Quote Originally Posted by Anonymoose View Post
Aye, that's what I've been thinking about. The thing is, the original point of Final Fantasy was to bring Western fantasy to Japan because it was so exotic and ... fantastic.
Subjective, I personally find western fantasy dull and generic. I like eastern and middle eastern fantasy and mythology. The original point of Final Fantasy was to save the company and bring out a good RPG, not westernize the RPG genre in Japan because the 80s and 90s Japan were starting to turn out the key JRPGs at the time which was significantly different from western RPGs in ways. The only relevance to western RPG FF shared was the magic system was sort of similiar to Dungeons & Dragons, then they went with the current Mana setup that they threw out for FFXIII.


why most of the items in the Japanese versions are katakana of English words (Grass Viper = Gurassubaipa). It sounds more exotic.
You're definitely stretching it a bit. It's not done because it sounded exotic, it's done because it's common practice in Japanese media (specifically gaming) to use generalized names, a lot of FF names, that you forget to point out, are generally much more rooted in older (and usually) middle eastern/asian mythology with the exception of heavy use of norse for some. If I'm in Japan and I try to write out that I seen a Garden Snake, am I trying to be exotic? Or am I just saying it's a Garden Snake?

XIV is a very blatant attempt at westernizing the (MMO) series, much like XIII was for the offline series since fast paced straight to the point gaming is what's popular now but that doesn't mean it's a good thing at times, because it's the biggest reason Korea dislikes TERA, even though it's not a horrible MMO, it's very clearly trying to appeal purely to western bases which Korea's main complaint about TERA aside lack of content, is "It feels to western, if I wanted to play a western MMO I'd play World of Warcraft or Rift."

I get the idea of the thread, but some things are a tad bit of a stretch of the imagination. No one is resistant to change, but remember that Final Fantasy wasn't made to westernize Japanese RPGs, it was made purely to save Square's asses lol.