As Long As It Sounds Foreign / Video Games

As Long as It Sounds Foreign in video games.

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• Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War brings us the ever-lovely name of the Yuktobanian prime minister; "Seryozha Viktrovich Nikanor", which is a horribly butchered form of Russian naming conventions.^note Realistically, it would be Sergey Viktorovich Nikanorov.
• Units in Age of Empires answer commands with the same gibberish lines, regardless of culture. Of course, the game is set in Ancient Times, and we have no idea how most of the languages involved were pronounced anyway. Age of Empires II, set in Medieval Times, gave civilizations different real languages... except when it couldn't: The Goths use German, and the Huns, Mongolian. Others are more questionable, such as both Byzantines and Italians using Latin, when Greek and Italian would be more accurate.
• Arc Rise Fantasia has a handful of very short songs sung by Ryfia and another Diva, which they use for various purposes, including as their attacks in battle. Each one of these is in a significant-sound and very pleasant, but completely gibberish "language."
• Assassin's Creed has perfectly well spoken modern Turkish... for the decidedly European and Christian Templars.
• The opening song from Atelier Iris 3: Grand Phantasm Schwarzweiss uses this along with Gratuitous German and Word Salad Lyrics. The German chanting in the beginning and end of the song is just a mash-up of German and German-sounding words with no grammar connecting any of it.
• Bangai-O includes a woman who only speaks in childish doodles of happy meadows and underwater scenes.
• Beyond Good & Evil also features numerous songs in very convincing-sounding nonsense. Specifically, the nonsense is meant to sound "Belgian, with a little Spanish and English mixed in." Even though "Belgian" isn't a language. However, there are songs with real Spanish and English words mixed in with the gibberish, as well as the game's pseudo-arc word, "Shauni."
• In Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, the towns all have German-sounding names that don't actually mean anything.
• In the 1996 adventure game Call of Cthulhu: Prisoner of Ice a Norwegian character is introduced early in the game, but his lines are just barely comprehensible to Norwegian, Danish or Swedish speakers. In one scene he screams "I have never loved anybody" in horribly mispronounced Swedish (even though he is supposed to be Norwegian).
• Every Civ leader in Sid Meier's Civilization Revolution speaks in themed foreign sounding gibberish... Intentionally.
  • The same thing happens for every governor in Sid Meier's Pirates!. Notably, it's the same nonsense phrases, just inflected differently for the various nationalities.
  • On the other hand, the only main-line Civ game to incorporate talking units, Civilization IV, has each of the units respond in the appropriate language. There was a little bit of "Blind Idiot" Translation, but the fact that they bothered to come up with good translations—and find native speakers where applicable—is rather touching. On the other hand, it also reinforces—to some degree-this trope: for instance, the Egyptians, who are very clearly based on the Ancient Egyptians, speak modern Egyptian Arabic. Similar situations are found with the Greeks (whose units speak modern Greek) and Persians (whose units speak modern Persian). The Vikings one-up these: modern Norwegian instead of Old Norse — and the faction leader, Sveyn Forkbeard, was Danish (so not only do they speak a modern version of the language, they don't even speak the right modern version). The Roman units, however, speak actual Latin—and remarkably well-rendered, with all the "c"s and "g"s pronounced hard, the vowel lengths and qualities properly distinguished, and a voice actor who really gave his all to creating a living-sounding Latin (the end result sounded—surprise, surprise—like a particularly energetic Italian).
  • Civilization V did away with the talking units. They just grunt now. Instead, they introduced talking leaders. The phrases the leaders say and the subtitles are completely different, even for leaders like George Washington and Queen Elizabeth I. There is still the problem of Ramses II not using proper Ancient Egyptian (this is justified by no one knowing what it's supposed to sound like) and other historical characters using modern-day versions of the languages. For example, Catherine the Great sounds like a modern Russian woman despite being born in a 18th century German principality (her subjects often complained at not being able to understand her heavily-accented Russian). Washington also sounds like he could be living in the 21st century.
• Command & Conquer: Red Alert runs on this trope, complete with Perevod Slepovo Idiota and What Do You Mean It Does Not Sound Glorious.
