification healing item called a "Gold Pin", but this does not work on the twins. However later in the game you are able to obtain a cure-all panacea. In English versions of the game this item is simply called "Remedy" and it does not work on the twins either. However the name of the item in Japanese roughly translates to "Medicine of 1000 Uses". This item is also very expensive. I believe the joke was for the player to waste these expensive "Cure All" items on the twins in a futile attempt to heal them.

However that's not the end of it...

I'm not sure how pervasive this myth was amongst Japanese players. However it really grew legs among English-speaking players of the original SNES English localization, known as Final Fantasy II. In that game the multitude of specific status-healing items and a great number of other items were "dummied out" of the game. That is, you cannot normally get them in the game but they do still exist. Every item that was "dummied out" had it's name changed to "Dummy". All told, there are somewhere around 50 dummied items in the game. Furthermore the expensive "Cure All" item was made extremely common and cheap. In this game version it's known simply as "Heal".

Now the context is somewhat lost if you're playing that version of the game, so it's somewhat more confusing. Couple that with a number of players that did learn that many things were removed from Final Fantasy II, the idea that an item or quest was removed had a lot more credibility. Compound it with players who used a Game Genie and specifically used the infamous "Gunslinger" code to add the Dummy items to their item list, which made 1) the existence of the Dummy items known, and 2) not many knew what they were for or did, 3) make the assumption one of them might be the item to use on the petrified twins, and 4) put that information out on the early internet... You get a huge rumor that fans, particularly the younger ones, believe as gospel and spread. Unfortunately it is no more true for the Final Fantasy II version than it is for any other versions.

The real method for un-stoning the twins is simple. Play the game! Once you get far enough the Elder of Mysidia will un-stone the twins himself.

Oddly enough, this myth became a reality 8 years after Final Fantasy IV, in Final Fantasy IX. In this game an NPC is petrified and there is a side quest to obtain the ingredients for a "Super Soft" potion which if completed will heal the petrified character. One wonders if it was added as an homage to the futile joke in Final Fantasy IV as yet another homage to the FF series to that point, as almost everything in Final Fantasy IX was.