Fist of the North Star isn't exactly the most accurate translation of the Japanse title, Hokuto no Ken, its just that it sounds a helluva cooler than "Fist of the Big Dipper" (which is what "Hokuto" actually is, the Japanese name for the Big Dipper).
Or "Ken the Great Bear Fist", which is the localized title suggested by Toei's International Sales & Promotion Department (source).
However, it's not THAT inaccurate either. Considering that the "Big Dipper" is a constelation that helps you find the "North star" Polaris. [1]
There is a Ranma ½ episode titled "Ranma and Kuno's... First Kiss." Be thankful that you really can never trust a title.
Though the titles do make some sense in context, ...Virgin Love and its sequel ...Junai No Seinen (The Young Person's Pure Love) do not do a very good job indicating how smutty the works are.
The movie Hearts in Atlantis. This is due, however, to it being an Artifact Title from the novella: the original novella was called "Low Men in Yellow Coats" and "Hearts in Atlantis" was an entirely different story (called so because the main character — avoiding going to Vietnam by being in college and thus it feeling like Atlantis — played the card game Hearts a lot (It Makes Sense in Context)). The movie makes no attempt at explaining the title. Other for it being, you know, a movie adaption of (a part of) the book Hearts in Atlantis... Brautigan refers to the sunken continent at some point in the dialogue, but that still doesn't make explicit the "hearts" part.
The Last King of Scotland is actually about the Last Dictator of Uganda. Idi Amin did claim to be the King of Scotland among his many other salf-applied titled.
TRON isn't really about Tron, but more about Flynn. TRON: Legacy even moreso.
Monster A-Go Go has a monster (sorta), but he doesn't dance - nor does Go-go dancing figure into the threadbare plot it has.
The Ref. The title implies something sports-related, and the holiday setting suggests something happy, but the movie is about as black a comedy as one will find from mainstream Hollywood. The eponymous character is a cat burglar who kidnaps a horribly dysfunctional couple in an attempt to evade a manhunt, and winds up having to "referee" their bickering while he plots his escape. In retrospect, the title fits, but a first-time viewer would have no idea what to expect.
The Grapes of Death. Awesome title, but the grapes themselves don't kill anybody. Farm chemicals applied to the grapes cause people to go berserk.
My Life As A Dog isn't a human-canine body swap comedy, but rather a Swedish coming of age dramedy. The closest it gets to literalising the title is when the main character has a breakdown and pretends to be a dog.
A Time for Drunken Horses is a notable aversion. You'd swear it was a metaphor, but it really does have drunken horses.
The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies is not a campy, counter-culture romp that the title implies. It's a straightforward horror-ish film. The zombies are actually of the traditional "hypnotized" variety and not the undead variety, so they don't "stop living" when they become zombies.
Literature
Some of the later Animorphs books got really bad about this. Titles like The Suspicion (where nothing is suspicious), The Prophecy (which features no prophecy), and The Hidden (which features a bizarre morphing buffalo that is definitely not hidden) come to mind.
Strangely, these are all books from Cassie's point of view. Make of that what you will.
The Three Musketeers is actually about the fourth musketeer who meets and joins the original three.
The Neverending Story ends. Well, the book has a bunch of subplots left with no ending, apparently to inspire children to become writers by actually encouraging them to write their own fanfiction. It's very meta.
Max Havelaar, of de koffiveilingen der Nederlandsche Handelsmaatschappy. The subtitle means 'or the coffee auctions of the Dutch Trading Company', but neither the company nor its auctions are mentioned anywhere in the book. Multatuli did this deliberately to get as many people as possible - particularly those interested in the coffee trade - to read his Author Tract.
Blackadder: The Whole Damn Dynasty: a book containing scripts of the series, does not cover the whole dynasty. It doesn't contain The Cavalier Years and Blackadder's Christmas Carol.
Perdido Street Station has almost nothing to do with the eponymous novel, beyond a scene in the climax. On the other hand it's hard to find a title that would fit with a book like that.
Neil Gaiman's short story "Other People" has only one character.