  • The most popular example◊ in Russia is the БРЭТ ЖОПА one. In the first Red Alert, Soviet briefing often include some encyclopedias drawn into the frame. Their backs all invariably show БРЭТ ЖОПА in uppercase - loosely translated as "BULLSHIT ASSCRACK".
  • Another cutscene example has a notification on a computer screen that says something like: "Dungir. Dungir. Atomec elictrods everhetid and the momant came. Time to tuntrum: 15:00"^note "Апосно. Апосно. Ядернии електроди пиригрилис и наступил момант. Время для срива 15:00.".
  • One of the examples: АПОСНО! НЕ ВИХОА! ^note Pure gibberish. They meant "Danger! Keep out!", but wouldn't it be more accurate to say "Опасная зона! Посторонним вход запрещён!"? If that would have been, then this cutscene would be a Moment of Awesome to these who knows the language.
  • Red Alert 3 trailer also throws this one for a second. A rebel board that says "Изменение". ^note  They got it wrong on FOUR letters. "Изменение" is directly translated "changing", while for the current context (betrayal), "Измена" would go better.
  • Good luck understanding the pseudo-Soviet hymn played at the menu screen. Apparently, they did try to use real Russian words, but none of the people who actually sang it spoke the language. The music does, however, make it sound like something similar to the Red Army Choir.
  • However, they are the first to correctly use the phrase "do svidania", which is normally used in movies to mean "good bye". To be fair, that is what it means, but more in the context of "see you later" (it literally means "until (our) meeting") and not "something you'd say to a guy you're about to shoot" (unless you mean See You in Hell). The proper word in this case would be "proshchai" (a final goodbye). Premier Cherdenko uses it correctly.
  Cherdenko: I will not say "do svidania", commander, for I can assure you... we will never meet... again!
• Daikatana has this before you even install the game. The front cover features two prominent Japanese characters 大刀. This can in fact be pronounced daikatana, but no one in Japan would pronounce it that way. 大刀 is properly pronounced daitō, and simply means "long sword".
• Being one big Affectionate Parody to Mortal Kombat, all of Kung Pao's voice clips from Divekick are Bruce Lee-sounding gibberish, being a reference to Liu Kang.
• Dragon Master: While some characters in this South Korean made knockoff of Street Fighter II have names that are common and passable in certain parts of the world (e.g. Baekun, Jackie, Joey, Gloria, and Garner), others are odd mashups of various foreign and/or made-up names/words such as "Klaus Garcia", "Jedi Ryan",^note (though the Star Wars originating word "Jedi" is thought by some to be loosely based on the Japanese word "Jidaigeki" referring to Edo era Period dramas) and "Mozard".
• Done with the name of the protagonist of the Russian campaign of Empire Earth. The name Grigor Illyanich Stoyanovich is not a proper Russian name, although it's easy enough to correct: Grigoriy Ilyich (presumably, they were going for the "son of Ilya" patronymic) Stoyanov.
• The tribals in Fallout: New Vegas: Honest Hearts speak a pidgin that sounds like a mix of English, Spanish, and Native American tongues.Which is exactly the language which would be spoken in southern Utah after three-hundred years of cultural intermingling, isolation and linguistic drift.
• Fate/Grand Order:
  • Mash Kyrielight's last name appears to be completely made up. Kyrielight is made up of the Greek word kyrie, meaning lord, with the English word light shoved onto the end. Mash on the other hand is a real name, albeit a rather ill-fitting one. It means bitter in Hebrew, which doesn't describe her at all. Although, given that Mash is simply the name the localization team decided on, it's likely that the translators were just trying to make something of Mashu, the Japanese pronunciation of her name, without turning it into Matthew.
  • The Crypters/Team A in Cosmos of the Lostbelt take this trope even further. The only character with a real name is the Japanese girl. The rest of them all having ridiculous sounding fake European names, like Kirschtaria Wodime, Daybit Sem Void, and Scandinavia Peperoncino. That last one is so egregious that it's acknowledged In-Universe as likely being fake. Ironically, the Japanese girl is actually Chinese and was using a fake name (that means "garbage", by the by), while the one with the egregious alias is the actual Japanese member of the group.
