Relic Quest glich conundrum

Without getting too much into it, brother was in a WP group, one of the DPS wasn't happy it wasn't going fast enough, yadda yadda, DPS drops, healer drops, group breaks up. Y'know, the usual. Anyway, after brother leaves the duty, he notices his Relic quest objective has changed from "defeat Hydra" to "Talk to person in North Shroud" aka the first step. Calls a GM, GM tells him, and I quote, "It is outside of our scope to fix quest related problems." And tells him to restart the quest. Not to say that wasn't expected.

But then we started thinking. He still has the unfinished relic in his possession, and the quest technically wasn't abandoned, it just reset for some reason. So the question is: Do we drop the sword, abandon the quest and retry? Or will the game still think he's completed that part of the quest and mess up again when we get to that point? Do we keep the unfinished sword and fight the hydra and see if it works? Will it even let him do Hydra? Or do we just redo the steps? Will that mess up the progress? I'm leaning towards just restarting entirely from scratch, since we weren't that far in anyway. I just don't want him throwing away the money for the materia to have it bug out again.

If he can equip it and talk the NPC to start the Hydra fight he should be fine.

That's what we're hoping for. We're gonna give that a shot later when we can play. Just hoping he'll be able to continue the quest from that point really.

If he can't, there's a thread on the bugs forum where people it's happened to are encouraged to report in while the devs have a poke around.
Luck.

Yeah didn't work. We just restarted it, so far no problems.