Unusual Euphemism / Video Games

• In ATOM GRRRL!!, Jessica yells out "Puss in boots!" at one point while having sex with Anna. Anna is just as confused as the reader likely is.
• Being A ΔΙΚ has the "restaurant", Quinn's euphemism for her prostitution business involving several HOT sisters.
• In BlazBlue, Taokaka's combination of Big Eater and Cloud Cuckoolander has turned 'meat buns' into a standard euphemism for breasts.
• In Blaze Union, when the girls of the party reject a gaggle of gangsters propositioning them, the gangsters decide to use force where words wouldn't work, and declare "I'm Taking You Home With Me" before attacking. Explicit use of the word "rape" would probably have forced a higher CERO rating on the game, but more importantly, it would have destroyed the over-the-top nature of the scene and taken away all that remained of its humor value.
• Chzo Mythos: "[They will know / They knew] the name of the King" is a recurring expression most often used when a character dies. Word of God states that it doesn't actually refer to death, but someone undergoing one of the "Blessed Agonies" required for initiation into The Order. It just so happens that "endure immense physical pain" is the most common one, which often results in their death immediately after.
• The Commander Keen fandom often uses "fucl", although it's not actually used as a euphemism in the games. It comes from an Easter Egg in which a few platforms on one level spell out "FUCL", but it's obvious what the developers meant, and soon became a meme.
• Devil May Cry 5: Nero and Nico sometimes call the giant demonic tree, Qliphoth, as a "house plant". When V is separated underground in Mission 5, he and Griffon also allude their act of destroying the Qliphoth's roots as "clearing up" but without "garden shears", likewise downplaying their threat.
• Divinity: Original Sin II: Lovrik the pimp refers to the services he sells as "stew", which can become a bit odd when he's trying to determine his client's sexual preferences. The Literal-Minded can also buy a bowl of stew from him.
  "What — ahem — flavour of stew do you prefer? Do you like the strong and meaty variety or do you prefer it delicate and fragrant?"
• In Dragon Age: Origins, Alistair will ask the player character in they've ever "licked a lamp post in the winter." In context, this becomes a euphemism for sex...or something. Also, Oghren will ask "Where can I get some sauce for that rump roast?"
  • There is also a rather hilarious exchange between Alistair and Oghren about "polishing their swords." Whether or not this is in fact a euphemism or not is lost on everyone, including Alistair. Also subverted. At one point he talks to Wynne about catching Alistair "twirling his pike" and how embarrassed Alistair was. Wynne is disgusted, until she realizes Oghren's talking about Alistair twirling an actual pike (a spear).
  • Oghren seems to be a master of these, as evidence by this conversation, again with Alistair:
    Oghren: So. With the boss, aye?
    Alistair: Pardon?
    Oghren: You and the boss. Rolling your oats.
    Alistair: I don't know—
    Oghren: Polishing the footstones.
    Alistair: —what you're—
    Oghren: Tapping the midnight still, if you will.
    Alistair: what are you going on about?
    Oghren: Forging the moaning statue. Bucking the forbidden horse. Donning the velvet hat.
    Alistair: Are you just making these up right now?
    Oghren: Nope. Been saving 'em.
  • Oghren also drunkenly mistakes the PC for his ex-wife's female lover, referring to her as a "moss-biting poetess." Sort of the dwarf equivalent of "carpet-munching," one would assume.
  • Also subverted in a conversation the Warden can have with Zevran:
    Zevran: You know, all this talk of Antiva, and for all it's riches and adventure, it is the leather I miss the most.
    Warden: Is that some sort of euphemism?
    Zevran: [laughs] It may as well be! But not this once, no.
  • The sequel continues the fun with filthy-minded party member Isabela, who utters a similar series of euphemisms asking if Aveline and Donnic have had sex and how good it was. "Put it in your peach" is one memorable one; she also uses "mastered your taint," riffing on an unintentionally humorous line from the first game that underwent Memetic Mutation.
• Near the end of the Namek storyline in Dragon Ball Z: Supersonic Warriors, the narrator says that Krillin, who was defeated by Freeza, was nowhere to be found.
• Right across the Dragon Quest series, "puff-puff" is a euphemism for... something. It's implied to be some sort of sexual act but it's never made explicit what the phrase means, and almost every appearance of puff-puff is set up to subvert the player's expectations in some way.