In a similar vein, in Agatha Christie's short story "The Four Suspects", the killer turns out to be a fifth character not counted among the so-called suspects.
The Goblet of Fire has a relatively brief appearance in Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire, and merely serves to trigger the events of the book, after which it's pretty much never seen or mentioned again. "....and the Triwizard Tournament" would've been significantly more descriptive.
A Clockwork Orange is a Word Salad Title that only makes sense in a variety of metaphorical senses, depending on which of the conflicting stories that Burgess has given to explain it that you believe. Suffice it to say that there are no literal clockwork oranges in the story.
The Decline of the West is a non-fiction book by German philosopher Oswald Spengler which inspired many people to grief about the coming end of civilization. Spengler wasn't completely happy with the title (which seemed to imply that the western world had to fall, like the Roman empire) and commented that he could've changed the title to "The fulfillment of the West", which would be closer to his intention - i.e. the west transforming to a stable but stagnant empire in the end. The fact that many fans only knew the title and didn't care to actually read the book didn't help.
BIONICLE Chronicles #3: Makuta's Revenge. Makuta's sole presence are two short monologues at the beginning and around the middle, and the rest of the story doesn't concern him, nor is he responsible for releasing the enemies, the six Bohrok-Kal. Their awakening was actually an automatic response to the heroes' victory over the regular Bohrok swarms and the Bahrag queens, from the previous book. Now, Makuta did release those, so technically he's indirectly responsible for unleashing the Kal as well, but the title's still a stretch. Later story material then Ret Conned out the "revenge" part, too.
Chronicles #4: Tales of the Masks, bearing the subtitle A New Quest..., makes it seem like it's about the Toa Nuva (featured on the cover) reenacting the tedious mask-collecting from the first book, but with new masks. The real focus is on exploring the relationships between the Toa and Turaga priests, through the Framing Story of the six Turaga reciting the tales of the mask-hunt, which is of lesser importance overall.
Live-Action TV
24 Hours in A&E: This show technically stays within the premise that all the events of an episode occur within 24 hours... but few, if any, episodes actually cover that long a period - most just follow a single day or night shift.
Doctor Who: The episode "The Next Doctor". But, of course, that's a spoiler.
The episode "Let's Kill Hitler," in which the Nazis and the genocidal dictator himself have little to no influence on the real plot. They either wasted a perfectly good plot or plotted a perfectly good waste, depending on your perspective.
iCarly: The episode "iCarly Saves TV". They don't save television, the gang gets the opportunity to turn iCarly into a TV show, it gets massive Executive Meddling and they give up and go back to the Internet.
Power Rangers Samurai: The first episode aired is titled "The Team Unites". Yet there is no uniting, at least not in a Recruit Teenagers with Attitude sense. The Rangers already have their powers, and the episode is primarily focused on the Green Samurai Ranger, Mike, who technically could be said to "rejoin" the team in the latter part of the episode. It's all but confirmed that it was supposed to be Episode 3, and the true "first episodes" of Samurai came in the form of Origins Episodes mid-season.
Revolution: "When the Lights Went Out in Georgia". The title implies we'll see events during the Blackout, but the episode proves to be anything but.
Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis: Beyond the first few seasons, these shows would often go entire episodes without mentioning or showing a Stargate.
Taggart: Since the death of actor Mark McManus, this show hasn't had Taggart.
Intestinal Disgorge's "I'm Going To Fuck Your Kid." They even acknowledge this partway through:
This song has nothing to do with fucking kids, by the way...
Throbbing Gristle's 20 Jazz Funk Greats. The genre is way off and the number of songs falls short by 9. If you include the bonus tracks on the latest reissue, it overshoots by 2.
Ween's 12 Golden Country Greats. Unlike the Throbbing Gristle example, the songs really do belong to the indicated genre; however, there are only ten of them.
The inaccuracy of the title of "Weird Al" Yankovic's "This Song Is Just Six Words Long" is self-evident.
The title seems slightly more accurate when read as "This Song's Just Six Words Long", but the lyrics still have a lot more than six words in them.