• Given that these are series based around a worldwide fighting tournament, it's expected that Fatal Fury and The King of Fighters would have some of these. Originally Kim Kaphwan was going to be called Kim Haifon, which is not a legitimate Korean name. Some others include Americans named Lucky Glauber, Mignon Beart, Duck King, Geese Howard and Heavy D!, a Frenchwoman named Shermie, two Germans named Alba and Soiree Meira, Italians named Robert Garcia and Fiolina Germi^note should be Fiorina, and an Irishman named Krizalid.
• Fighting Baseball, the Japanese localization of MLBPA Baseball, did not get a license to use the names of MLBPA players, and instead infamously used made-up "American-sounding" names like "Sleve McDichael", "Mario McRlwain", "Mike Truk" and the immortal "Bobson Dugnutt". ProZD reads out the whole list here.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy V gives most of its characters vaguely German-looking names, but the results — such as "Faris Scherwiz" and "Galuf Halm Baldesion" — are borderline nonsensical.
  • Many aspects of Final Fantasy VI were inspired by European culture — a fact which is reflected in the names of its characters. However, it freely intermixes names from English, French, German, Italian and Latin without any apparent desire for authenticity. For example, "Setzer Gabbiani" combines a German surname with an Italian surname. And then there are names like "Relm Arrowny" which seem to be completely made-up.
  • Final Fantasy XII: Although the names sound like Sanskrit, the locales of the Great Crystal fall into this trope. According to the Final Fantasy wiki, they are actually well-faked bastardizations of English and scientific terms (e.g. Dha = Down, Kabonii = Carboniferous, Jilaam = Xylem).
  • Admitted by Word of God for Final Fantasy XIV. When a fan asked what the lyrics were to a boss' theme music, the game's sound director admitted the company has a software program that generates "sounds that resemble vocals," and that's what was used for that song. The preset that was selected was to make lyrics based on Latin, so "the language used is probably Latin."
• Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance and its sequel Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn have the Ancient Language, which the Herons use to sing their galdr. The language is just Japanese being reversed. The written version of that in the game is also a cipher of English, and is translatable.
  • A mild case of this occurs in Fire Emblem Fates. Scarlet's name in the Japanese version was Crimson. While both are shades of red, "Crimson" isn't really used as a name while Scarlet can be, making the translated version seem more correct.
• In God of War (PS4), the runic version of location names appear to be complete nonsense; the runes shown in the trailer when disovering Dauthamunni actually spell out lthrjbiotwog gthhfrllngu.
• Grandia II's ending theme, "Canção do Povo" (Portuguese for "Song of the People"). This goes beyond merely singing with a Japanese accent, the singer doesn't even try to sound Portuguese, it's as if the lyrics had been converted to kana for her to read.
• All the spoken dialogue in the Gravity Rush games, including "Jeuchalais Evule Plelat" and other songs, is just a French-sounding Conlang, not actual French.
• The events of Half-Life 2 take place in an unspecified Eastern European location, so the game features quite a few inscriptions in Cyrillic. However, they are often misplaced (these inscriptions are mostly written in Russian, even though City 17 is loosely based on the capital of Bulgaria, Sofia), misspelled, and sometimes just spell complete gibberish.
  • One of the common poster decals seen throughout the game has the sentence "...ЅҶ ТФŞ ИУЕŞТ ПАЙЮК ЕНҪАћТ". In addition to the letters that are actually used in Russian and Bulgarian, it features glyphs that are found only in Serbian, Macedonian, and various Cyrillic-written non-Slavic languages; "Ş" isn't even a Cyrillic letter. If you couldn't tell already, this is pure nonsense. The only "word" in there that exclusively uses letters found in Slavic languages is "ПАЙЮК", and that still isn't a real word in any language.
  • Bizarrely, though, despite the otherwise Eastern European theme, some signs are written in Romanian and (mangled) Greek, and the gas pumps along the outskirts of City 17 are labeled in Swedish. As long as the texture reference photos look foreign...
• The protagonist's official name in Harvest Moon: Save The Homeland is "Toy". Fans prefer to opt with "Tony", but that was his grandfather's name.
