Here there be Dragons

Square has recently announced that they are publishing a complete remake of Final Fantasy IV (that's Final Fantasy II for us 外人). I'm waiting for someone to send me a link to it, so I can smugly reply, "Oh, yeah... I finished that a couple months ago. They did a really good job with it! Some of the story gets lost in the translation, but I'm glad you can play it now, too."

My friends totally love me; but that's not important.

What is important is the Lunar Path. Anyone who has beaten Final Fantasy IV should remember leveling up in the area just before the Lunar Core. Here were a wealth of enemies that gave good experience, and could be killed rather quickly. Particularly, there was a pair of dragons: King Ryu, and Ging Ryu. Good experience, easily killed by Odin, nice guys for you to relentlessly slaughter. Their names always kind of vexed me, though... King Ryu, fair enough. He's strong, of course he's a king. Ging, though... Why ging? My guess was that it was like the Jimera in Final Fantasy, where they needed an alternate name for a stronger version of a Chimera, so they just changed the first letter.

As it turns out, they are similar to kyzoku: they've been named phonetically. The ん sound in Japanese is occasionally translated as "ng," which is what happened here. They are originally called 金竜(kin ryuu) and 銀竜(gin ryuu), Gold Dragon and Silver Dragon respectively. The GBA translation actually used the literal translation as their names.

Final Fantasy V and Final Fantasy X both have an optional boss that follows this naming convention: 神龍(shinryuu) In both, 神龍 is one of the strongest enemies in the game, which fits the meaning of the name: God Dragon.