Japanese game censorship

[Bamyasi]

Is anyone else getting kind of tired of the recent uptick in censorship of Japanese games?

I mean a lot of it is pretty minor i.e. removal of sexual imagery/costumes not considered sex-positive in western puritanical countries.

Personally I don't play games for pornographic appeal, but it was nice to have that brief period during the 2000's when most Japanese games went unaltered.

I personally think it's wrong to alter anything brought over from another culture, even/especially if it offends people. It's important to engage with other ways of thinking.

Thoughts?

[PocketIllust]

ＴＨＩＳ

[Dust]

I'm pretty sick of censorship in general.

[SrsSam77]

I've been seeing a lot of threads about this on /v/ lately, hell right now theres a thread about a company thats getting shit because a dev refuses to cave into sjt's demands

[Gladius]

crap games but triggering feminist shitlibs is always good for a laffo

[Bamyasi]

Yeah but they seem to be winning.

It's funny that they so zealously decry cultural appropriation while actively engaging in cultural imperialism.

It seems what we're meant to take away from this is that they simply hate other cultures, which I suppose is why their ideal world would be a bland, ethnically homogenized multicultural wasteland.

[rtil]

japanese media censors itself all the time

not that this makes it any better

localizers/translators have too much creative liberty over their work

[Binary_2]

I want my barely clothed loli in bravely default and I want it now

[zwimmy]

leave the boobs alone

[Unless]

I don't know specifically to what censorship you're referring, but on a related note I feel like gaming as a media seriously needs to grow up. Insensitive and/or offensive media (cultural or otherwise) exists and continues to be created in most avenues of art, but gaming continues to have the biggest call to arms for censorship. Maybe this is because in the general scheme of things it's still much younger, or maybe it's just the sort of thing in which I'm interested and I'm biased to think this is the case even though it isn't at all. Yes... I may be wrong, but I doubt it.

I just find it weird how, in video games (with some exceptions a la Germany and Australia), it's perfectly acceptable to rip off people's body parts and clobber them to death with them, but it's significantly less acceptable to include sex scenes. I mean it only makes sense I guess — people know that violence is wrong and it's not something they'd ever do in real life so including it in games is okay. We couldn't include sex in games though because it's much more taboo and our poor generation's children might think that it isn't distinctly wrong.

[ZennyPLUS]

Honesty is a good policy, I like the director of the Senran Kagura games. The guy is honest about his games and what he likes. Tits. And that's what the games have--mind you there's more to the games, but that's a selling point. The games have a rating and their intended for adults to purchase. This is like that shit way back in the day with DOOM and Mortal Kombat, people wanted to ban it because it offended a group of people who were never the intended audience for it. There wasn't much of a ratings system then until the ESRB rounded it's head. This will come to pass as all things like this does. The west is just so afraid of sex it's funny. Working at gamestop has showed me that Americans are A-Okay with their kids blowing up brown people in COD to defend ol' red, white and blue or shooting up the streets in GTA V, but if the game barely mentions sex, well shit, how are they suppose to explain that to kids?

Censorship sucks, I agree, but it's not a new topic and the companies who localize the games will change what they deem necessary in order to make it sell, whether it's really needed or not.

Seriously though, Koei is afraid of negative press now, lmao, they're been getting slack for the DOA girls for at least 10 years now. Suddenly they care.

[Bamyasi]

I don't know specifically to what censorship you're referring, but on a related note I feel like gaming as a media seriously needs to grow up. Insensitive and/or offensive media (cultural or otherwise) exists and continues to be created in most avenues of art, but gaming continues to have the biggest call to arms for censorship. Maybe this is because in the general scheme of things it's still much younger, or maybe it's just the sort of thing in which I'm interested and I'm biased to think this is the case even though it isn't at all. Yes... I may be wrong, but I doubt it.

I just find it weird how, in video games (with some exceptions a la Germany and Australia), it's perfectly acceptable to rip off people's body parts and clobber them to death with them, but it's significantly less acceptable to include sex scenes. I mean it only makes sense I guess — people know that violence is wrong and it's not something they'd ever do in real life so including it in games is okay. We couldn't include sex in games though because it's much more taboo and our poor generation's children might think that it isn't distinctly wrong.

I think it's a combined effect of the medium, as well as its socially accepted demographic (grade school boys who need to be protected from the sexboobs), being young. We seem to be entering a Hays Code era with (imported) video games. Cartoons have a different (albeit causally related) problem in that they're also thought of as being for children, so hardly anything artistic or mature can come from that medium in the western industry. I agree with everything in ¶2. Most of the censorship we're talking about is related to sexuality, but linking any specific examples might make the complaints seem frivolous.

Honesty is a good policy, I like the director of the Senran Kagura games. The guy is honest about his games and what he likes. Tits. And that's what the games have--mind you there's more to the games, but that's a selling point. The games have a rating and their intended for adults to purchase. This is like that shit way back in the day with DOOM and Mortal Kombat, people wanted to ban it because it offended a group of people who were never the intended audience for it. There wasn't much of a ratings system then until the ESRB rounded it's head. This will come to pass as all things like this does. The west is just so afraid of sex it's funny. Working at gamestop has showed me that Americans are A-Okay with their kids blowing up brown people in COD to defend ol' red, white and blue or shooting up the streets in GTA V, but if the game barely mentions sex, well shit, how are they suppose to explain that to kids?

Censorship sucks, I agree, but it's not a new topic and the companies who localize the games will change what they deem necessary in order to make it sell, whether it's really needed or not.

Seriously though, Koei is afraid of negative press now, lmao, they're been getting slack for the DOA girls for at least 10 years now. Suddenly they care.

"How anybody expects a man to stay in business with every two-bit wowser in the country claiming a veto over what we can say and can't say and what we can show and what we can't show — it's enough to make you throw up. The whole principle is wrong; it's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't eat steak."
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               —Heinlein

The DOAX3 thing seems like a publicity stunt tbh. Those games have always sold way better over here than in Japan:


Hayashi and friends will be rolling in import dollars from teh controversy sales boost.

yeah i couldnt care less

Censorship in action.

[Unless]

yeah i couldnt care less

Censorship in action.

In for the penny.

[ZennyPLUS]

Hey man, I want my softcore ecchi good stuff. Don't hold that back from me.

Oh yeah, I'd figure it was a publicity stunt. There's no press like bad press.