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In the Fire Emblem: Awakening game, the avatar character — that is, the main character whose name and gender you pick — has a default name. In English, the default name is Robin, because the character can be male or female. Robin is arguably a gender-neutral name in English, so it seems to be a good choice.

In the Japanese version, the default name is ルフレ (Reflet). Does this reasonably come across as "sounding" gender-neutral in the minds of Japanese players? Or do they have no such context because it's a foreign name?

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  • Sounds gender-neutral to me. Maybe with a tiny slant towards female (just like "Robin" for me, really). I will let a Japanese person answer though. Oct 21, 2014 at 20:53

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Or do they have no such context because it's a foreign name?

This. ルフレ sounds very foreign to me, a native Japanese speaker who loves games. People don't have any clue how to determine whether it's a male name or female name. (But if I have to guess, I would imagine it's possibly an European female name.)

I googled "ルフレ", and then excluded "-ファイヤーエムブレム", and "-スマブラ" (where ルフレ from FE appears as a playable character). I could find only one different character with the same name, and I think she is not so famous.

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