How Final Fantasy Taught Me the Word ‘Jihad’

Here’s a funny story about how video games can make for some very weird cross-cultural connections. Specifically, going deep on Final Fantasy VI taught me the word jihad back before many non-Muslims living in America would have a reason to learn it. But that doesn’t mean I encountered it in a way that offered fewer negative connotations. No, Final Fantasy’s usage of the term was so loaded that it was actually stripped from the English-language installments of the franchise.

This is a follow-up, in a sense, to my previous post, about how the Final Fantasy character Bahamut originated in Dungeons & Dragons but also goes back to Islamic lore. While researching these things, I was emailing back and forth with Fatimah, who is one of the two Japanese translators I work with on this site and who is Muslim. When Fatimah expressed surprise that Final Fantasy would incorporate elements from medieval Islamic cosmography, I realized that not only did I have a whopper of a connection to explain to her about this very subject, but also that there was a lot to unpack in this particular connection.

I couldn’t find this gif online so I made it specifically for this post.

Final Fantasy VI hit shelves in North America on October 11, 1994, and I was instantly all about it. I’d played Final Fantasy IV over and over again, and I had consumed another Squaresoft RPG, Secret of Mana, with equal enthusiasm. I therefore could not have been more primed to enjoy Final Fantasy VI. But don’t think that I just merely played this game. You have to picture me being a twelve-year-old who preferred video games to other kids my age, who lived in the country and therefore was socially isolated anyway, and who was just learning how to use the internet to further his nerdish interests. I received Final Fantasy VI for Christmas in 1994 and beat it on January 29, the day of Super Bowl Sunday. Don’t ask me what the halftime show was, because I was glued to the upstairs TV, watching what seemed like the grandest ending to a video game I’ve ever seen. In some ways, I’m not sure any video game ending has moved me as much.

Beating Final Fantasy VI did not mean I was done with it, however. Almost immediately, I began it again, and over time I would explore every inch of this game. Regarding my activities online, this meant reading about the game in a depth I’d never before experienced. I consumed everything from wild theories — Was Gogo actually Daryl? Is there a way to revive General Leo? Are Siegfriend and Ziegfried actually two separate people? — to in-depth breakdowns of how the game we got in North America differed from the original Japanese version.

At some point, I happened across a webpage that fundamentally changed my relationship to video games and that is also responsible for me making Thrilling Tales of Old Video Games all these years later: Origins of Character Names in Final Fantasy. It’s just what it sounds like. Less a full site than a long text document, it points out the different sources of proper names throughout the Final Fantasy series. It really opened my eyes, because while I knew a fair bit about Greek mythology and the Bible, there was a literal world of cultural references that Final Fantasy was pointing to, and I loved using this document as a jumping off point for further research into all the stuff that added up to make the video games I loved. At some point the list became part of the Final Fantasy Compendium website, which today offers up the original document as I remember it as well as an updated version that covers through Final Fantasy XII.

One of the things that I remembered reading in the document was that the Final Fantasy VI summon known as Crusader in the English localization of the game was known as Jihad in the original Japanese.

As I said before, there is a lot to unpack here, but when that word jihad was introduced to the mainstream English lexicon as a result of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and news reporting on extremist Muslim groups, this webpage made me have a reaction that was probably unique: “Oh, like that thing from Final Fantasy.”

As far as Final Fantasy VI summons go, this one is a weird one. It’s only acquired late in the game, because to get it the player has to defeat eight optional dragon bosses, and two of them only exist in the final dungeon. And it’s not particularly helpful to use in battle. Its attack deals massive physical damage to all enemies but also the player’s party, meaning you could wipe yourself out.