• The Mafia of Cooks in A Hat in Time are vaguely Italian and vaguely Russian, but definitely foreign.
• In Haven (2020), the books in the abandoned library that houses the Illustrated Erotica Handbook have pseudo-German names like "Uff Glishden Tär", "Gorgnemuld", "Flurm Gliffen", and "Flurm Gliffen: Ostruisï", though the last one's subtitle is a legitimate Italian word meaning "clogged" or "obstructed". Likewise, the names of Source's islets and many of its creatures are either Japanese-sounding gibberish or Gratuitous Japanese.
• Maybe this is a common theme in Tom Clancy games, but in the air combat game HAWX, the game opens with the squad facing a set of Bolivarian insurgents named "Las Trinidad" attacking Brazil. The problem with that is that Las Trinidad does not mean "the trinity" (that's la trinidad), but Trinidad. As in Trinidad and Tobago.
• Hearts of Iron III has an expansion "Dies Irae: Götterdämmerung". That's a linguistic triple whammy! "Day of Wrath" (Latin): "Dusk of the Gods" (German), which is itself a supposed German translation of Ragnarök, but which actually means something more like "Doom (as in ultimate fate) of the Gods." And it's a content expansion for playing as Nazi Germany. Is the title supposed to be Latin? Is it supposed to be German? Is the player supposed to lose?
• The creators of ICO, to facilitate the important gameplay/plot point of the two main characters being unable to verbally communicate or (in Yorda's case) be understood by the player, came up with not one, but two fictional languages for their protagonists. Yorda speaks something vaguely reminiscent of French, and Ico's language sounds a bit like Korean. The Queen speaks both tongues fluently, a talent she puts to good use in her little chats with Ico.
• Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis features a sequence on a German submarine. The controls on the boat are labeled with terms like "Flugeldufel", "Krauskefarben" und "Ausgeschnitzel". All these 'words' are actually gibberish that sounds like German.
  • "Ausgeschnitzel" looks suspiciously like it may have been intended to be a "Blind Idiot" Translation of "cut it out", and "Krauskefarben" looks something like the button you should press if you want a rainbow afro.
• Jade Empire does this with its own Conlang. Rather than being assigned to particular lines of text the sound bites are chosen at random, and 90% of the recorded lines are actually cow jokes.
• Jagged Alliance 2 is a notable exception. The demo has characters Gasket (a moron), and Ivan (a Russian with little patience). When Gasket displays his stupidity, Ivan finally says "I've never worked with such an idiot before" in perfect Russian, AND the game correctly displays what he said in text as well. Considering that excluding Ivan is the only exception to a game fully in English, it's impressive they took the effort to get it right.
  • He speaks plenty of Russian during the entire (full) version of the game as well, with occasional "bouts" of broken English. Amusingly, whenever Russian is used, the English subtitles are followed by Russian subtitles which don't always match Ivan's speech.
  • In the original Jagged Alliance Ivan only spoke Russian.
    • He was also subtitled only in Russian. The new Nintendo DS version of the game has his subtitles (unfortunately?) only in English.
  • Ivan is the not the only character who speaks his native language, although most foreigner characters (there are many, from different nationalities) simply use the customary Poirot Speak.
• The aliens which do not speak English (or "Basic") in Knights of the Old Republic actually just repeat the same few stock phrases for audio. The subtitles claim a completely different story. This is a somewhat clever way of saving disk space and money on recorded speech, but you quickly notice the repetition. Here's a drinking game: Take a shot every time an aliens starts a line with something that sounds like "nonda tiihuu tongaa" or "choko-laka-baka". You'll be sloshed within an hour.
  • Interestingly averted and yet played straight in Jade Empire. They hired an actual linguist to create Tho Fan, a Conlang, and then, for the same reasons as the above, they had most of the lines be jokes about cows.
• Knuckle Heads: While most characters' names in this fighting game are passable, but in the case of two of the fighters the names would not be credible. It is unlikely any real-life Norwegian would have the surname "Darrell" (of which is of French origin) and then more blatantly unbelievable is the case of Blat Vaike of Greece who has a name that is not only not Greek in origin, but also composed of names from another part of Europe a long distance away from Greece, that being the Baltic countries and Russia.
