Quote Originally Posted by Feronar View Post
Also, in the early FF games, like back on the Super Nintendo, the white mage's big powerful offensive spell was called Pearl. I wonder why they changed it to Holy.
It always was Holy, but because of Nintendo's draconian American censorship rules at the time, they forced Square to change it in the US versions of FFI, IV and VI to remove any trace of religious iconography (this is also why the chapels in FFI became 'clinics'). Sony had no such scruples however at portraying even distantly 'religious' terms in FFVII, so Holy was properly translated as Holy for the first time, and has been the case for each FF game ever since.

The 'Ra/Ga/Ja' thing however is more just pragmatism. Ra/Ga/Ja are suffixes that are obtuse and confusing to new players who are not familiar with past FF games, so FFXIV has reverted to the old style numbering system for spell tiers (and before you pass judgement, FFXI actually used both, leading to such silly spell names as 'Curaga VI'). It is not necessarily a bad thing, just a different thing, and as others have said, it's more easily understood if you were familiar with the older FF games pre-FFVIII which signified the change in the English-language versions from spells being numbered to 'Ra/Ga/Ja' suffixes.