Spells, why you no named good?!

[FMElan]

I answered this yesterday in another thread, and it was discussed during Beta as well, but here goes.

First and foremost, the -ara, -aga and -aja suffixes are literally nonsense. They don't mean anything, even in Japan. While they do keep the suffixes in the JPN version, the difficulty was that there's nothing really consistent about the naming scheme over the various different uses for them. I don't remember the exact suffixes used in this example, so it's not 100% accurate, but...

When it comes to spells, we generally know that -ara is L2, -aga is L3 and -aja is L4. This holds true in Japan, but they have at least one more suffix that I can't remember at this time. Unfortunately, those same suffixes are used for the different levels of materia, and they don't hold to their own naming scheme, which makes it a lot more difficult for both the localization team and the players. IIRC, L2 is -ara, L3 is -aga and then there's something else for L4.

Now, while it WOULD work to assign the names of spells based on their affects, ala FFXI(Fire = Single Target, Fira = PBAOE, Firaga = AOE), the problem is that this sort of naming scheme needs to start in Japan, since the localization team has no control over what spells are coming and in what order they'll be implemented.

If you want to enable this, it's not impossible. Simply create a Macro with the Fire 2 spell, name it "Fira" and give it the Fire 2 icon. Sure, it's not official, but if all you want is to see the classic FF name...

You must have only played FFVIII onward.

Actually, FF1-7 also had this naming scheme, it was just changed in localization due to space issues. FF1, for example, only had a 4-character maximum, so Fire = Fire, Blizzard = Ice, Thunder = Lit. FFVII is the main exception, in that it HAD the character space for the spells, but it wasn't translated by Squaresoft.