"Flamescale" is a banned word.
(Image credit: Square Enix)
Tactics Ogre Reborn, a remastered version of Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together, itself a remake of a strategy-RPG classic, assigns a default party name based on your character’s date of birth. If your date of birth is between May 2 and May 25, that default name is Flamescale. As Twitter user Choojermelon points out, even though it’s one of the names the game picks for you, trying to accept it results in the error message, “Text contains banned words. Please change your entry.”
Choojermelon suggested it could be because Flamescale contains the word “mescal”, an abbreviation of “mescaline”, as in the hallucinogenic drug. Others theorized it might be thanks to containing “lame” instead, but trying it myself “lame” on its own is fine while “mescal” is not. Also banned: cocaine, ecstasy, LSD, and heroin, though not marijuana.
It wouldn’t be the first time a profanity filter has been tripped up by an innocuous word because another word on a ban list was inside it. The Dark Souls 2 profanity filter was infamous for preventing players from having the word “knight” in their name because it filtered out anything containing the letters “nig”. Dark Souls 2’s banned word list has been uploaded, so you can read it and be baffled by the inclusion of such innocent strings of letters as “but” (surely just banning “butt” would do the job?) alongside longer words of bizarre specificity like “cockfucklutated”.
What makes the harshness of Tactics Ogre Reborn’s filter more notable is that it’s an entirely singleplayer game. We’re used to online games having chat filters, and resulting oddities like Genshin Impact censoring the words “Taiwan”, “Hong Kong”, “Putin”, “Hitler”, and “words”, but seeing a strict filter in a singleplayer game is more surprising. Is it a remnant of a canceled multiplayer mode, or was it included for the sake of restricting streamers and pranksters who might upload a screenshot of a rude word on social media?
It’s a long way from Fallout 4, which not only let you enter “Fuck”, “Fucker”, or “Fuckface” as your character’s name but rewarded you by having robot butler Codsworth greet you with lines recorded specifically for them. I tried calling my party “Fuckface” in Tactics Ogre Reborn, but it wasn’t having a bar of it. “Cockfucklutated” was right out.
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