Humor is completely subjective. What I might derisively grunt at, you might find absolutely side splitting. And Vice Versa. Try to keep this in mind.

I'll start with two nominations that I think will be pretty universal:

1) YiiK's attempts at Bathos. (Humor contrasting seriousness.) Often during the game, there will be a serious discussion that suddenly loses wind because something completely contemptuous will occur. Example: The philosophical discussion at the start of the game suddenly being sidelined by the appearance of the Golden Alpaca.

2) Persona, and the mandatory shounen bathouse scenes. If you watch Japanese Animation, you probably already know what this entails and have felt the internal facepalm. Here's a TLDR: A bunch of boys try to sneak to the girl's side of a bathhouse, and "HIJINX" ensue. This was a trope that had become a worn old horse by the time the original Dragon Ball was in animation.

It doesn't work in Persona due to the simple fact that many of the issues and elements that are being discussed are often along the lines of, "She killed herself due to sexual harassment". (Though confusingly, Persona 4 was given a Cero B, which is equal to a PEGI-12.)


So, now that I've set the stage, go ahead and humor me with examples of failed humor in video games.

Roman Bellic.

Why would humor be subjective?

So if I understand this (since you didn't explain), this is the fellow who shouts in your cellphone, "EY, NIKO! LET'S GO BOWLING!"

Because some people may find a certain joke hilarious, while others could get extremely mad at it, or anything in between. Persona 4's humor overall didn't land for me.
Sure, it was funny and it made me laugh every now and then, but considering the context of the game, trying to solve an elusive murder case while dealing with each main character's personal hell, it felt a bit tasteless.
And I think the humor was even more impacting for me because I had just finished Persona 3 FES when I started it, and P3F has depression and death as main plot points.

That is still not subjective, it is just some people have free will and can think and some are just dumb drones.

I don't make a habit of replying to you, but just to make it blatantly obvious: There are cultural, lingual, and rearing difference between every person. If I walked up to you and said 893, you'd not get that I just said Ya-Ku-Za in Japanese. Japan loves number puns, but they often don't translate well.

The phrase, "It loses something in translation" is often quite literal. If I made a TV show in English about a Hungarian comedy star, I doubt it'd manage to gain much of a foothold.

And that's just not getting into the fact that some people see slapstick as rote violence, vs other people finding it to be grand physical comedy. Each aspect of humor can be broken by personal tastes.

Pretty much. I left it at Roman Bellic for impact as the character is just grating. GTA IV was a tonal departure for the series (it dropped much of the "fun" of the previous games (accepting that San Andreas only became fun once the dire opening "hood" chapter was well behind you), and then through in an annoying, unfunny waste of space cousin to the totally depressing main character.

If it wasn't for the setting in 4, I'd absolutely hate the game.

Haven't played it, but the ''Princess Beach'' joke (or whatever it was meant to be) from Death Stranding: https://youtu.be/y3NLesfkpMA?t=99 I don't know if it was a joke but I think that's a testament to how confusing this scene is.

Possibly others: anything from MS Flight Simulator? Because its a flight sim and they don't.....

I do think there often is a theme of "Good jokes delivered at the wrong time", but it can't be said to be the inexplicable result of the localization; as I feel the fandom would have stabbed the team metaphorically if it wasn't reflective of the original script. But one does have to wonder how much was the fault of a joke translating poorly, vs just plain shouen anime nonsense. A lot of Kojima Productions have what at best could be described as a Big Lipped Alligator Joke. I feel the brick joke of the Metal Gear's design being made fun of and (internally conceptualized) in 3 isn't a non-sequitur, but it's so self referential as to be eye rolling.

"A bipedal tank on legs? That'll never work!" (Said tongue in cheek, at least 5 installations in.)

if you tell a linguistic joke in different lang ofc it is a bad joke as it loses its meaning , see it is not subjective

slapstick is for simpler minds like children, people grow out of it when they smarter

most of humor that don't work in games are due to translations and cultural differences. trying to make jokes that 'fit all' results in lame and flat jokes.

Can't really think of specific jokes that I found tasteless or offensive. But I don't find Monkey Island 2 all that funny (whereas I quite like the 1st and 3rd game), too much bitterness mixed in for my taste.

Also, "haha reference!" is not a joke. Stupid games. (Easter egg? Even a humorous one for some people? Yes. But a tension-breaking joke? No.)

A couple jokes that were ruined by translation:

Final Fantasy 5 (PSX version): There's a joke in the original Japanese, where the protagonist looks for something like porn in a library, but unfortunately, the translation of that part was rather incoherent and not funny. (Note that the GBA version's translation did it better: It looks like the character is looking up the word "ass", only to find out that it's about donkeys.)

SaGa 2 DS: There is a multi-lingual joke in the Japanese-themed world (Edo), in a classroom, that the fan translation ruined by "fixing" an intentional English grammar mistake. For the record, here is that joke in different versions:
* SaGa 2 original: "Please do not play this game" (English words written in katakana).
* Final Fantasy Legend 2: "HELLO! HOW ARE YOU? I am learning to speak English. ... How come you can understand me?" (Or something like that; the important thing is that the translators replaced this untranslatable joke with a different one, just like they replaced opium with bananas.)
* SaGa 2 remale: "Please do not this game" (in katakana) followed by some Japanese. (Key point here is that the verb is missing; in Japanese, the verb goes at the end of the sentence, so it seems reasonable that a Japanese learner of English would make this mistake.)
* SaGa 2 remake fan translation: "Please do not play this game" (putting the verb back in, ruining the joke), followed by the Japanese written in romaji (Roman letters, which European languages like English use for their writing system)).