• The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess zig-zags this with Midna's spoken language. Half the time, it's legitimately just random gibberish that sounds like some strange merge of Japanese and French, while employing neither the grammar rules nor words of either language. We think it's gibberish, anyway. The rest of the time, a decent chunk of her dialogue is actually broken-up and scrambled clips of English that, when put back together, succinctly sum up or directly relate to whatever she just said.
• The soundtrack of the game LocoRoco is composed of happy singing in complete and utter nonsense that nonetheless sounds very much like a real language. If, you know, you don't listen to closely. This was done intentionally, so the lyrics "wouldn't have to be translated" for foreign audiences.
  • The songs specific to each variation of LocoRoco tend to also pull from specific languages. For example, Pink sounds vaguely French.
• In Magicka, everyone speaks in a made-up language that sounds like a mix of German, Russian and Turkish words. Well, Turkish might be pushing it, but some words sound suspiciously like it. In fact, the language is so well made that many people think they have accidentaly installed the non-English version of the game.
• The Mario & Luigi series often has the eponymous brothers speak to each other (and to others) in Italian-sounding gibberish.
  • In Super Mario Odyssey, the New Donkers' voice clips consist of American English-sounding gibberish.
• This promotional poster◊ for Marvel vs. Capcom: Clash of the Superheroes doubles as a parody of the Mega Man (Classic) series. Several of the Marvel vs. Capcom characters are featured as Robot Masters and some of their names have even been changed to follow the Robot Master naming scheme (aka "[insert word here] Man"). The problem is Morrigan, who is referred to as "オイロケマン", which reads "Oiroke Man" ("oiroke" is Japanese for "sexy"). It should be "オイロケウーマン" (Oiroke Woman). Thankfully, they didn't make the same mistake with Splash Woman from Mega Man 9.
• Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain averts this trope. Russian characters speak real Russian, while the African mercenaries encountered later speak authentic Afrikaans, with all the voice actors involved being native speakers of those languages. Code Talker and, later in the game, Quiet can also be heard speaking actual Navajo at times.
• Modern Warfare features Arabic graffiti in some levels, of varying accuracy. In one particularly amusing case, "Infinity Ward", the game's developer, is spelled out phonetically.
  • Call of Duty: Black Ops mostly gets it right for the VC speaking Vietnamese, except for the one over the loudspeaker in "The Defector", who, when not speaking accented English at the US soldiers, is shouting one-syllable gibberish that kinda-sorta sounds Vietnamese, and, some of the multiplayer voices, which sounds more like Chinese. Naturally, many Vietnamese-speakers doesn't understand them.
  • Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II introduces a Polish operator codenamed "Gromsko". The word doesn't mean anything in Polish or any other language.
• Mortal Kombat:
  • Mortal Kombat is known for this trope, starting with Raiden's bizarre scream when performing his Superman move in the very first game. With the exceptions of "Get over here!" and "Gotcha!" most of what the kombatants say is gibberish shouted very loudly. Especially in Mortal Kombat 4.
  • The creators also admitted that Bo' Rai Cho is simply a Punny Name ("Borracho" is Spanish for drunk) that sounds vaguely Chinese.
  • Also Kitana. As per Word of God, her name is a deliberate merging of the Japanese words "Kitsune" (her original name in concept; once someone pointed a Japanese name was too contrasting to adoptive father Shao Kahn having a Chinese one, it was changed) and "Katana". They were satisfied as long as it sounded "generically Asian enough".
  • Raiden is a real name...except that even in modern games, it's still pronounced "Ray-din" instead of "rye-den".
  • Scorpion's surname, "Hasashi", isn't even a real Japanese word. While one could pronounce it with a hard "S" that results in sounding like "Hizashi", which is a real Japanese surname, modern games usually don't opt into it.
  • Kenshi is a credible Japanese given name (albeit very, very rare). His son, Takeda, however, is not, primarily because it's a surname.
• Averted in Never Alone as the narrator speaks in the actual language of the Iñupiat people, who contributed heavily to the game's development.
