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Just for the heck of it, I've been wondering if there's anyone here in the guild who, over the course of their time playing installments of BoF, came up with any particularly interesting or creative renames for any of the main characters. While I'm sure we've all, at one time or another, used our own names or those of people we know (or at least know people who've done that), I'm talking more here about names that (at least in your mind) are almost as inseparable from the character as their original name(s).

Let me give you an example. Way back when the first BoF came out for the SNES, a friend and I picked it up to see if it was any good (obviously it was so for me, otherwise I wouldn't be writing this. XD ) While my friend eventually became disillusioned by the apparent lack of "normal humans" as main characters, the one thing we agreed on was our creation of another name for Ryu.

Around that same time, we were both fans of a "musical comedian", as it were, named Ray Stevens. So when we started up a new game of BoF I, while we were at a loss initially as to what to name Ryu, we eventually (and randomly) crammed Ray's name into four digits.... creating the name "Rast".

Oddly enough, the name fit so well to me that, even to this day, pretty much any BoF game I start from scratch begins with renaming Ryu as "Rast".

I've also got one for Ursula that I came up with during my last playthrough of BoF IV... but I'll save that for a little later. ^^

Ahaha I prefer the original name more ^^;;; (Unless it's Pokemon then I'd rename some of the Pokemon xD)

I kinda spaced it off until just now, but during my playthroughs of BoF3 I also made a point of renaming the faeries that would come to inhabit the village.... Unfortunately, once I was satisfied with most of the names I'd be really hesitant to send any of them off on treasure hunts, even though resetting in any cases of death would've been the more sensible course. ^^;;

But while I'm writing this post, I may as well go into the name for Ursula I mentioned earlier. I'm sure I don't need to tell any BoF4 veterans that Fou-Lu's empire tends to have some very Chinese-influenced architecture and dress, not to mention some of the names (like, I don't know... "Fou-Lu"? ^^; ) So after taking in all that influence, I couldn't help but find it a little odd that Ursula would have such an... almost European-sounding name. On my first playthrough, I gave her the name "Reiko" (which is another story in itself, but that's not the point here)... but since that's more Japanese than Chinese, I really tried to make an effort in finding a suitable Chinese name for her on my second full playthrough.

Out of that, and using a handy little leaflet of various names from all over the world (a leftover from my tabletop RPGing days) as a reference, I came up with the name "Xi Lan". It stuck pretty quickly for me, even though it might sound like a slightly simplistic name... but once I actually took the time to look up translations for "Xi" and "Lan", I found a number of translations that are actually quite fitting in terms of Ursula's personality:

Xi: "Dusk/Dawn/Twilight", "Fire", "Glaring", or "Vexed"
Lan: "Orchid", "Mist"

Not too bad for a name that I partly made up. ^^

Tee hee I named my dragonair as Ryu xD

If the game gives a preset name, I usually stick with that. My little sister has a habit of renaming all of her characters the same thing on every game, and it gets under my skin haha. But if it's something like, say, Pokemon, I give every one I catch a nickname haha. The same thing goes for games like Monster Rancher.

Haha, I just named them what felt right. I do that with everything, actually. I have a money tree named Bernardo. rofl

Version .IRL whee