• Dwarf Fortress community:
  • A meta-example: "Fun", derived from the motto of the game, "Losing is Fun", and always capitalized. It can be both used to refer to the act of losing ("I'm having a lot of Fun right now,") and factors that are likely to make you lose ("I just embarked in a particularly Fun evil biome.")
  • Sometimes also carps ("Oh, carp!"). On a related note, Gurglefin from Skylanders uses carp in this sense. He's a fishman.
  • And then there's "Daycare" and "Unfortunate Accident"
  • The "Hidden Fun Stuff" is a codeword for certain endgame things that almost invariably spell doom for the player. Certain parts of the community got tired of that piece of slang, though, and when DF 2010 came out, they produced a suite of Unusual Euphemisms: getting some "cotton candy", going to "the circus", and meeting "clowns". The reason for is that when you open up Hell, a large number of demons come out at first, and after the first large rush they still keep coming out, so players compared it to a Clown-Car Base, which lead to "clowns", "cotton candy", etc. It isn't an actual Clown-Car Base, it's just that new demons will periodically spawn at the map's edges down in Hell, simulating demons wandering in from the rest of the world's Hell, with the portion of Hell on the player's map being only a tiny portion of the whole.
  • Possible sort of euphemism - joke involving Dwarf Fortress. The demons (explained above) are displayed as the "&" character (due to dwarf fortress displaying with ASCII code). The & character in programming has been known to refer to a type of background process in UNIX called a "dameon", which means the program is not under the control of the user of the computer. This name is from Maxwell's Demon, and fits, given how ingame the demons are tirelessly in the background, waiting to be released.
• An NPC in Happy Happy Village in EarthBound (1994) tells Ness, "Don't go to heaven!" This piece of dialog sounds like Nintendo of America put it in as an oddly censored version of "go to hell," but it was present in the Japanese version as well.
  • There's also the memorable, "You will be gone, and you'll be burning in...well, you'll go to heaven!"
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • "Morag Tong", the name of the native Dunmeri (Dark Elf) assassin's guild, translates to "Foresters' Guild". How they got this name is never explained. They also employ a lot of Double Speak, such as referring to assassinations as "honorable executions" because they are legal (within Morrowind). You can join them in Morrowind.
• One of the questions on the G.O.A.T. character-design test in Fallout 3 is, "A crazed vault scientist runs up to you and yells 'I'm going to stick my quantum harmonizer in your photonic resonation chamber!' How do you respond?" It's a euphemism for something, but we're not quite sure what.
• In Fatal Fury 3, when you play as Mai Shiranui in a single player game, the pre-battle conversation with Andy Bogard includes this line:
  Andy: W...What?! Mai, what in the name of the Great Ice Cream Salesman are you doing here?
• How about the word "Kupo" said by the moogles from Final Fantasy? An early cutscene in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance has Monteblanc, a moogle, utters the line "That's the most Kupo thing I've ever heard!"
  • There's also a moogle in Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings that spouts out a long string of 'kupo', before switching back to English so he can end the sentence with, "and your chocobo too." Not entirely coincidentally, said moogle has the name "Foul-mouthed Moogle".
  • The fact that it's the rough equivalent to "poo-poo" in Polish is probably a coincidence. The name of the perennial Super Mario Bros. villains caused a certain amount of hilarity in that part of the world for the same reason.
  • You spoony bard! This line has gotten so iconic that it's been lampooned countless times and always included in every remake of Final Fantasy IV even when the entire script has been rewritten (so far it's happened twice).
  • "Son of a submariner!" One of the few times where the euphemism makes more sense than the word it's replacing.
• Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance: Marcia has used the following words as expletives: crackers, chestnuts, mutton chops, horsemeat, jerky, and barnacles. She's just as colorful when coming up with an insulting term for someone.
  • In fact, Fire Emblem is full of this stuff. "Moldy onions" and "hornet hairs" in particular stand out. Also common are dated or archaic words like "dastard" and "cur".
• The word "Frag" is used to mean a kill in an online FPS.^note The term originates from a few Unusual Euphemisms in TV Shows, such as Babylon 5.
  • Frag is short for "fragment", or "tear into pieces". So not really less graphic. It may mean a more difficult, more graphic type of kill, in some games.
• One of the Harvest Moon games has the term "Best Friend system" when to the lesbian marriage option. You "best friend" your 'friend' even though they clearly have both Affection and Friendship points once you get a certain item, and that the clearly affectionate lines are all left in from the original male-only version of the game.
• In Haven (2020), Yu and Kay use the word "bloot" in place of swear words.
