games with unusual naming conventions

sometimes games - including ones developed by completely different people! - use odd naming conventions particular to the platform or series. the classic example is games that use their platform’s name in the title (“Super” for SNES games, or “64” for N64 games), but i’m curious if there’s others that you like or leap to mind

i’ll start this thread off with my personal favorite: a bunch of NDS games have a subtitle whose words start with “DS”, but which isn’t just the letters “DS”. it felt ubiquitous to me but apparently it was rarer than that (albeit not THAT rare). some examples:

  • Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow
  • Advance Wars: Dual Strike
  • Lunar: Dragon Song
  • Fullmetal Alchemist: Dual Sympathy
  • Resident Evil: Deadly Silence
  • Guilty Gear Dust Strikers
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Speaking of Castlevania I really wish it had worked harder to maintain its (songtype) of (badthing) naming scheme

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it had a decent run there for a bit

Rondo of Blood
Symphony of the Night
Harmony of Dissonance
Lament of Innocence
Aria of Sorrow

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Boogie of Alienation
Jingle of Loss
Dirge of Premature Ejaculation

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Waltz of Impending Gastrointestinal Distress

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hey now these are all Boogerman sequels

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and Harmony of Despair on XBLA

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Which goes double because it was an HD remix of various Castlevania games

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a few games took the “iThing” framework from iPods, just like everyone else in two-thousand-whatever:

I-Ninja
I-Fluid (??)
iRequiem

Full disclosure: I knew this was a thing but the above games were me literally looking at a list of games beginning with “I” because I couldn’t remember any

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“International” (and “Final Mix” for Kingdom Hearts) was added to Square’s rereleases of FFs in the Japanese market that usually included the English dub and any overseas additions as well as some extra stuff. Koei/Omega Force did this on its rerelease of the first fist of the north star musou game, Hokuto Musou International

Sega released a US Shenmue, which is just a Japan region-coded version of the first game’s English dub

This might fit better in the game puns thread but the xbone version of Dead Rising 3 (which was kind of not great and pushed DR further into musou-ification) had a cool really heavily stylized arcadey score attack DLC mode, “Super Ultra Dead Rising 3’ Arcade Remix Hyper Edition EX + α”, that riffed on Capcom’s Street Fighter revision naming.

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The first three sequels to Puyo Puyo all have wordplay with numbers in their names:

Puyo Puyo Tsu (Sounds like “two” and means “expert”)
Puyo Puyo SUN (Sounds like “san,” the Japanese word for three)
Puyo Puyo~n (“yon” is the Japanese word for four)

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The Ninja Warriors
The Ninja Warriors Again
The Ninja Warriors Once Again

Pushmo
Crashmo
Stretchmo

BoxBoy!
BoxBoxBoy!
Bye-Bye BoxBoy!

Every Extend
Every Extend Extra
Every Extend Extra Extreme

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What would an NDS version of Dark Souls be called? Or Death Stranding?

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I feel like there are so many anime fighting games/visual novels that just go insane adding more and more random stuff to the end of the game name until it hits the point of self-parody.

To name just one… UNDER NIGHT IN-BIRTH Exe:Late[cl-r]

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Harmony of Dissonance is a pretty interesting title even outside the convention. also a perfect description of its own soundtrack

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3DS had some games that tried to fit some sort of wordplay on 3D, such as Kingdom Hearts: Dream Drop Distance.

Speaking of, Nomura mentioned he was giving Kingdom Hearts’ games an internet theme but looking at what actually came out only a few strongly fit the bill. Chain of Memories (COM), Birth By Sleep (BBS), Re:COM, with some more fitting a more general technology theme.

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Just a minor thing, but about 20ish hours into the tri-ace JRPG Resonance of Fate (RoF), which was called End of Eternity in some markets, it somehow clicked that EoE could be a play on the lineup of dude, lady, dude… but i have never found any mention of that anywhere else, so must have been my symmetry OCD going wild.

Let us not forget the abbreviation DX used in so many Deluxe versions/remasters of older games

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this is so great

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After the first Pokemon games came out, I thought all the sequels would be named after increasingly obscure colors and we would all be like « Did you get Pokemon Beige or Pokemon Carmine? » in 2020

I was very disappointed when they immediately moved on to silver and gold

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