This summon is also odd because most in the game call forth a single entity but this one delivers three different ones into battle: Demon (鬼神 or Kishin), Fiend (魔神 or Majin) and Goddess (女神 or Megami). This is a reference to the lore of the game itself; the backstory of Final Fantasy VI tells of three warring gods that are responsible for creating magic and starting a war. (More on that in the miscellaneous notes section.) But this is all to say that the figures appearing on screen don’t correspond to anything associated with Islam. The nature of the attack — something that kills your enemy but also you — probably does, however, but in a way that underscores how the term jihad was being understood outside the Muslim world. I don’t think I’m stretching plausibility by suggesting that it functions, essentially, like suicide bomb. It’s not a great look, for the era or for Squaresoft in particular.

To be very honest, I felt embarrassed explaining this to Fatimah because I have not often had the occasion to tell to someone about how a video game appropriated something for their culture and, well, made it weird. Her response was nuanced, but the opening line was this: “I’m… screaming, this is hilarious but like, in an offensive kinda way. I can’t believe this is a thing ahahahahaha.”

What is interesting about the English localization is that it swapped out the original Japanese name (ジハード or Jihādo) for Crusader, a name that is still very much mired in connotations of holy war. The Crusades, after all, were a series of wars in which Christian forces sought to free Jerusalem from Muslim rule, the etymology of crusade going back to the Latin crux, “cross.” And while it’s interesting that the English version of this summon puts the onus of “a holy war that hurts your enemy as well as yourself” on Christians rather than Muslims, it’s nonetheless worth considering that both crusade and jihad are words that have meanings wholly divorced from their most militaristic connotations. English-speakers very casually toss around the word crusade to mean any one thing a person is passionate about, even a non-religious cause — “My aunt is on a personal crusade to ban Kelly Clarkson from appearing on television,” for example. In a similar sense, the etymology of jihad goes back to the Arabic jahada (جَاهَدَ), which Etymonline places in the context of waging war but most other sources offer merely as something broader — “to strive,” “to struggle” or “to exert effort.” Etymonline notes that going back to around 1880, jihad was being used in English to mean “any sort of doctrinal crusade.”

Most English dictionaries list the “holy war” definition of jihad first. And that is accurate in the sense that dictionaries report current usage, and this sense of the word is the one most predominantly used by English-speakers. But it’s also worth noting that many Arabic-speakers have a different sense of jihad that encompasses struggle, generically, but often the kind of struggle that has spiritual significance, often an inner struggle to better oneself. A 2002 Gallup poll of Muslims living in eight different countries shows that ones living in Lebanon, Kuwait, Jordan and Morocco primarily use it without any militaristic connotation, although those living in Turkey, Iran, Pakistan and Indonesia skewed more toward that. As Fatimah explained in our email exchange, “A lot of people misunderstand what jihad actually means and use it to paint Muslims as savages or something. … The jihad most Americans are thinking of is a misunderstanding of ‘self-defense’ and ‘standing against injustices,’ not war and terrorism. But hey, what do I know?” She also pointed me to Robert Rabil’s 2018 essay on jihad, which features the following that summarizes her understanding of the matter: “For most Muslims, both sunni and shi’i, ‘lesser’ jihad unequivocally means a call for defensive warfare when under direct attack, whereas ‘greater’ jihad remains a struggle with the self to live in a moral and virtuous manner.”

I would love to know who at Squaresoft made the decision to change the summon’s name from Jihad to Crusader. The localization was done by Ted Woolsey, so I’d imagine it was him, but also I’d be curious to know whether the motivation for the change was to avoid offending Muslim gamers or because invoking this sense was just inappropriate for the tone of the game. Nadia Oxford’s 2020 interview with Woolsey illustrates how it was tricky to omit explicit mentions of death and killing in the game, even though the plot hinges around a literal apocalypse, so perhaps Nintendo just balked at the proximity the word jihad had to mortal violence even in 1994.

