As part of my generally anal-retentive gaming habits, I never rename characters in RPGs. In my eyes, anything other than the original, intended names would be sacrilege; even at the age of twelve, you could find me correcting the all-caps names of my characters in Final Fantasy III to a more sensible case setting. For me, it's always been about immersion. As creative as I can be, it just feels so wrong to go against the designers' original choices, even when I'm given the option to change those choices. Maybe watching my stepdad play through Final Fantasy II starring my family warped me somehow--after all, he made me Kain.
When I'm given an array of ready-to-be-names blank slates, I typically don't get too wacky. The guys are typically named after me and my friends, while the single girl character (there's usually only one) is reserved for my current girlfriend or possible girlfriend-to-be (god willing). I'll admit that games like Earthbound, with relatively personality-free main characters, also fall into this habit of mine, as do games like Secret of Mana, where I learn that the characters have names years after the fact--and also that these names are very dumb.
In the era of voice-acting, renaming characters is no longer the norm. The awkward, off-putting, just-chugged-a-bottle-of-NyQuil conversations of Final Fantasy X were made all the more creepy by the simple fact that the other characters could not say Tidus' name--after all, you might've changed it. Years later, Dragon Quest VIII handled this problem much better; the name you'd chosen for your character still appeared in the written dialogue, but characters would say things like "my boy" and "guv'nah" instead of the offending proper noun. Here, I could name my character "Bob" and not worry about the consequences.
So where does everyone else fall on this issue? I can't be the only one who feels compelled to stick to the original names I'm given, no matter how asinine they may be.
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