• In one of Ikemen Sengoku's story events, Mitsunari innocently asks why Nobunaga and the female player character (who are a couple) were so late to the former's birthday celebration and Ieyasu replies that "Nobunaga was exploring the hills, trimming hedges, while [the player character] took care of any uppity snakes."
• In Weapons Drawn from The Jackbox Party Pack 8, whenever a murder takes place, Lord Tippet will use odd exclamations such as "BILBO BAGGINS!", or "SNAKES ON A BISCUIT!" although on some occasions, he will calmly say "Oh good god." whenever a murder happens.
• Jurassic: The Hunted has:
  "What the Foxtrot is going on here?"
  • Note that "foxtrot" is the aviator's spelling alphabet word for the letter F. Not that unusual.
• In Kid Icarus: Uprising, one chapter has Pit tell Big Bad Hades to "go home". Since Hades is the ruler of the Underworld, this is equivalent to telling him to "go to hell".
• One of the Naughty Sorceress' attacks in Kingdom of Loathing refers to cooking you up "a nice spaghetti breakfast." This is an euphemism one of the game staff uses for tentacle rape.
  • This euphemism was originally shared with the founders of the game 1000BlankWhiteCards.
• This little exchange in Luminous Arc 2 (said in a joking manner):
  Rashe: You want me to punish you like dad used to?
  Roland: No no! Not in my Lapis Seeds.
• BioWare seems to be quite fond of this trope (among many, many others), as in the Lair of the Shadow Broker DLC for Mass Effect 2, we had this exchange.
  Shepard: [looking at a giant screen with asari dancers] What kind of hotel is this?
  Liara: Azure. It's a luxury resort with an... "exotic" edge. "Azure" is slang for a part of the asari body in some areas of Illium.
  Shepard: Where?
  Liara: In the lower reaches - near the bottom.
  Shepard: I meant "where on the asari body".
  Liara: So did I.
  • Played with in the second game during Garrus' romance. After his loyalty quest, he mentions how turians "blow off steam" before high-risk missions (also leading to a gem along the lines of "I had the reach, she had the flexibility"). When Shepard suggests casual sex in the same manner, he agrees to research it so neither of them go into shock from exchanging incompatible fluids. After referring to it in very scientific terms and mentioning how terrible that sounds, he goes back to "blowing off steam".
    "I've never considered cross-species intercourse before. And damn, saying it that way doesn't help."
  • The phrase "popping [one's] thermal clip" is used several times throughout the series.
• In a probably unintentional example - being a game targeted to a younger audience - within the game Mechquest, there was a holiday event in which you could go into a house where a randomized NPC would say a rumor about your character. One included: "I heard that *your character name* does somersaults with Nurse Helia!" Nurse Helia is female, if you were wondering.
• Moshi Monsters: Buster Bumblechops once refers to a Groin Attack as an attack to the "gooberries".
• In Days of Ruin an unnamed IDS agent uses terms such as "Oh good gravy" and "Sweet corn casserole!". This and her other funny dialog (such as being the only one to care that the plane they are on is crashing) is key in framing the theme of the breather chapter she appears in.
• In Obduction, C.W. uses the term "Karffin'" in place of actual swear words.
• In Octopath Traveler II 's Japanese version, Pala refers to Agnea's breasts as "peaches" and tells her that she can use them to her advantage. In the English version, most mentions of "peaches" are replaced with "talents" instead, but one traveler banter apparently kept this reference when Agnea mistakens Partitio's mentioning of "peaches" for a while before realizing that he was talking about actual peaches.
• In Paper Mario: Sticker Star, the description for the Billiard Ball has "For the love of Toad" likely to avoid "God".
• In the Pokémon series, the Day Care Man refers to Pokémon mating as "playing", as in "[Your Pokémon] would prefer to play with other Pokémon than each other."
  • Justified in that, most of the time, said daycare man is talking to an 11 to 12-year-old; though since these are E-rated games, the man will still say this to the teenage protagonists of Pokémon Black and White, Pokémon Black 2 and White 2, and Pokémon X and Y.
  • It's also quite possible this is because they DON'T mate - according to a special scene in HeartGold and SoulSilver, Arceus creates every single Pokémon egg. Which aren't quite exactly eggs, but more like a sort of nursery or cradle.
• During the opening of Portal 2 when Wheatley is moving your bedroom, he tells you he's going to "attempt a manual override on a wall". Translation: He is going to bang your bedroom against it until it goes through the wall!
