Dear Devs fix the spells names!

[Tsukino]

Fernehalwes, from the Localization team, made a post about the naming conventions during the Beta Test period of FFXIV ARR since there was a heated discussion in regards to the spells names back then as well. Unfortunately the Beta Test Forum isn’t available anymore, but i did manage to find a reddit post in which most of the original post was saved.

People picked this apart in the original thread as well, but for some reason they kept their numbers.

First of all, there is nothing tying the naming of materia to that of spells. They could have easily gone with numbers for materia (which make sense because they are higher level and have more powerful effects) but left the spell names with actual Final Fantasy naming conventions.

Second, the spells are never listed, so them "lining up" is meaningless. They're always shown as icons and the tooltips appear relative to the icon's location. Even in the rest of the series they appeared in multiple columns and never really lined up in Japanese quite like that (except maybe XII).

Then there's the matter of choosing them because the Japanese names only work in the "order learned" and are not in line with effects. But then it makes even less sense to give them numbers. The suffixes are meaningless and only FF fans will notice that they're not in line with increasing power, but numbers pretty much say 3 > 2 and if anything are more confusing than the random suffixes when they don't line up with functionality.

Finally, Square has been "fixing" the naming for years now, ever since they were no longer bound by hard-coded character limitations. For almost 15 years, the games have had the same (or close to the same, barring weird exceptions like Warp) names as the Japanese versions, and they have stuck by this change in nearly every remake and new game released. I'm honestly surprised whoever is in charge of that effort "allowed" the XIV team to get away with just inserting their own system.

Unfortunately our localization team tends to over-think a lot of things, and end up completely rewriting sections of the game to make them sound better as they see it, or to help us out because they know something about the mechanics. Also, they love terrible puns.