• NieR:
  • The soundtrack has lots of indeterminately-foreign sounding gibberish, most prominently in the recurring theme "Song of the Ancients". Devola, who sings it around the village, says that it's in a language that has been long forgotten otherwise and no one knows what the lyrics actually mean, since the song is so old. This is continued in NieR: Automata.
    • Impressively, there's several languages As Long As It Sounds Foreign'd, the end credits theme alone having variations in fake Japanese, French, and German.
  • The residents of Facade also speak in a language that was apparently created by shuffling hiragana around, which sometimes makes it sound like actual Japanese.
• The Austrian guards in NightFire speak gibberish that sounds vaguely German. Similarly, the Yakuza substitute high pitched yells for Japanese.
• The video games titled Ninja Ryukenden (Legend of the Ninja Dragon Sword) in Japan would be given a new name in America: Ninja Gaiden. Those with knowledge of the Japanese language may be puzzled by the title, as "Gaiden" is Japanese for "side story", and at the time of its release, Ninja Gaiden was its own self-contained story, not a side story. This would later become Hilarious in Hindsight with protagonist Ryu Hayabusa's prominent appearance in the Dead or Alive series, with the modern Ninja Gaiden titles being side-stories to DOA, an idea solidified by the Japanese versions of the games adopting the Ninja Gaiden name.
• The Panzer Dragoon series has the so-called "Panzerese," which is a combination of Japanese, German, English, and either Latin or Italian. Example: One song of the Panzer Dragoon Saga Soundtrack is called "Ecce Valde Glorious Ale." Make of that what you will. (does not qualify for Fictionary because it uses actual words from other languages)
• Persona 3 Reload: When having a conversation with Chihiro outside the cinema, there may be film posters in English:
  • Friday in a certain day
    Fans of a Dutch soccer team
    Americans heading off to war are facing
  • The more than dreamin (not dreaming or dreamin', dreamin)
  • Detonator
    A troubling trend for a Dutch
• PikáGame, a Pokémon-themed NES clone is taglined with randomly inserted Japanese characters in the box art. "ぁどきおウか" should mean something if it wasn't the small kana as the first character, and "ウ" being the only katakana alongside the rest of the characters that are hiragana.
• Pokémon Colosseum and its sequel Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness have characters whose names go from just slightly off normal names to a random string of letters. (Then again, with such a large cast the series may have ran out of "normal" names by then.)
• Whenever Konami's Pro Evolution Soccer cannot use a player or a team (or has to make one up), they will resort to entirely made-up words. For the teams, initially, it made sense as it indicated their procedence (except for Stoke City, which is funnily but correctly called "The Potteries"), but as the series went on it seems the imagination of the people responsible for the database went off the rails. Just look at this lineup for a fictional Australian team: Adelmonth, Hughvich, Teldanstey, Fendymery and Cerkusnyder; Mcmalough, Jakonglow and Purkertone; Sirklark, Garetolden and Hornormant. Scaled back since PES 2016, where they started using correct, but completely unrelated, names with initials, although the Master League default players still have gibberish names.
• Resident Evil:
  • Resident Evil 4 is set in a nameless fictional European country apparently placed in the middle of Spain. Despite this, all the Ganados speak Spanish with a Mexican accent. "Ganados" is itself an example as well: Ganado means "Livestock" in Spanish and it is rarely pluralized.
  • Early games don't quite get Russian naming conventions: The de-facto Big Bad of The Umbrella Chronicles is named "Sergei Vladimir", and two of the U.B.C.S. members from RE3: Nemesis are "Nicholai Ginovaef" and "Mikhail Victor". While Ginovaef's name can at least be justified by poor translation^*A better rendering would be "Nikolai Zinoviev", anyone with even a passing knowledge of Russia will realize that the other two are rather nonsensical (but they can have a last name derived from Viktor or Vladimir, such as Viktorov or Vladimirov).
  • Resident Evil Survivor has two child characters by the names of Lott (male) and Lilyrungo.
  • From Biohazard Marhawa Desire we have... Merah Biji. Sure, "merah" ^Translation meaning "red" and "biji" ^Translation meaning "plant's seed" or "balls" as in "testicles" are legitimate words in Indonesia. Thing is, they probably thought every languages in the world uses adjective noun word order like English and Japanese. Indonesia uses noun adjective word order. Maybe they were just looking up on Japanese-Indonesian dictionary without bothering to learn the grammar.