• In the MMORPG Puzzle Pirates, the game client allowed three settings for filtering swear words: Leave them unfiltered, turn them into %* $#@! and the like, or "Pirate-ize" them, making them acceptable terms. This generated such phrases as, "We're all scuppered." Even the simple acronym "wtf" would be translated into "Blistering blue barnacles!" - a Shout-Out to Tintin.
  • For certain sexual terms, the "Pirate-ize" filter will substitute "John Thomas" and "harmonica lesson". The full list is available here.
• In Reality Breakdown: Kel's War, the third game in the Reality Breakdown series and the first to happen chronologically, protagonist Kel's home dimension seems a bit different from most other dimensions, in that they use energy from the sun to perform their "magic", and have "frap" as a swear word. The word is versatile, too, as one NPC is seen running into town yelling "One frapping huge army is coming!", while another time Kel wakes up and asks a party member how long he was out. When hearing how many days he was unconscious, he says "frap, I missed the weekend". Amusingly, Kel uses the word in another dimension later in the game, and naturally no one knows what he's talking about. The word is likely a combination of "fuck" and "crap".
• At the end of Resident Evil 4, Ashley apparently ends up swooning over her heroic savior (i.e. Leon), judging by her propositioning him for "overtime".
• Psychonauts: "Eggs" are used as a euphemism for "brains". More specifically, Coach Oleander uses this euphemism when he talks in his sleep about his specific plans for world domination.
• From Sam & Max Hit the Road:
  Sam: Percent sign ampersand pound sign!
  Max: And colon semicolon too!
  Spoonbender: What the [bleep] are you doing?
  Sam: Swearing in longhand, asterisk-mouth.
• Internet humorist Seanbaby did this in an article about adult video games, replacing sexual terms with the names of vehicles.
• Sengoku Rance replaces every instance of the word "penis" with "hyper-weapon" and uses "imperial juice" as a euphemism. Which leads to...
  Rance's hyper weapon is ready for action!
• The Sims 2 has pairs of Sims "Woohoo", rather than have sex. Used consistently, though the original The Sims would only have "Play" in similar contexts.
  • Fans of the game has since adopted it as their own euphemism.
  • In The Sims Medieval, pirate town Aarbyville is also known for its "meat trade." This is actually an Unusual Euphemism for prostitution, though it takes a few references before you get it. (The Fighters' Guild quest has perhaps the most transparent one.)
• Slammer: Promoter Vinnie Gaider's most prominent idiosyncrasy is his use of wrestling terms in place of curses.
  "What for clothesline's sake are you still doing here?!"
• Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves had a level inhabited with pirates who came up with some rather amusing insults rather than traditional profanity. The title character even lampshades this at one point.
• In the Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic games, "space" is frequently used. Examples include "Space off," and "Go space yourself".
  • The term 'space' (as a verb) is sometimes used in Sci-fi as shorthand for the act of ejecting something from an airlock, e.g. in one episode of Babylon 5 wherein an alien ship is said to have 'spaced' the captives held on board.
  • Another term from the same games is "Schutta." If the Exile asks Atton what it means, he replies, "Ask a Twi'lek. It's not flattering."
    • Weasel-like creature.
  • There are some other fun ones for the sex act. "Just because I saved her doesn't mean I'm going to go charging up her boarding ramp!" "You look like you and [your Love Interest] just hooked up a power coupling" (for that last one, you can ask "What do you mean?", and Mira replies "You know! Hooked up a power coupling?" A more obscure example referencing the previous game is "Pulling a Bindo," which apparently means leaving the Jedi. The expression is a Shout-Out to the first KOTOR game, when NPC Jolee Bindo did just that.
    • Specifically : leaving the Jedi to be with a woman (since Jedi are Shaolin monks IN SPACE, and thus supposed to be celibate)
  • Also there's this double example with no naughty meaning at all: "Now that we're off that dejarik board of a planet, I say we burn sky until we see lines."
  • In Star Wars: Republic Commando, Boss likes to demand "What in Death's name?", and when telling his squad to blow stuff up he says things like "Let's rearrange some architecture, Deltas," and "Initiate radical restructuring, Commando." He also once says "By the Force!" and "BLAST!" After that last one, his most rulebound squadmate asks "What's that, sir? I didn't copy" and is told "Uh, just some interference on the comlink."
• START AGAIN START AGAIN START AGAIN: a prologue: Crab. Crabs are inevitable, and Vaugardians use it as a curse word... and take the act of boiling a crab in a pot of water as an act of incredible sacrilege. All the more so when it's happening in a former House of Change...!
