Games That Let You Name NPCs - DSP, Batman, and Moviebob fight aliens

[Judge Dredd]

You say NPCs, but nearly every example is for naming and/or customizing your potential party members. So I'm going to just guess this is for general free-form-ish games with abominations characters the player makes rather than JRPG-style fixed casts?

Yes. That might have been a better way to phrase it. I wanted to separate it from games where you name the player character like Zelda or Mass Effect, or games where you name the party members but they have fixed personalities like FF7.

 

[Disc]

Surprised we nearly got to the bottom of the first page before someone mentioned miitopia, that's like the gold standard of this sort of thing.

 

[Capsule Creatures]

Surprised we nearly got to the bottom of the first page before someone mentioned miitopia, that's like the gold standard of this sort of thing.

I was going to suggest Tomodachi Life but wasn't sure if it would count, since you're making a virtual representation of the exact person and not just using their name for some video game character. Tomodachi Life is also amazing for this though. Currently on my island we have male Chris-Chan dating Nancy Pelosi and female Chris-chan married to Osama Bin Laden. Lmao

 

[Mooger Meng]

Yes. That might have been a better way to phrase it. I wanted to separate it from games where you name the player character like Zelda or Mass Effect, or games where you name the party members but they have fixed personalities like FF7.

Most prominently, at least from what I've seen and you've noted in the OP, are squad-management games like the various X-Com entries, and anything styling itself after Final Fantasy Tactics and its formula. Of course, the latter category tend to have plots and characters within them that are important to the narrative, but you'll end up with plenty of filler that you can tweak and customize to your heart's content. I could rattle a few of those style off, if that's relevant to your interest.

 

[Judge Dredd]

Sure, go for it.

 

[Mooger Meng]

Allrighty. Just a few I can think of off the cuff:

- Obviously, the OG Final Fantasy Tactics. You can name units you hire, and I think have one opportunity to rename any units you persuade when you get them. Neither of the Tactics Advance games allow any sort of naming, though.
- Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together and Tactics Ogre: Knight of Lodis allow direct naming of hired troops. Of the 4(!) versions of LUCT, the most recent remake (Reborn) is the only one that gives a single opportunity to rename units persuaded in battle, when you're deciding if you want to keep them afterwards.
- Pretty much every single strategy game from Nippon Ichi (Disgea, Phantom Brave, Soul Nomad and the World Eaters, etc.) allows naming your generics, though I don't recall if you can change it after hiring them.
- Phantom Brigade is a somewhat NuCom styled mech tactics game, whose combat mechanics are a strange blend of real-time and turn-based: all units on the field act concurrently in five second chunks, and you have to coordinate your team by timeline rather than using grid squares or time units. I found it difficult to wrap my head around, even before I noticed it allows they/them pronouns for its pilots.
- The somewhat recent Battletech game (2016-ish, I think?) also lets you customize your non-important pilots, with the same pozzed caveat.
- Wartales is a low fantasy cross between NuCom and Mount and Blade, and allows you to change anyone's name at just about any time you're not in battle, even the few static characters you can pick up.
- Symphony of War is a mix of Fire Emblem and Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen (if you've played the aforementioned Soul Nomad, it's very similar) that lets you rename just about anyone in your army between missions.
- Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark is another FFT-type that allows naming hired generics. I think it allows renames after the fact, and you can even load custom portraits for your characters.

 

[Judge Dredd]

The somewhat recent Battletech game (2016-ish, I think?) also lets you customize your non-important pilots, with the same pozzed caveat.

I thought you were stuck hiring from a pre-defined list? I remembered watching a modded playthrough where the guy complained hero pilots were cartoon characters but there was no way to change them.

 

[Waifu Denier]

I remember Stranger of Sword City being a Wizardry style dungeon crawler which, besides the standard name all party members, made it extremely easy to paste in images to customize the party lineup. I had a friend on steam almost a decade ago send me his abomination of a party.

 

[Battlecruiser3000ad]

In Ultima Online you could name all entities under your control, both summons and tamed animals, and at least on the emulated server I played on if you released them they'd stay in the world until killed by someone. I had a hobby of finding ways to teleport into inaccessible places (mostly to mark travel runes and then trap people in there) and used it to release some dogs, birds and cats with funny names in some of them so the names would show to anyone walking by but they couldn't just easily kill them.

 

[Mooger Meng]

I thought you were stuck hiring from a pre-defined list? I remembered watching a modded playthrough where the guy complained hero pilots were cartoon characters but there was no way to change them.

That might well be the case, I dunno. It's been a while since I've bothered with it, but I could have sworn that it let you modify more than just the main character.

 

[Dysnomia]

I just remembered, in Wild Arms 2 you can name the dog. Which is a good thing since his name is mistranslated. It's supposed to be Rush but they went ahead and transliterated it to Rassyu.

In Bioshock 2 if you have the Handyman tonic equipped you can repair security bots you've hacked. They will have random names.

There's a lot of games where you can name all party members. In Disgaea 2 can you name the weapons if you go through their item world? I seem to recall that. But I don't currently have a PS2 to try it out.