Character Name Limits

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Many older video games have limits to how many letters can be provided in text entries. This can lead to a character's name shortened to fit into the allotted space. Sometimes an entirely new name is made for the character, other times letters are dropped from the name to make it fit.

This can be quite prevalent in games translated from Japanese—after all, in the Japanese alphabet, a single character can represent an entire syllable which would need two or three letters in the Latin alphabet.

Compare Serendipity Writes the Plot when technical limitations change the creative direction of a work of fiction, and Cap. See also Dub Name Change, as differences between languages may cause this to occur when translations are done.

Examples of Character Name Limits include:

• Pokémon has Feraligatr and Victreebel, as there's a limit of 10 letters for their names. Victreebel is particularly noticeable as its pre-evolution Weepinbell has both L's.
  • In the beta versions of the original games, Gyarados was called "Skulkraken" due to the same problem.
  • At first, Vespiquen looks like the second E in "queen" was dropped for this reason, until you count the letters and realize there's only nine.
• Final Fantasy I is filled with these, both with enemies (such as PEDE, as opposed to Centipede, or BLUE D for Blue Dragon) and with spells (such as HRM, LIT). These became especially evident in subsequent re-releases of the game, which had less constrictive character limits and changed many names to be more faithful to their full intended names (example: MADPONY became Crazy Horse).
• Final Fantasy II, Frionel was renamed Firion in English releases to fit under the six-letter limit.
• Final Fantasy IV, the Four Fiends take their names from The Divine Comedy: Scarmiglione, Cagnazzo, Barbariccia and Rubicante; these became "Milon," "Kainazzo," "Valvalis" and "Rubicant" in the original Super NES release. In the same release, the summons Leviathan and Bahamut appear in the menu as Levia and Baham.
• Final Fantasy VI, Strago drops the "s" from the end of his Japanese name.
  • The boss Poltrgeist omits an "e", and the Ultima Weapon drops the space and is renamed AtmaWeapon. Both are only in the Super NES release; later releases restore Poltrgeist's name to the Japanese Demon and the AtmaWeapon became Ultima Weapon.
• Chrono Trigger has the protagonist named "Crono" as there's a limit to five letters to character names.
• The Mega Man Battle Network games follow this trope for the names of NetNavis, which might be an intentional throwback to the older games that had less memory. This leads to Navis named FlamMan (FlameMan), the American football-themed FootMan/GridMan and JapanMan (originally YamatoMan.
  • Obliquely touched on in MS Paint Masterpieces. The author renamed one of the Robot Masters from Elec Man to Electric Man—because he reasoned/assumed that the character would have been named Electric Man originally if the first Mega Man game hadn't had an eight-character name limit.
• A real life example: Canadian producer Deadmau5 came up with his name when he opened up his computer tower and found an actual dead mouse inside. He wanted to use "dead mouse" as his screen name on a forum, but the Web site had a limit of eight characters for screen names, forcing to shorten it to "deadmau5".
• Most game show ports to microcomputers and early consoles allowed eight characters for a player's name.
  • The NES version of The Hollywood Squares limited players' names to four letters.
  • The Game Boy ports of Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! had five-letter limits.
• Parodied in Homestuck with the name of "kind abstracta" (weapon proficiencies) which are limited to 8 characters + "kind", leading to "fncysntakind" if you wield a fancy Santa as a bludgeon.