海賊

In the original Final Fantasy, you could get a ship and sail the ocean.  Getting the ship wasn't hard, as there was a man named Bikke was happy to let you borrow his...once you butchered his crew.  His crew consisted of 9 pirates, who seemed to be made of tissue paper.  Once you had the ship, there were of course endless creatures in the sea that were more than happy to engage you in combat.

One of these was named. "Kyzoku"

This always kind of confused me.  They looked exactly like the pirates, only blue.  They seemed be named characters, but they came 4 and 5 at a time.  I eventually stopped wondering about it, and didn't give it any more thought until I started replaying Final Fantasy in 日本語.  Again, I made my way to Pravoka, and met with Bikke.

9 かいぞく (kaizoku) attacked me.

Suddenly, the long unanswered question re-asserted itself!  For some odd reason, this word was not in my dictionary...  So, I went to the internet, searching out the meaning(and ordering a better dictionary).  I then found it meant...Pirate.  Apparently while translating the game, they couldn't think of a synonym for Pirate, so they just used the Japanese word.

Oddly enough, when I fought a Kyzoku in the Japanese version, they were called パイレット (pairetto).  Apparently they had the same problem thinking of creature names in Japan.