For what it’s worth, the 2022 Pixel Remaster remake of Final Fantasy VI changed the name again — to Doomsday, which is at the very least a sort of life-ending badness that’s a notch or two further removed from religion than are jihad or crusade. This change puts Final Fantasy VI in line with Final Fantasy IX, where Vivi’s most powerful Black Magic spell is one that does shadow-elemental damage to the enemy party and the hero party alike. In the English localization of the game it’s called Doomsday. In that game’s original Japanese, it’s called… Jihad.

Further in our exchange, Fatimah explained to me that many works of Japanese pop culture, in particular those made by female creators, tend to be more culturally sensitive, and on her blog she reviews Tenmaku no Jadoogar: A Witch's Life in Mongol, a newish manga about a thirteenth-century Irani girl — named Fatima — living in the Mongol empire. It’s a good read if you want to understand one person’s perspective about how cultural themes can be appropriated in a positive way and used to make meaningful art.

Miscellaneous Notes

Although I’m not listed as a contributor, I did send in an addition to the Origins of Character Names in Final Fantasy list way back when. Specifically I offered up some info regarding the elemental spirits in Secret of Mana, which was included on the list because the first game in this series was a spinoff to Final Fantasy. Given the limits of my knowledge base at the time, I’m sure whatever I submitted was bare bones and was further embellished by later contributors. However, I am fairly certain that one chunk of the text in the final version of the document is mine. It’s referring to Shade, the shadow elemental, and reads, “Shade just refers to darkness.”

This is hilarious for two reasons. For one, it’s utterly uninsightful. For another, it’s not technically correct, as the term shade has a double connotation here: the absence of light but also the sense of a ghost or malevolent spirit. Given what I’m doing with my site now, it’s amusing to me that my one extant contribution to this older project is so sucky.

To sum up, I am okay with not being credited for this.

About a year into the existence of the Origins of Character Names in Final Fantasy project, the creator, Mark Rosa, combined forces with Andrew Vestal, who is someone I’ve tracked through the industry since. But I’m curious if anyone knows the whereabouts of Mark Rosa. I’m kind of keen to interview him, but if not that then just to thank him for making this in the first place and setting me on a path to find out where all this comes from. Anyone?

Apparently the Super Bowl XXIX halftime show at this game was an Indiana Jones-themed one that was promoting the new Indiana Jones-themed ride at Disneyland but also featured Tony Bennett, Patti Labelle and the Miami Sound Machine. That… sounds like an overstuffed lineup, to be honest. It’s wild to consider how much Super Bowl halftimes have changed since then, but it’s perhaps oddly relevant to this post just because at the time the most recent Indiana Jones movie was The Last Crusade, and it’s all about Indy searching for the Holy Grail.

Okay, one final bit that could probably be its own post but I kind of want to be done with the Warring Triad already.

*deep breath*

While the three figures that comprise the Final Fantasy VI Crusader summon do correspond to the three gods that appear in that game’s storyline, it’s actually so much more complicated than that. There was no way to address all this without derailing the post entirely, so it’s all here, pushed to the bottom. In the backstory for Final Fantasy VI, three gods descended down to earth and started a war with each other, mutating some humans into magic-using creatures called Espers (幻獣, Genjū or “phantom beast”) that they forced to fight on their behalf in what is referred to as the War of the Magi (魔大戦, Mataisen or “Great Demon War”). The three gods are not properly named in the game itself and referred to as the Warring Triad (三闘神, Santōshin or “three warring gods”). The war ends when they turn themselves to stone, and the Espers take what amounts to their dead bodies, now basically statues, with them to a sort of pocket dimension where humans can’t bother them. The statues are placed in a precise geometry so that each holds the other two in check.

