Most sequels have pretty straightforward titles. Usually, you get the franchise name, then a number. That’s the good old sturdy format that gave us Sonic the Hedgehog 2, God of War 3, and Grand Theft Auto 4. There are also the numerous cases where you get the franchise name, followed by a subtitle. These are your God of War Ragnaroks, your Super Mario Bros Wonders, or your Animal Crossing: New Horizons. And we often see these two approaches combined, resulting in titles like Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest, Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag, and The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim.
Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 And The Subtle Art Of The Subtitle
But then there are the rare sequels that completely break convention, eschewing popular wisdom in favor of nomenclatural chaos.Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2is one of those sequels.
The first game was titled Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. Hellblade was an unusual game, but that’s a straightforward name, and it set a simple template you could reasonably expect the series to follow going forward. Going off the first game, you would expect the sequel to be titled Hellblade 2: Senua’s Saga. Those wordsareall in the title, but for some reason Ninja Theory decided to swap them around, putting the franchise name second.
This is an uncommon approach to titles, but it does happen. The secondJurassic Parkmovie wasn’t called Jurassic Park 2, it was The Lost World: Jurassic Park. Though it’s easy to forget now since the series came to be known asRambo, the first film in that action series was actually just titled First Blood. The second movie used this technique, then — Rambo: First Blood 2 — and used it as an opportunity to rename the franchise going forward. If you want an example that even shares a word with Senua’s Saga, look no further than the horror sequel, Hellbound: Hellraiser 2.
TheSuper MarioAdvance games on GBA took an even weirder tack. Those games were rereleases of earlier Mario games, and included those games' names as subtitles, no matter how bizarre. The result was that you might even get two separate numbers in the same name, as in the case of the supremely clunky title, Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3.
SEO Demands Make For Clunky Titles
Increasingly, series are adopting a variation on this technique for SEO reasons. In the ’90s, you would have understood that Glass Onion was the sequel to Knives Out because the TV spots had Daniel Craig doing his Foghorn Leghorn Benoit Blanc voice and the poster dubbed it, “The Hilarious, Thrilling Sequel to Knives Out!” or whatever. But now if someone wants to know more about the sequel to Knives Out, they’ll just Google Knives Out 2. Calling the movie Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, makes the movie more discoverable online. The same goes for Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.
Those SEO reasons don’t apply to Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2, though, which makes it all the more bizarre and fascinating to me. The arrangement of the words in that order doesn’t really achieve any practical purpose, as far as I can tell. The important bits are there no matter how you slice it. That makes it interesting in a different way, an eccentric artistic choice when we’re used to game titles being economical and even mercenary.
There could be a method to the madness. Maybe Ninja Theory wants to drop Hellblade and emphasize Senua going forward, like the Rambo series did with First Blood 2. Heck, maybe they just want to surprise the audience and will swap it back for game three. I can’t predict where the future will take game naming conventions, but I’m excited that, in a world of games with functional, but uninteresting titles, Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 is keeping us on our toes.