• Parodied in Rising Zan: The Samurai Gunman. Said game is made in Japan but set in the Wild West; Western characters speak semi-decent English, while Japanese characters will utter the same phrase ad nauseum. The geisha enemies, for instance, utters "kimono, kimono, kimono" while the Sumo enemies will spout "chanko, chanko" ^note chankonabe, a Japanese broth meant to help sumo wrestlers gain weight.
• "Divinitus", the Roman faction map theme in Rome: Total War is just a collection of random Latin words (or gibberish that sounds Latin-esque) that don't add up to meaningful lyrics.
• The Half-Japanese, Half-Russian male lead of the first two Shadow Hearts games had the name "Urnmaf" or "Urmnaf"—depending on who you ask—in the original JP releases. For the US and EU releases, it was changed to Yuri, which is genuinely a name in both languages—although usually a girl's name in Japanese. It could be meant as "Yuuri" (or "Yūri") in Japanese (as well as "Yuri" in Russian)- which is a legitimate male name. Japanese names usually tend to have their long vowels omitted when romanized.
• "Simlish", the language of the characters in The Sims and its sequels is meant to be English foreign-sounding gibberish. Apparently the company that makes the games frequently receives calls from customers who think they've gotten the game in the wrong language. Simcopter was the first game to feature it. In The Sims 3 Simlish includes (correct, but irrelevant) phrases in French, Spanish and German. It also features licensed music from various bands... "translated" to Simlish. The cadance and intonation of the nonsense words follows the actual lyrics, and sometimes, the gibberish sounds almost like actual words.
• Soul Series:
  • "Cervantes de Leon". Umm...no Hispanic, east or west of the pond would have that as a full name, unless it's just the surnames, which are what the names supposed to be. There's also no acute accent above the "o" in "Leon", but that goes to nitpicking territory.
  • Patroklos' full name is initially written as Patroklos Alexandra. Greek surnames are like Slavic surnames; they would change according to the person's gender. It should be Patroklos Alexandros. A patch eventually fixed it to "Alexander", which is still incorrect, but is a much better alternative.
  • Names aside, the fourth game features several German phrases to fit the theme of Hilde's kingdom, most of which are typos at best and plain gibberish at worst.
  • Siegfried Schtauffen. His first name is fine, but his last name has no real-life record in Germany or elsewhere.
    • Well there is the last name Staufer/Stauffer, and a Mr. Stauffenberg became famous for failing to assassinate Adolf Hitler. But "Scht" is not a combination of letters you'll find in (modern) German
• In Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, the player has an option to have the NPCs speak with their native language of whatever country the mission is set in. Anyone who speaks Spanish will instantly recognise the (supposedly Peruvian) guards' accent in the first two levels as being European.
• Star Trek Online manages to do this with two of Star Trek's Con Langs.
  • The game borrowed bits of the worldbuilding done by Diane Duane for her Rihannsu novel series for the Romulan Republic in the Legacy of Romulus expansion. Unfortunately, Rihan language geeks have noted that "Mol'Rihan", the in-game Romulan translation of "New Romulus", is grammatically incorrect: they just slapped "mol'" ("new", but it's supposed to be a suffix) onto ch'Rihan (Romulus in Romulan, literally "of the Declared"). Among the more accurate translations would be "ch'Rihan'mollais" (though the Rihan geeks in the fanbase have largely adopted "ch'Mol'Rihan". They also frequently try to use Romulan words for Meaningful Names, only to misuse or misspell them (e.g. getting the 'a' and the 'e' backwards when they tried to use "laehval" ["shadow"] for Sela's flagship IRW Leahval), and forgetting that Romulans don't name ships or people after abstract ideas (RRW Lleiset, meaning "freedom").
  • Their tlhIngan Hol is equally bad. A particularly common mistake is forgetting that Romanized Klingonese is capitalization-sensitive ('q' and 'Q' represent different sounds). For example, there's a ship in the backstory named the IKS Quv. They were presumably going for quv (personal honor) rather than Quv (spatial coordinates).
