I’m not just a clown, I’m the whole circus. A week after I called him GenshinScaramouche’s most annoying character, Scaramouche’s story, crushed my heart to small pieces and made me spend gacha money on him. Since Genshin launched two years ago, players were growl non-stop as the dialogue choices in the story”didn’t mean anything.” Now it finally does, and I agonized over it last night for several hours. It was probably the toughest choice I’ve made in any video game this year.

Scaramouche has been a recurring badass villain since his debut in November 2020. He’s always had a foul-mouthed personality, but he first earned my ire for helping create weapons that killed their wielders unconscious. Several months later, I discovered that he was using a stolen divine object to transform into a god. Again, I understand this is all from a textbook villain arc, but what really irritated me was his superior attitude. He’s an artificial puppet who feels abandoned by his creator, but that doesn’t really excuse his terrible personality. Or his desire to become a god-tyrant.

The final main story quest attempts to redeem him. After defeating his god form in the last patch, he became an assistant to the God of Wisdom. She showed him a traumatic memory from her past which proved that his loved ones had not betrayed him. The revelation was so shocking that Scaramouche attempted to erase himself from reality using a fantasy supercomputer. It worked, sort of. The world created another version of him to replace the one that disappeared in this new timeline. This is the one you pull into the gacha character. More importantly, you can give it a new name. This name will appear in all cutscenes and UI text. Although this is normal for a game like Pokemonbeing able to rename playable characters is a first for any gacha character I know.

Here’s the catch, though: the new type won’t accept just any name. Players report that you can’t give him his old name. You can’t name it either. mother who “abandoned” him. He rejects everything names based on his former colleagues, since they had abused and exploited him. He has a custom response to each rejected name, which some say is similar to the naming mechanism in Subtitle. If you decide to give it your own name, it expresses his approval. The game will allow you to rename it in the future, but warns that this can only be done a limited number of times. Developers really I want you to think about naming the character and treat it as seriously as the names deserve.

I was pleasantly surprised by the process, as naming video game characters can often be a way of taking agency away from them. It has become a meme give to rival a humiliating name in Pokemon Red and Blue. But by showing clear preferences against specific names, the Scaramouche clone looks more like a “real” person to me. Giving it a name wasn’t just a matter of personal aesthetics. I felt like I was fulfilling a specific emotional need that had been denied to him for so long. Despite all this, you can still name it bootyshaker69 Where biggerchungus. A popular Last name this has swept away through the fandom is “little girl.”

Fortunately, many people are more thoughtful about this. Some people do lists of potential names as if they were first-time parents. A fan even created a whole Google survey to ask the other players which name they had chosen. Others are looking for meanings From some Japanese names, since his homeland is based on Japan. Honestly, it’s such an amazing gaming experience. I can’t think of any other art medium that could force players to go to such lengths to simulate the experience of choosing someone’s name. In choice-centric games, I’m used to deciding which NPCs live and which die. This one took me through an emotional decision-making process that felt exclusively personal to me.

I was faced with a riddle. Names are new beginnings. It is impossible to use names to describe the past or the present. So I gave her a name that represented my hopes for her future. Shohei (hover, even/flat) seemed to suit his new wind-based element Anemo. And just like his mother, I also wanted to give Shohei some freedom and agency, but without the tragedy Scaramouche experienced. His previous incarnation felt abandoned as he traveled the world. Wherever Shohei goes in his new life, I hope he goes with a purpose.