Pun Based Title / Video Games

• The title of Akiba's Trip is a pun on "Akiba Strip", and stripping enemies is how you defeat them.
• Alienation is the Spiritual Successor for Dead Nation, but instead of shooting zombies, you shoot hordes of alien invaders.
• Arc Angle is a deliberate misspelling of Arch Angel. The main character is an angelic entity who shines an angle of light in an arc in front of it.
• The Enhanced Remake of Archer MacLean's Mercury is called Mercury Hg ("Hg" being a play on "HD", and also the periodic table symbol for mercury).
• The soundtrack from Assassin's Creed Syndicate has a Murder Ballad, sung from the perspective of a woman telling her friends she will be unable to make it in time to an appointment, because she has been murdered and is lying like a broken doll on the tiles of Waterloo Station. The name of the song? "The Late Pearl Attaway".
• The fighting game Battle Stadium DON is a manga-based pun. DON stands for the three manga franchises represented in the game, Dragon Ball, One Piece, and Naruto. It also refers to the sound effect "DON," which is used for "dramatic impacts" in manga (similar to "dun dun DUNNN!" or "dun-dunnnnnn!") and anime. The three of these shows also tended to use "don" heavily, considering their genre.
• B.C.'s Quest for Tires's title is based on the film Quest for Fire.
• Beacon of Hope: Someone being a “beacon of hope” means they inspire others and introduce hope into seemingly hopeless situations, and the protagonist is named Beacon and from (thus “of”) the town of Hope.
• Bear + Berserkers = BearZerkers.
• Combine that with Gory Deadly Overkill Title of Fatal Death when Brain Dead 13 is named for a reason: it takes place in Dr. Neurosis' castle, which is located at "13 Brain Dead Avenue", for those who haven't seen the intro. It can also be a Double-Meaning Title when it involves an evil scientist Brain in a Jar and the many death scenes of Lance Galahad. Also, 13 Is Unlucky for Lance and the player.
• The otome Dating Sim C-14 Dating centers around a group of archaeologists. It's a play on the term "carbon dating" (or "carbon-14" dating, for the radioactive carbon isotope), a method used by archaeologists to determine the age of ancient artifacts.
• Castlevania = "Castle" + "Transylvania"
  • Castlevania: Rondo of Blood is known as Akumajō Dracula X: Chi no Rondo in Japanese. The "X" is meant to represent the fact that it's the first Castlevania game set after Simon Belmont's era (most of the previous games were remakes and prequels), but it doubles as a Stealth Pun since it's the tenth Dracula game released by Konami in Japan following the three Famicom games (3), the MSX2 version (4), the arcade game (5), the first two Game Boy games (7), the Super Famicom version (8) and the X68000 version (9).
• Catlateral Damage combines "collateral damage" with "cat", appropriate for a game all about causing destruction as a cat.
• The Communitree: Titled after "The community" and "Tree".
• Contra: Hard Corps. The French loanword "Corps" sounds a lot like "core", hence "Hard Corps" is meant to be pronounced like "hardcore", but a lot of people mangle the pronunciation of "Corps" and they end up pronouncing the title as "hard corpse".
• Many levels in Croc: Legend of the Gobbos are named with a pun, usually a poor one at that. Examples include "I Snow Him So Well" (being in the snow themed world and "License to Chill", also on the snow island and "Be Wheely Careful", in reference to the large spinning cogs which Croc must ride to navigate the level. Others are debatable as to whether they are true puns, but are intriguing nonetheless, such as "And So the Adventure Begins" (the first level in the game, go figure), "Cave Fear", "Life's a Beach" and "The Tower of Power".
• Cyberia = Siberia
• Daemon X Machina is a Mecha Game with a title playing on "Deus ex Machina."
• In The Darkside Detective, each section has a title that is pun on either a police-related phrase (such as "Police Farce") or a famous movie (such as "Tome Alone").
• The Wii version of the original Dead Rising is subtitled Chop Till You Drop.
