#job system

What’s in a Name?

In the english versions of Final Fantasy III, both the remake and the Pixel Remaster, the job is officially translated as “Dark Knight”. Looking at the Japanese, however, that is technically not accurate: The term used in both the original and the final version of the remake is “魔剣士”; Most sources translated this as “Demon Swordsman” or “Cursed Swordsman, thought at least one fan translation goes with “Magic Swordsman”. Meanwhile, the series generally uses “ 暗黒騎士 “ when referring to the Dark Knight job.

As a further fun fact, unused text in the remake shows that they did toy around with changing the name of the job to “黒剣士”, which would translate to Black/Dark Swordsman, although it still would have been different from the usual phrasing. Either way, they kept it the same in the final.

This particular spelling doesn’t come up often in the series after this. Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings would use it for the “Warmage” job. Meanwhile, Bravely Default 2′s use of it, the series being no stranger to using obscure III stuff, resulted in the job being translated as “Hellblade”. The Ultimania Archive, the one time the job got a non Dark Knight name, went with Mystic Swordsman. 

Speaking of that Archive:

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The Dark Knight was always intended for FFIII, even seperate from the Demon Swordsman.

We know this due to this page from the Final Fantasy I-VI Ultimania Archive.

Look closely, and you can see that the job that III translates as Dark Knight uses the III-exclusive name. Meanwhile, another job uses, shockingly enough, a term almost exactly the same as the one the remake almost used.