Over the course of the game, the villains get ahold of the statues and destroy this delicate balance, resulting in an apocalypse that changes the entire world. (You know it’s bad because in the second half of the game, the sky is purple and the overworld music is melancholy.) In the game’s final dungeon, the heroes acquire Crusader, whose three components represent the Warring Triad, with the effect of their attack being friends and foes alike being injured, because that’s what happened in the war. But they also fight these three entities before the final boss battle. The closest the English localization gets to naming them is in these battles, where they’re Demon, Fiend and Goddess in the current localization, though Poltergeist, Doom and Goddess in the original Super NES translation. In Japanese, Demon is きしん or Kishin, literally “fierce god,” and he’s represented as an evil gargoyle-looking dude that looks an awful lot a lobster red version of Fiend, who in Japan is まじん or Majin, literally “demon god.” Meanwhile, Goddess has retained her name in all English localizations and is the easiest to tell apart. She just looks like a woman wrapped in just enough fabric to cover up the important parts.

Left to right: Fiend, Goddess and Demon.

When the heroes fight the final boss, Kefka, they first have to fight three tiers of a grotesque sculpture first, ascending to the next one up only when the current one is vanquished. I always envisioned the three tiers as representing the three gods, and this would seem to make sense, because the apparent name for this malevolent art installation is Statue of the Gods. However, to a degree, this perception seems to have been shaped by the Nintendo Power strategy guide for the game, which says that the first tier is Demon, the second is Goddess and the third is Fiend.

It’s an elevator that is going nowhere good!

The Final Fantasy Wiki, however, says this is not true and is, in fact, something wholly generated by the editors of the guide. And I guess this makes sense? Because while it seems plausible that the enemy known as Statue of the Gods would have a direct tie to the gods who got turned into statues, it never made sense to me that the second tier should represent Goddess, since the third tier is the only that emphasizes anything that looks distinctly feminine. (Part of it evokes the Pietá, and while the localized name for it is Lady, in Japan it’s まりあ or Maria, which is something else that seems like it would have gotten an automatic no from Nintendo on the grounds of not wanting to offend Christians who wouldn’t like a game requiring you to kill Jesus’ mother.) There’s nothing in the game itself to suggest that the tiers correspond to the gods in this way, but certainly it seems like a given that there has to be a connection, no?

The other bit of information I learned about them is that they were designed by Tetsuya Nomura, who is better known as the main character designer for Final Fantasy VII but who did monster design for Final Fantasy VI, in addition to creating the characters of Shadow and Setzer. Concept artwork drawn by Nomura for Final Fantasy VI indicates that he initially conceived of these characters as having proper names.

Translation, via Fatimah: “Goddess Sophia / Fallen god’s wrath, god of silence/reticence and knowledge.” Image via the Final Fantasy Wiki.

Translation, via Fatimah: “騎神 literally means ‘equestrian god,’ but I'm gonna say something more like ‘mounted god’ or like ‘centaur god’ is what they meant based off the design. I can't make out the last word, I know the kanji in the middle is 高, but the ones I’m thinking for the other two aren’t adding up.” Image via the Final Fantasy Wiki.

Demon was initially Zurvan, after the god of space time in an offshoot of Zoroastrianism. Fiend, meanwhile was named セフィロス, which is rendered in Nomura’s art as Sefilos. The katakana are the same as that of a more famous Final Fantasy villain, however: Sephiroth, who was also designed by Nomura. Given how much Final Fantasy VII has come to dominate fandom of this franchise, especially compared to the comparatively small representation Final Fantasy VI gets, it’s gratifying to me to learn that FFIV’s iconic villain has some roots in Final Fantasy VI, however slight. The etymology of Sephiroth is fairly well documented online, mostly speculated to come from the Hebrew סְפִירוֹת, or Sefirot, a Kabbalistic term referring to manifestations of the divine in the physical world. Finally, Goddess was originally Sophia, Greek for “wisdom” but also a major figure in Gnosticism. In Final Fantasy XIV, the Warring Triad appears again, this time classified as more akin to recurring summons like Bahamut, and bearing the names Nomura originally intended them to have in Final Fantasy VI.

Miscellaneous Notes

Yoshi vs. the Loch Ness Monster

Bahamut and Behemoth: One and the Same?