• Star Wars: Masters of Teräs Käsi features the martial art "Teräs Käsi" that's inexplicably and ungrammatically Finnish. It means something like "steel, hand". If you must have a Finnish title, try "Teräskäsi" for "hand of steel".
• Averted in an example of Reality Is Unrealistic in Street Fighter. Although Zangief's name sounds odd to a Russian ear and has no meaning in the Russian language, it is borrowed from an actual Soviet wrestler: Real-life Victor Zangiev, who was Ossetian. This is lampshaded in the Russian dub of Wreck-It Ralph, where Zangief is voiced with a heavy North Caucasian accent.
  • It happened again in Street Fighter V: The Thailand stage, set at a Buddhist temple, contains Islamic chanting in Arabic.^note While Thailand has a sizable Islamic population due to geographical proximity to Myanmar and Indonesia, the country is overwhelmingly Buddhist. The people at Capcom quickly removed the music when they found out.
• Team Fortress 2: Appears here, most likely due to Stylistic Suck. The European mercenaries have exaggerated accents and sometimes say foreign-sounding words that don't actually exist in their own language, and the map Kong King contains some very bungled Chinese. There's also this bit from the German Medic in Mann vs. Machine mode:
  Medic: Uppengraden, everyone!
• There's one example in Tekken with Baek Doo San. It wouldn't work out as anyone's name, because, while it's a proper name, it's a proper placename, referring to Paektusan, the sacred Korean mountain straddling the Chinese and North Korean border. The homage is deliberate, though.
• Total Carnage: As a parody of the (first) Gulf War, General Akhboob gives various rants in pseudo-Arabic gibberish and even has the battle cry "Allbahyu faradallah!"^note I'll buy YOU for a dollar!, a Call-Back to Smash TV.
• Touhou Project has this with the character Maribel Hearn: Her first name is written in Katakana as マエリベリー (Maeriberī), which could be rendered a number of ways, including "Merryberry", and doesn't seem to come from any recognized language; "Maribel" is simply the spelling that most of the fandom has agreed upon. The franchise's creator ZUN seemingly picked the name because it sounded foreign and was difficult to pronounce as evidence in-universe with Renko just calling her Mary because she has no idea how to pronounce her name, and when asked point-blank even admitted that he had no idea what the proper romanization should be. However, since Maribel's portion of the franchise is set far enough into the future that the only edible plants are synthetic (among other things), it's possible that language drift is in effect.
• Wachenröder, a Japan-exclusive Turn-Based Strategy game for the Sega Saturn, has a title that sounds German but doesn't really mean anything.
  • Supposedly, it could mean something like "he who eliminates guards", from Wache (guard) + roden (to clear a forest). In any case, though, it's not a word that sees any serious usage in real German.
  • It's actually a reference to Wilhelm Heirich Wackenroder, a German poet of Romanticism. It's written in katakana as "Bakkenroda" (the umlaut is only cosmetic), which fits the German pronunciation of the poet's name.
• Warcraft: Medivh's name is probably meant to sound like Gaelic, even though the letter V isn't used in Gaelic at all (an understandable change, as they probably realized noone would say his name right if it was spelled Medimh.)
• In the GBA version of Wings, fake propaganda posters displayed between mission sets demonstrate a creative approach to German syntax and vocabulary.
• Wolfenstein has a downplayed example: in the recent games (starting with Wolfenstein: The New Order) there are several advanced weapons with "kraftwerk" in the name (E.G laserkrafwerk) , likely as a Shout-Out to the band. While "kraftwerk" is a real German word, it means "power station", and is thus an odd name for weapons (laser power station?) Especially odd is in Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus where there is both a laserkraftwerk and a lasergewehr (meaning laser gun, which seems like a much more appropriate name.)
• X has a problem with coming up with Japanese names. The man who worked out the core principle behind FTL jump gates was a Japanese man named "Kazuko Ashizava". Two problems: the "v" sound does not exist in Japanese (indeed, the Japanese tend to have a lot of difficulty pronouncing it), and "Kazuko" is a girl's name. Another background character is named "Dr. Akira Desu", which would mean "Dr. I am Akira".

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