• In Tales of Xillia, Teepo uses the word "bazongas" to refer to breasts (Which is made apparent if you don't cook anything for a while, which may prompt him to say Elise will never grow any if she doesn't eat). Jude is shown to be unaware of the meaning in a skit, where Alvin and Rowen decide to take advantage of it for their amusement by goading him into yelling "TEACH ME ABOUT BAZONGAS!" at the top of his lungs, which gets him a scolding from Leia.
• Miscreants like Garrett are called "taffers" in the world of Thief. Lower-class citizens use variants on this word, making sure nobody is "taffing about", "taffing with me", or "giving me taff". Though fans of the series speculated that "taffer" was derived from some real word from a European culture the universe resembled, the creators assures us the word was made up.
• Tick Tock Isle: When you meet the pre-teen musician, she asks:
  Melody: What the flute do you want?
• To the Moon: In Impostor Factory, when Quincy isn't Symbol Swearing, he tends to go "What the pug?!"
• Umineko: When They Cry has Shannon and Kanon refer to themselves as "furniture". This seems to be a way of illustrating the class difference between themselves and their love interests, who are members of the family they serve, and how (in Kanon's case), they have no right to be with them. The truth is actually even sadder.
• In Undertale, monsters politely refer to death as "falling down". This is eventually explained: when a monster gets to the point in its long life that it can no longer continue, it just stops moving and drops down on the ground, waiting to die and its body to scatter.
• The original Wing Commander used "slag off" as an Unusual Euphemism for less Media Watchdog-friendly terms ending in "off". Unfortunately, as to slag someone off means to insult them, "slag off!" is equivalent to shouting "insult!"
• In The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings it seems to be a common euphemism to replace the verb "fuck" with "plough", as in "Go plough yourself!" As a standard exclamation "fuck" is still liberally used in the game.
• Math-obsessed Minamimoto in The World Ends with You flings mathematical terms instead of profanity, most commonly "hectopascals" and "you zetta sons of digits". This is most obvious near the end, when he clearly replaces the F-word with "factor" (especially since "factoring hectopascals" makes no sense as it's a measurement of pressure).
  • Eiji Oji, an in-game celebrity, has a blog called "F everything," and its title lead may you to believe it's a stereotypical angst-filled blog...until you discover that to "F" something means to declare it to be "fabulous."
    "F this ramen! F it to high heaven!"
• In the Mists of Pandaria expansion to World of Warcraft the Hozen frequently use "ook", "grook", and "dooker" (and variants) in ways to quite obviously suggest they are swear words.
  • A prime example: "I'm gonna ook you in the dooker!" No, really. It's actually said.
  • In Cataclysm..."THRALL'S BALLS!!!" which has become memetic as of now due to it's hilarity.
• Xenoblade Chronicles:
  • While the game isn't afraid to drop a real swear when it's appropriate, Rex in the second game can sometimes be heard exclaiming "Titan's Foot!" as a swear.
  • Xenoblade Chronicles 3 utilizes this as part of its Worldbuilding: As the primary cast are all soldiers born from People Jars and have no concept of sexual reproduction or familial relationships, all profanity deriving from those subjects (e.g. "fuck", "motherfucker") are replaced with made-up swearing like "sparking", "snuffed", or "mudder", which have implied in-universe derivations^note "Sparking" and "snuffed" derive from the Flame Clocks (which are tied to the lifespans of the inhabitants of the world) as well as the general idea of flames being analogous to life, and "mudder" is a reference the lowest colony ranking being "dirt" In lieu of religious swearing (as they also lack any concept of religion), they will also occasionally swear by their nations' respective Queen: "By the Queen's wings!" By contrast, swearing derived from bodily functions ("shit", "arsehole") and animals ("bitch") are retained, as the characters are familiar with those concepts.
• In Zork: Grand Inquisitor, Yoruk is an ancient and powerful wizard, so powerful in fact that wars have been fought over the possession of his skull. (And yes, this is a Shout-Out to Hamlet.) As such, people use the term "Sweet Yoruk!" in the same way people in real life use "Sweet Jesus!" (though they say "Sweet Yoruk" more than people in real life say "Sweet Jesus". When was the last time you heard someone say "Sweet Jesus"?)
  • Also, the people in Zork get milk from Hunguses instead of cows, so "Holy Cow!" becomes "Holy Hungus!"

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