Early in Final Fantasy XVI’s epic adventure, a young Clive Rosfield is tasked with clearing out a tribe of goblins that’s infested a nearby swamp in the Grand Duchy of Rosaria, but what he finds there is far more monstrous … and smelly: A 20-foot-tall tentacled, plantlike gaping maw of razor-sharp teeth and writhing tendrils swallows a goblin whole. “A Marlboro!” I shouted at the screen. Clive’s companion Sir Tyler, however, screamed “A Morbol!?”
I can’t be the only one a little confused here.
Aside from yellow Chocobo mounts and pink Moogles, the Malboro is one of the most instantly recognizable creatures in the series, popping up in almost every entry to barf its “Bad Breath” attack on players and inflict all sorts of status ailments. For years, many gamers — this author included — misread the name as “Marlboro” like the cigarette brand. It gives you bad breath. It makes you sick. It can negatively impact your status. It all checks out.
The Malboro first debuted in Final Fantasy II, and even Final Fantasy XVI’s latest design echoes the original concept art drawn by series artist Yoshitaka Amano in the late 1980s. A tree trunk sort of base with thick, root-like legs gives way to a central mass of tentacles with dozens of knife-sized teeth. Supposedly real-life scallops inspired the design, as their shells have many “teeth” that look dangerous but are actually gills used to filter plankton out of the surrounding water. The Malboro imagines a world where scallops are giant and dangerous. But how did they get such a name?
In the pre-internet era when Final Fantasy II was made, localization and translations were done by a small team with minimal access to developers to clarify the intended meaning of various words. Which is how we wound up with bizarre translation errors like “spoony bard” in Final Fantasy IV or “This guy are sick.” in Final Fantasy VII.
Square Soft tasked Kaoru Moriyama with translating Final Fantasy II for western audience, but the project was eventually scrapped in favor of localizing Final Fantasy IV instead which suffered a confusing rebranding to Final Fantasy II in North America.
"Thinking back, it was a tough job translating at that time," Moriyama told LostLevels.org in 2006. “We had so very limited memory capacity we could use for each game, and it was never really 'translating' but chopping up the information and cramming them back in."
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As such, while English translations of the game are playable today, the dialogue is a clunky mess. At one point in time, it was likely Moriyama who had to translate the Japanese name for the Moruboru, and she landed on Malboro perhaps as a sly reference to the cigarettes. The ongoing assumption is that Malboro includes the Latin prefix “mal'' which means bad, ill, or evil. And in Japanese, “boroboro” or just “boro” in slang means something akin to damaged or rotten.
Curiously enough, the Malboro was missing from Final Fantasy III, V, and XIII. And it was Final Fantasy XI that introduced the “Morbol” as a creature family or species designation, referring to them more explicitly as “land octopuses” with a slightly different design that reflected that. Final Fantasy XIV carried on this same approach, which seems to have bled into Final Fantasy XVI as well.
At least one Reddit post highlights that the one common thread across these three games is Christopher-Koji Fox, who serves as the localization director in Final Fantasy XVI. Redditors speculate that Koji Fox takes a more holistic approach to translation and prefers a more literal translation. Moruboru is essentially moru (mor) and boru (bol) put together, as Japanese doesn’t have a native “L” sound, so therefore most words resort to the Japanese “R” sound. Hence why Morbol could, in theory, be the more accurate translation.
Alternatively, the Japanese onomatopoeia boro refers to the growling sound of an upset stomach. Malboro therefore becomes something like “evil upset stomach,” which makes a lot of sense considering the lore for the Morbol within Final Fantasy XVI’s bestiary:
“The foul cocktail of bile and partially digested prey that accumulates within these giant carnivorous plants’ bellies makes their breath so spectacularly rancid that it can be used as a weapon to repel would-be attackers,” it reads.
Evil upset stomach certainly applies there.
To complicate things even further, however, the English voice recording for Final Fantasy XVI came first and was then translated into Japanese, a rarity for Japanese developers and the first time that’s ever happened in franchise history. Yet when Sir Tyler sees the many-tentacled beast, he exclaims, “A Malboro!?” (jp: Maruboro dato!?). As Automaton Media points out, however, Sir Tyler uses the odakagata or “high tail” pitch accent that some would flag as incorrect, including Square Enix Community and Service Department member Murouchi Toshi. Even Final Fantasy XVI producer Naoki Yoshida opts instead for the high head, or a higher initial pitch, in various events and livestreams.
Something was lost in translation going from an English translation of a 35-year-old tentacle monster back to Japanese all this time later. So how do you pronounce it? “Marlboro” obviously.