• Death Trips is not only a play on Death Grips but also references how the villain, Lady Death, suffers a Death by Falling Over.
• Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest is about Diddy embarking on a quest to rescue Donkey Kong (quest for a Kong), and along with his girlfriend Dixie he'll conquer several lands that are under the power of the Kremlings (Kong-quest).
• Dragon Ball Xenoverse: the first syllable of "xeno" sounds like 'Z', which thus invokes the name "Dragon Ball Z".
• Fate Tectonics is a play on the term "plate tectonics", and has you assembling landmasses piece by piece, and once you've used up enough time, destroying them with natural disasters such as earthquakes, tidal waves, and meteors.
• Fortnite is a construction-based shooter that's named after an unintended but totally grammatically correct way of interpreting the word "fortnight". That word is supposed to mean "fourteen days", but it can also be read as a literal "fort night"; hence the title, Fortnite, which is aptly about building a fort so that you can stand your ground against whatever goes bump in the night.
• (A)Fro + Robot = Frobot
• Invisible, Inc. is a pun on invisible ink, a tool used by spies to send secret messages.
• Ittle Dew is both a Character Title and a reference to how much it imitates The Legend of Zelda. In other words, "It's not Zelda, but Ittle Dew (it'll do)."
• James Pond: Underwater Agent is an obvious pun on James Bond (who is an underCOVER agent). His arch nemesis is Dr. Maybe (after Dr. No), and most of the levels in the game are (terrible) James Bond puns, such as "A View To A Spill" and "Leak and Let Die".
• Kang Fu, referring to the martial art "kung fu" and the animal "kangaroo".
• The Wii game Kiki Trick, the gameplay of which largely revolves around identifying audio cues, is a play on kikitori, a Japanese phrase meaning "listening comprehension".
• Kirby:
  • Kirby's Epic Yarn: "Yarn" being both what the characters are made of and a synonym for "story".
  • Kirby: Triple Deluxe references the fact that it’s on the Nintendo 3DS.
• The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and its follow-up The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds refer to both Link (the character) traveling between the Light and Dark World, and the literal link between said worlds.
• LEGO City Undercover: The Chase Begins is a Nintendo 3DS prequel to the Wii U game, detailing how the protagonist Chase McCain became an elite member of the LEGO City Police Force.
• Several level titles in LEGO Marvel Super Heroes are puns. Like "Juggernauts and Crosses" for the first level at X-Mansion involving Juggernaut (because it's X-Mansion, there are indeed a lot of crosses around), "Taking Liberties" for the level where you fight a HYDRA-hijacked Statue of Liberty, and "Bro-tunheim" for the level where Thor and Loki reunite.
• Mario Party: Star Rush: One minigame is titled Tiles and Tribulations, which is a reference to the phrase "trials and tribulations".
• Marvel Puzzle Quest has 90% of the PVP events and a PVE ones with those - a lead designer even stated that she's "a person whose job duties routinely involve generating puns." For instance, Hulk = "Smash Hit", Doctor Strange = "Strange Days", America Chavez = "Stars and Strikes", Nico Minoru = "Staff Appreciation Day"...
• Mass Effect: Andromeda: Has some groaners as Side Quest names. These include Cache Flow, Cache and Release, Cold Hard Cache
• Hudson Soft's Momotarō Densetsu ("The Legend of Momotarō") led to a More Popular Spin-Off called Momotarō Dentetsu ("Momotarō Electric Railway").
• Nearly Departed, about family members who had died but remained hanging around the house as ghosts after the funeral.
• The Nintendo 3DS' title is a pun on the name of its predecessor, the Nintendo DS, and the 3DS' new stereoscopic 3D feature.
• Nomolos: Storming the Catsle: Yeah, castle was deliberately spelled catsle for a cat pun.
• Ōkami: In Japanese, "Okami" is a homophone that can mean either "wolf" or "great deity", with each meaning being written differently in kanji (the game's title uses the kanji for the latter). Fittingly, the game's story involves Amaterasu, one of the most important deities in Japanese Mythology, taking the form of a wolf.
