Final Fantasy IV: Kainazzo Shocked!

I can remember playing Final Fantasy IV as a kid and having real troubles with the boss fights in Castle Baron. After you break in via the sewers you have to fight Baigan (and his respawing arms) and then immediately afterwards fight Kainazzo (the water fiend). I remember Kainazzo having these brutal AE water spells and having to try him over and over to kill him...

Here's how my fight last night went.

Cecil - attack
Yang - attack
Porom - cure2
Palom - lit2
Tellah - lit3
Cecil - attack
Yang - attack
Porom - cure2

At this point Tellah finally got around to resolving lit3 which killed Kainazzo. He put his water shield thing up once, immediately before Palom resolved lit2 which brought it down. He never got around to withdrawing into his shell. He never cast an AE spell. He didn't heal himself. Lit3 took him from probably around 60% life to dead in one attack. How was this ever hard? Did I not want to cast my best spells as a kid? Maybe I was using Tellah to heal and the twins to use their stupid twin attacks? I likely didn't know I could heal up between the fights and might have spent all Tellah's mana on Baigan? (To be fair it doesn't make a lot of sense that I can go to my old room in the castle and sleep between fights...)

At any rate Baigan is dead and I got to see one of the silliest cutscenes in any game. Kainazzo (like Milan before him) wants a second crack at killing the party. In this case he causes the walls of the hallway to move inward in order to crush the party like some sort of medieval trash compactor. Palom and Porom get the bright idea to turn themselves into stone in order to stop the walls from moving in any further. After the walls stop Tellah tries to remove the petrification but gets an error message. It can't be removed because it was inflicted of their own will.

There are all sorts of problems here! For one thing, neither of them can actually cast stone. Palom learns it at level 36 and we're not nearly that high. Next, why would stone statues of two little kids stop walls which are presumably able to crush human bones? It doesn't even get to the point of trying to crush them. The walls stop independently as if they're simply unable to push stone children. Finally, what sort of magical universe has the rule that a spell can't be undone if it was self inflicted? There's always absurdities revolving around death in games like this (why can I bring Rydia back to life over and over but Anna takes a couple arrows and is just dead) but this one really takes the cake. Under the logic used here if Tellah had turned them to stone (a spell he can actually cast) he could have then healed them of it after the doors open. But since they wanted to get stoned it can't be undone? Bah! Nevermind the fact it actually does get undone, later, by the head honcho of Mysidia...