What is the Gil

Ever wonder why money in Final Fantasy is called "Gil"?

I bet some of you have wondered what exactly a "Gil" is, especially since it has become one of the few recurring institutions in all the games of the Final Fantasy series just like Chocobos and that guy named Cid. Yes all money in Final Fantasy comes in the denomination of 1 Gil. And I am writing about it because the answer lies in Final Fantasy IV.

In the original Japanese Final Fantasy Famicom game your money was labeled with the Roman letter "G"; I've never read the game's instruction manual so I'm not sure what it was meant to represent. I suppose both "Gold" and "Gil" are valid.

The first Final Fantasy game to explicitly refer to money in-game as "Gil" was Final Fantasy II. In the original Famicom Japanese game the word Gil is written in Hiragana as "gi ru" (which makes me think that it may actually mean something in Japanese; the Japanese only normally use Hiragana for words of Japanese origin and Katakana for foreign or made-up words). However from this game forward money became Gil.

So how does Final Fantasy IV, a game created ~4 years after Final Fantasy II, explain what it means? Well I don't actually know exactly why Square started using the term way back in 1987, but they explain it's use in Final Fantasy IV in 1991 in, of course, the SSH Book.

First of all, and this is a translation "error" that persists in all in-game English scripts of FF4 to this day, is that the name of "Edward" the Bard-Prince of Damcyan is actually "Gilbart Chris von Muir". According to the (brief) history of Damcyan presented in the SSH the royal family of Damcyan is the "Gilberts" meaning all the royalty of Damcan are named Gilbert. Damcyan is also described as a nation of trade and commerce, and is the center of that activity in the world, so they created a national currency, called (you guessed it) the "Gil" in honor of their sovereign ruler (and in the game it is spelled using Katakana this time rather than Hiragana which is appropriate). This currency has become standard throughout the world (and apparently with the Dwarves and Phantom Beasts of the underground and even with the Lunarians on the Moon, but FF4 is so full of bottomless plot holes it's not funny).

So this explains the Gil at least in the context of Final Fantasy IV, and is probably the reason for it's current usage today, even in Final Fantasy XII and onward.

Interestingly, original English translations of the Final Fantasy games (Final Fantasy II SNES, and Final Fantasy III SNES) used "GP" for the monetary denomination, that is implied as "Gold Pieces". That makes pretty good sense I suppose, and a translator might have thought the sometimes Hiragana sometimes Katakana word "gi-ru" was just short for gold? However I don't think there has ever been a description of what a Gil actually is; coin or paper? Gold, Silver, or precious metal at all? We just don't know.