• OMORI is a pun on Hikikomori, which translates to "shut-in",based on the titular character's condition.
• Open Sorcery, a game taking place in a world where magical spells are written like computer programs, is a play on "sorcery" and "open source".
• Point Blank (1994) and sequels are somewhat oddly-named in Japanese, but all the titles are puns conflating the stock Japanese phrase "ganbare" with the English word "gun."
• The North American title for Protect Me Knight 2 is called Gotta Protectors. The eShop's game description sums it up succinctly: "The bad guys are after Princess Lola. You gotta protect her!"
• Purikura Daisakusen an arcade and Sega Saturn game by Atlus, refers to two things. "Purikura" (or "PriCla") is both the Japanese abbreviation for Princess Clara, the game's main character (who originated in the Power Instinct franchise), and for the "Print Club", a series of photo booths that allow you to print pictures with funny effects, trademarked by Atlus in Japanese.
• The sequels to the Puyo Puyo games.
  • The "Tsu" in Puyo Puyo Tsu can roughly translate as "Expert", but it's also pronounced the same way the Japanese pronounce the English word "two".
  • The "Sun" in Puyo Puyo Sun is a homophone for san, Japanese for three.
  • Puyo Puyo~n, the fourth game in the series, ends with a portmanteau between the words puyo and yon (four).
• The name RuneScape is often accused of being a pun on "RunEscape".
• Rush'n Attack = "Russian Attack"
• Saints Row: The Third has the mission "Trojan Whores", where the strippers hired by Pierce for a party at the Saints' new headquarters turn out to be "hooker assassins" hired by the Syndicate to assassinate the Boss and his lieutenants.
  • Saints Row: Gat Out of Hell is a play on "bat out of Hell" and the name of one of the playable characters, Johnny Gat. Not to mention that the whole point of your mission is to get your boss out of hell.
• Skatebird: Skateboard + Bird.
• Smashroom: Smash + Mushroom = ... well, take a guess.
• South Park: The Fractured but Whole should probably win an award for its creative title. Matt and Trey originally wanted to call it something more explicit like "Butthole of Time" but the publisher refused, so they had to get creative.
• Splatoon is a play on the word "splat" (referring to the ink) and "platoon" (referring to the combat).
• Street Fighter II: Champion Edition is officially called Street Fighter II Dash in Japanese. The word "Dash" is represented by a prime symbol, which is used in math to indicate the derivative of a function. In other words, Street Fighter II Dash is really "The Derivative of Street Fighter II".
• Super Cane Magic ZERO is a RPG made by Italian devs and featuring the art of Italian cartoonist Sio. It's about a dog that ate a magic cane and made the world fall into chaos with its now-magical barks. But "cane" (pronounced kah-nay) in Italian means "dog", so it's about a cane-wielding cane, thus explaining the subtitle "Legend of the Cane Cane". By the way, "Zero" means "zero" in Italian.
• Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U is a clever homophone that showcases both the availability of the games for those consoles, and them being collectively the fourth installment in the series.
• The third Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles video game for the NES was subtitled The Manhattan Project and involved Shredder's plot to turn Manhattan into a floating island.
• Them's Fightin' Herds is a pun on the phrase "them's fighting words".
• They Hunger 2: Rest in Pieces. The zombies eat people. Fast forward nine years, and now it's a one-liner in Duke Nukem Forever.
• Trigger + Gore = Triggore
• Ufouria is a pun on the word "euphoria", also u have to control four different characters. And when you look at some of the bosses...there's also the UFO pun as well.
• Private Eye Dol, a graphic adventure game for the PC Engine, is about an idol singer who is also a detective.
• The expansion pack for X: Beyond the Frontier is called X-Tension. X3: Reunion and later games have a Game Mod called Xtended.
• The You Testament is a video game inspired by the New Testament that adds you as a character.

---