One of my other jobs involves keeping an eye on celebrities and writing about their lives. This means I have to find it in me to rejoice in the births of their badly-named babies. Hooray for Lady Sugar Papaya. She might not be as special and unique as the Blue Angels and Pilot Inspektors in her Academy, but surely she won't have to resort to affirming her individuality through the arts or academics.
Video games, especially JRPGs, are pretty big on inoculating characters with a "Special!" booster before the game even begins. Names obviously define a person, but they're not a free pass to depth and wisdom. You have to grow into a name, even earn it in a way. If Cloud Strife is a deep and complex character (he's not) it's because of his trials and journeys, not because his name is more l33t than yours.
I always liked Wild ARMS because the main characters were compelling despite the fact they were stuck with names obviously given to them by their parents and not mental hospital escapees. Jack. Rudy, Cecilia. I remember them well to this day and I have yet to think to myself, "Gee, those were great characters but too bad Rudy wasn't named Sir Puppy Tails the III. That would have added so much."
It's not to say characters can't have interesting or different names. Final Fantasy VI's Terra has a moniker that suits someone who's half Jem doll. "Locke" isn't common, but it's not unheard of, and it suits a thief treasure hunter. Sometimes sanely unique names pop up by accident: I always thought "Celes" was an unusual abbreviation of "Celeste," but apparently it's a mistranslation of "Ceres," as in the harvest goddess who throws a wintry sulk every six months. So, yeah, there y'are.
There is one nice bit of progress going on with the name game lately, and that's the fact localisers are increasingly okay with leaving JRPG characters with their Japanese names. Japanese names sound funny to your mom (not mine, since she worked for a car company for ten years), but Akira Sakamoto is as plain as it gets in J-Land. It is a nice name. It is better than "Sunlight Tempest."
The obvious loophole that name-crazy developers need to exploit here is to keep coming up with alien races. "Oh, stop me from using 'FoSoYa, will you?"
Maybe developers just don't bother because they know if I have the chance, the hero of their painfully-crafted story is going to be renamed Mr Poo.
Related Links:
On Renaming Charaters
On Renaming Characters: My Own Naughty Experience
Character Case Study: When Good Characters Get Bad Attitude