Subverted by original Beatles drummer, Pete Best, who infamously named his first album Best of the Beatles, confusing fans of The Beatles expecting a Greatest Hits album.
The Legend of Zelda isn't always about Zelda. One game only mentions her once at the very beginning (she never appears), one only included her in a flashback, and two others only contain her if both are played in tandem. What's more, aside from portions of Spirit Tracks and two of the non-canon CD-i games, you never play as her. All this leads to a massive case of I Am Not Shazam for poor non-eponymous hero Link.
You do not get to Destroy All Humans!, though you get to Destroy All Martians in the second one.
The Mega Man Star Force series focuses more on electromagnetic waves than stars or space. Star Force 2 doesn't have anything to do with stars! As for the "Star Force," it's just a power that MegaMan gets in the first game but has nothing to do with the other two games; there's only a vague mention of it in Star Force 3.
Technically, Solid Snake is still considered the main character in MGS2, he's simply not the player character for most of the game (there's a difference it seems).
The eponymous wars of Guild Wars ended before the earliest events in the game.
Chrono Trigger. The actual Chrono Trigger impacts the plot only briefly - and even then, optionally, as it's possible to go ahead and fight the final boss without completing the part of the story that involves it. (Adding insult to injury, it's even referred to more often as the "Time Egg".)
This is less the case in Chrono Cross; while the eponymous item arguably spends less time relevant to the story than the Chrono Trigger, it is of much greater overall significance what with being the piece of Phlebotinum that's supposed to reintegrate the timelines and kill the Time Devourer off once and for all.
Although the Chrono Trigger item is relatively insignificant, the description that's given to it ("It is pure potential. By unleashing a specific course of events, it can have a powerful effect on time...It represents a possibility, it may or may not hatch.") applies equally well to the party, meaning that the time travelers themselves are a kind of Chrono Trigger. It gets a little meta.
Plumbers Dont Wear Ties. In one scene early on in the "game", John is seen playing air guitar with a plunger while wearing a tie.
Metroid Prime Hunters does not involve Metroids or any incarnation of Metroid Prime at all. It includes creatures that attack in a similar manner to Metroids, but not Metroids themselves. (Though the demo version, First Hunt, that was included with DS systems at launch, did include Metroids.)
The Elder Scrolls III Morrowind - The eponymous scrolls get one mention in the game itself, and it's also the fifth game in the series...
Arguably the name Morrowind implies that you will be journeying across the entire province, when in reality you are limited to the island of Vvardenfell. Obviously this is located in Morrowind, but it still could be considered misleading.
The Elder Scrolls is awful about this, to date the eponymous scrolls have only been relevant in Oblivion (as a relatively unimportant MacGuffin) and Skyrim where it's really only important once. The subtitles are accurate though, although Oblivion would be more properly called Cyrodiil to be in line with the other titles being placenames.
Well, Oblivion IS a place in TES universe
The first Elder Scrolls game Arena doesn't have any arenas in it.
Fortunately, that's been handily dealt with: "Arena" is believed to be the translation of Nirn, from the language the earliest of the spiritual beings who took part in the creation of the world, the Ehlnofey.
The Minecraft Pocket Edition contains neither mining nor crafting.
And since it is also available for many tablets, the "Pocket Edition" part is not entirely true either...
The Mega Drive version of Action 52 falls into this, as it really only has 51 games. Several games across both versions also fall into this problem:
Dam Busters, which doesn't feature a dam at any point in the game.
Haunted Hill in both versions, although the NES version sometimes goes under the more apt Haunted Halls.
in over a year. And nothing aside from the first panel of the first adventure has been made in MS Paint.
Also, Homestuck is only about a kid stuck in his house for about a few dozen pages out of several thousand. Apparently Andrew Hussie was going to name it Sburb, the name of the game on which the story is based, but thought it was too boring.
"Faraway Morning and Three Short Tales" is the title of the 34th chapter of Gunnerkrigg Court which actually does have characters telling three short tales. Sounds like a short chapter, right? It's actually one of the longest chapters to date thanks to all of the Character Development and plot revelations going on between each of the tales.
