Garland’s Famous “I Will Knock You All Down!” Line in Japanese Final Fantasy

One famous quote from the original Final Fantasy English translation continues to live on decades later.

Near the start of the game, when you attempt to save the princess, a bad guy named Garland speaks angrily and then finishes with:

I, Garland, will knock you all down!!

This line feels more amusing than intimidating, so what does he actually say in the original Japanese script? Let’s take a look:

Technically, the word used in Japanese is 蹴散らす (kechirasu, "to kick and scatter about"). But in situations like this, the word functionally means something closer “to devastatingly defeat” or “to rout”. I’ve gone with “vanquish” in my example above, but it could be translated other ways too.

So, how did this turn out as “knock you all down” in the official release? Well, my gut instinct says it was a pretty simple mistake, but it take some explaining if you don’t already know Japanese:

• First, at this point in Square and Nintendo’s history, they were still using non-native English speakers to translate games. In other words, a Japanese person in Japan translated the original Final Fantasy script. The same happened with the unreleased English sequel and later games released in English, actually.

• Second, the word 蹴散らす is a pretty uncommon one in everyday speech, so the translator was most likely like, “Okay, so 蹴散らす roughly means ‘to defeat’ here. 倒す (taosu) has the same meaning and I know how to translate that word, so I’ll do that!”

  Indeed, 倒す is a much more common word and does mean “to defeat” in contexts like this – it’s actually pretty much the default word for “to defeat” in games. The problem is that 倒す has multiple meanings, and the more common meaning is “to knock over” or “to knock down”. In fact, if you look the word up in a dictionary, “to knock down” is the first definition you’ll get most of the time:

  …While “to defeat” is usually the last definition given.

So that’s likely what happened – a mix of a non-native English speaker, an uncommon Japanese word, and a synonym with multiple possible translations. Mix it all together and you get a bad guy whose terrifying threat is “to knock you all down!”

Whew, all that explanation for just one line of text.

Actually, it’s been a long time since I played the PlayStation release of Final Fantasy I, so I checked it out again and it looks like they decided to replace the famous mistranslation with, “I shall take on all of you!”

I also briefly played the GBA port/remake when it was released. I forgot what it said, so I checked that out too just now, and apparently the translators decided to edit the script a bit and put the original famous line back:

Interesting – they even included the double-exclamation marks from the original translation.

Anyway, hopefully this helps clear things up a little bit. It’s a pretty weird situation and it’s another case where a wacky translation went on to become such a big deal that it’s been deliberately left intact despite being a poor translation. It’s an interesting phenomenon – in a way it’s almost like mistranslations or unintended translations sometimes add spice to otherwise bland, conventional parts of games.