This section is dedicated to someone who reached out to me while writing this book, a Butterfree who goes by their species name only, and requested that I write about lookalike items.
While traversing mystery dungeons, you almost certainly have stumbled upon items that look near-identical to other items, yet behave completely differently. "Oran berries" that poison you, "sleep seeds" that let you walk on water, "x-ray specs" that make it difficult to see, and so on. The infamous lookalike items, the adventurer's bane. One might wonder why they look so similar, and even have similar names. To explain why, I'll need to give a history lesson in linguistics.
There are dozens upon dozens of lookalike items, and I'll be explaining most of them in later sections. This section is simply an overview of them in general.
Long, long ago, long before the first mystery dungeon, long before even footprint runes, there was the First Language. It was an exclusively oral language, and it split into what would become the languages we know now. The First Language was a powerful thing, and while its power has mostly faded with its extinction, remnants of it remain in today's languages.
The oren berry is the most widely known lookalike item. If you've been in an adventuring class, you likely know the mnemonic "Blue stem is yummy, green hurts my tummy", to differentiate between the blue-stemmed oran and the green-stemmed oren. The origin of the names oran and oren come from a similar place. The word "oren" actually is derived from the old, seldom-used term "orenge", which means "poisonous fruit". You might notice that that word looks very close to orange, and it actually is thought to derive from the word orange. It's thought that orange used to also mean "unripe fruit", after the orange color of unripe tomatoes, and eventually, it split into orange, the color and fruit (which oran is derived from), and orenge, which would become oren.
Similarly, orans and orens are thought to be closely related biologically. What's strange, though, is that the word orenge predates the first record of oren berries. You might think they simply hadn't been discovered yet, but no. The first record of oren berries, as much as could be translated, stated that oren plants appeared in their fields, in the place of some of their oran plants.
This pattern exists with other lookalike items, too. The term via came before the via seed, reviser before the reviser seed, and so on. It's not confirmed, but it's widely believed that the terms caused the existence of the lookalike items.
Corroborating this is the fact that certain lookalike items have been lost to history, around the time of their terms' extinction. Nobody uses the word "engree" anymore, and you don't see engree seeds anymore. If you're wondering what either of those are, "engree" is a word that's a distant ancestor of "angry", and engree seeds, well, made you angry as a Mankey. Both the term and the seed went extinct about 2500 years ago.
These aren't limited to words in Mystre, either. Mix elixirs were first discovered in the Sand Continent, where the language Tapaga is used. Unfortunately, I don't know much Tapagase, but I'll do my best to explain nonetheless. You may wonder why Mix Elixirs restore the stamina of Linoone and only Linoone, when the name in Mystre doesn't suggest this at all. In Tapagase, the words "max", "mix", and "Linoone" are all very similar, leading to the term mix causing the mix elixir to exist.
While it isn't entirely known why lookalike items look so similar to their, well, lookalikes, it's thought to also do with their terms being similar. Oren berries' green stems are a common sign of unripe berries. The markings on mix elixirs resemble those on a Linoone. While not every lookalike item follows this rule, most of them do.
Even now, language is ever-changing and evolving. More and more new words are spoken into existence with each year, while others are forgotten. It's very possible that the oren berry will go extinct in the next century, as its term already borders on it. Similarly, it's likely that the words of tomorrow will create new lookalike items altogether. With the slang "sus" on the rise, and its similarity to "sitrus", we could see the appearance of a "sus berry" before too long.
And that's all I have to say about lookalike items for now! A fascinating intersection between the evolutions of life and language.