How to Title Your Stupid Sequel

[chadachada123]

Well Demon's Souls and Dark Souls, while not being true sequels, are spiritual predecessors/successors of each other with a unique naming scheme. I like their naming system, and would certainly like to see others do the same.

The Elder Scrolls does it alright. No one refers to them using number, and very rarely are they even referred to using "The Elder Scrolls." The vast majority of references just use the location name (barring Arena and Oblivion). So while the full name is, for example, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, it is commonly referred to using just Skyrim, taking the number issue out of it.

Edit: For larger series, like Halo and Star Wars, it is justified in having the universe name in the title, but it still should have something besides just a number for main releases. Everyone knows what you mean when you say Knights of the Old Republic, for example, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic works well.

Halo: Reach works well. Halo 3: ODST, however, sounds like an expansion of Halo 3 and not a full-blown game.

 

[chadachada123]

Star wars is a movie where the sequels were named in numbers, although they did make some effort to add in new names, and give the numbers not starting from 1.

Fun fact: A New Hope (the first one, episode 4) was originally released as Star Wars, without any number or sub-name. The sequel, Empire Strikes Back, was the first that had a sub-name and a number.

Still, the sub-name is generally used way more amongst fans than the series number, just like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is generally called Oblivion pr TES: Oblivion and almost never called The Elder Scrolls IV.

 

[grumbel]

I like numbers in titles. Numbers are great. They are straight forward and easy to understand. It annoys me to no end when I see stuff like this:

Blackwell Convergence
Blackwell Deception
The Blackwell Legacy
Blackwell Unbound

or

Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus
Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee
Oddworld: Munch Oddysee
Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath

in my Steam library and then have no idea in what order those games are supposed to be played, which means I have to make a trip to Wikipedia to find it out. With some plain old good numbers, I wouldn't have that problem. Given how every game gets turned into a franchise with at least half a dozen titles and spin-offs on multiple platform, handhelds, phones and tablets some good old numbers can help a lot in keeping track of what is available and how it fits together.

 

[Proverbial Jon]

This article is amusing considering Microsoft made Bungie tag the "Combat Evolved" subtitle onto the end of the original Halo because they didn't think it would sell by just being called "Halo." How times have changed.