femmenietzsche:

I first encountered these unusual Ws way back in the 90s, but at the time I never paid much thought to them.

For example, in the Super Famicom version of Final Fantasy IV, there’s a technique called “W Meteo”. This was translated as “W.Meteo” in the English Super NES release… but back in the day I just always assumed it stood for “White Meteo”.

A few years later I encountered something similar in Final Fantasy VII – a special skill called “W-Item” that lets you use two items in one turn:

I’ll admit that with this FFVII “W” I was a little more confused, but I just figured it probably had a good reason for being called that.

And it does, I later learned after studying Japanese for a while! Just as Mighty Kombat surmises, the prononuciation for “W” is often abbreviated down to just the “double” part in Japanese, and as a side effect it often gets used to refer to things that are doubled. So the “W.Meteo” wasn’t a white-spell Meteo like I first thought (although that would’ve been cool); it instead just meant it was a “double Meteo” spell. And “W-Item” meaning “double item” makes perfect sense.

This is so sensible we should adopt it in English. They even have W burgers in Japan!

To call out the elephant in the room, what’s the story with how S is the level above A++?