One of my favorite things to do in games is name people/monsters/things
Maybe even my favorite thing. I love putting my personal stamp on a game
Talk about/share your favorite name schemes and i dunno the psychology of self-made labels as applied to video gaming
I have this weird thing where all my main masculine characters are Billy, and feminine are Lily. I didn’t realize these rhymed until I was 16 or so.
In Pokemon I try to name them terrible puns, but they’re so bad I don’t even remember a single one. :-/
I’ve heard people on a few gaming podcasts say that, now that they are adults, Link is Link and Celes is Celes.
given the option I go with a lady player character called esme in offline games (because I’d generally rather play a narrative game about women) and usually stick to Felix in online games (because I still don’t really like misrepresenting my gender)
I did stop using my real name in favor of characters’ default names in jRPGs and whatnot in high school though, yeah
I think the most I ever cared about names was naming my squad in Worms
I’ve stopped renaming JRPG characters too, actually. Even though I’m always tempted.
For historical reasons, my Etrian Odyssey parties are always named after the Internet handles of people I know.
last time i played etrian odyssey i named my team after various fujifilm slide films. it was nice!
when i play pokemon in japanese i try to make goofy little puns with the names but they’re all awful. like uh i caught a mankey and it had a pig nose and it was furry so i named it inoshishi, which is a type of wild boar…it died in my nuzlocke and later down the road when i caught another one, i named it ninoshishi…like ni+inoshishi…like second inoshishi…
…
generally in jrpgs i try to go by the character’s canon name, although i was trying to figure out a character’s canon name recently and in looking it up and seeing their name ended up ruining a plot point for myself so i might be avoiding that in the future.
I also used to name every character I could, but gradually moved toward keeping the default names for characters presented with stories and personalities.
I still like to name characters, however, and always do so for generic ones I create in tactical RPGs and other such things.
Also, I wasn’t totally comfortable with the shift toward characters with overt stories and personalities in video games, especially as they began to talk. But that’s another discussion.
When I played through Pokemon Y I named every mon after a videogame. Had an Azurill named Astro Rabby, a Talonflame named Gradius, and a Tyrunt named Dragon’s Dogma.
Dragon Age: Origins made me realize how much I like alliterative names when I unknowingly named my human princess war general Catherine Cousland.
When I play an SMT game where they let you use a nickname and a surname, I always go full on ~writer~ mode and try to think of a regionally appropriate and evocative name (is this enough of a deprecative buffer or does it need more)
Persona 3 had the manga-canon name of Minato Arisato (because I’d heard this translates to “main character” and rhymes so I thought it was genius. no clue if that ended up being true).
Persona 3 FES I went with Ayumu Watanabe. Quoted from behindthename.com:
From Japanese ć© (ayu) “walk” and 夢 (mu) “dream, vision”.
From Japanese wata meaning “cross” and nabe meaning “bank”.
Nocturne I went with Hibiki “Hibi” Kurosawa.
[Hibiki] means “echo, sound” in Japanese.
Means “black swamp”, from the prefix kuro meaning “black” and sawa meaning “swamp”.
with “Hibi” meaning “crack” or “flaw”.
Needless to say, I’m that person who’ll spend hours on the name screen.
I used to name characters after my friends, now I name them after my cats
what happens is I start up some jrpg(-like) rom I grabbed as part of general survey, expecting to just take a quick look, and then if prompted to name the hero I put in something generically filthy and vulgar
5-10 hours later I realize I have screenshots I can’t show anybody
Probably the only ongoing thing is that every time I play Alisa’s route in Front Mission 3, I always name Liu’s wanzer “Blind Dragon”, what with the fact that he always seems unable to hit worth a damn with his rifle during the early game when you’re forced to use him and can’t even give him other weapons.
rainbow six:
I’m a compulsive namechanger, any game that lets me name things I will always name things.
Sometimes lame nerdy “badass” stuff based on literature or mythology or whatever. Sometimes people I know. Sometimes themed abstractions like colors or Greek letters or something. Sometimes filthy hilarity.
I have no creative juices so this constitutes like 70% of my imaginative impulse. I really, really hated fully-voiced dialogue and the way it locked in character names forever.
Growing up, I always put a lot of thought into what to name my Final Fantasy characters–especially the protagonists, to the point that sometimes I’d plan names for the new games in anticipation of their release. These were usually nonsense fantasy names that I thought had the ring of the character’s personality. Wish I could remember more of them.
As a kid, I had landed on the name “Ash” as a cool JRPG name, but then Pokemon came out and kind of ruined that.
For a while, all love interests were “Iris” or “Jade,” and I used to say that’s what I would name my daughters.
I remember naming a protagonist “Del,” once.
In my teens, I started naming protagonists “Ginger” as sort of a too-cool-for-school anti-cool name. But I started to kind of like how cute it is.
My greatest shame: I just took my my real name and Japaneseified it for the recent Persona games. I really wanted it to be me, you guys
My main characters are always named Frank Poole
Frank Poole is the guy HAL chucked into deep space
In 3001 they find his body and reanimate him
I imagine that all the games I play are his ~cosmic dreams~ as he spends a thousand years floating to the edge of the solar system
oh I forgot to mention
a good friend of mine named their Persona 4 protagonist Damascus Godsword and nothing has ever been as hilariously cool as that ever since
My friend named his P4 protag FRESH PRINCE so everyone in the game called him Fresh-kun or Prince-san. It’s canon.