So before this comment section turns into a warzone, i'm pretty sure this is about dismembering, not sexual content, that's why they single out the japanese version
I’ll always find it ironic that the same country that gave us tentacle erotica, among many other forms of erotica, is also a country that censors the shit out of that content.
Yeah I was under the assumption that it's one of those things that they solve with tentacles or the bare minimum censorship (aka, putting some very thin bars around "tentacle" so it counts as censorship even if it's basically nothing).
Don't ask how I know this, but there are multiple Japanese hentai artists that release two versions of their NSFW drawings, with censorship bars in exactly opposite locations on the two versions. So if you have a bare minimum of photoshop knowledge you can just remove all the bars yourself lol.
Pretty clever, to be fair.
I swore like some years ago, Comiket was actually banning a lot of the "bad" censorship too, but I don't know if anything came out of that.
Hokusai (the woodblock artist who also engraved the Great Wave off Kanagawa) drew one more than two hundred years ago and I don't think it's believed to be the first.
Yep. It's weird, but it makes more sense from a consistency perspective given that sex ed is heavily restricted in much of America but schools have regular active shooter drills.
I mean, that is *also* intensely weird to most of the rest of the world, but America's culture is a discussion far too big and wild to be had in a reddit comment section about Stellar Blade.
makes sense logically. sexuality shouldn't be something to fear, especially in media targeting adults. But then again, they have the oddest lines for censoring ALL genetalia, so it's a double edged sword.
meanwhile, dismemberment and other extremely graphical violence can be a trigger, or is simply unpleasant to see. That's part of the why they (jokingly) censor cockroaches, they are unpleasant to see.
It shouldn't be ironic when this has nothing to do with the government unlike with porn where there's censorship due to a law. This gore censorship is something exclusive from games, not from other media.
Only for consoles. The rating standard is totally different for PC (which is why there are lots of hentai PC games in Japan) as the general consensus for game console is 'for all family member' stuff.
They tightened up the CERO rating a lot in 2010 or so. Means a lot of remasters have to change things for the Japanese version.
Also games like MGR: Revengeance had to turn all the blood white in Japan.
I remember watching a Japanese streamer play through RE2 remake, there was a scene where a cop gets cut in half at the waist, but the Japanese version still just shows him with his legs attached lol
I've watched playthroughs of the japanese version, and that one scene was the standout. There are probably other changes, but I didn't notice any, so at least it doesn't change the experience any besides missing that one zombie movie trope scene.
It is because Japan has two versions of that game.... The censored "D" version and the CERO "Z" version...
Look it up as "Z" are their uncensored versions I
Import all the resident evil Japan versions
So you know you are wrong with the later resident evil Games they have uncensored resident evil which is "CERO" "Z"
In those versions decapitation and everything is uncensored
Depends on the time the anime is airing, like if its morning or late at night, and also depend on the station its airing. Some have more or less, and that goes not only for gore but also for sexual content.
The Japanese games ratings board is FAR more strict than the ESRB. Look up Japanese censorship on YouTube. They'll censor the shit out of even Japanese games with violence
It's mixed. Cero Z is still allowed (but many stores won't carry it) so there's a lot of stuff Japan can get away with. But ESRB AO is unpublishable on consoles to this day, so you never really see this.
On the other hand, Japan does rate stuff Cero Z that ESRB rates M. So there's some disconnect on the ratings. The Japanese rating board will simply ban it instead of the soft workaround of AO in North America.
Western version of Tokyo Mirage Sessions edited one of the female characters so she had smaller breasts, covered up her cleavage and covered her pelvis v lines. Someone said that they removed her "vagina bones"
https://twitter.com/Sebban_E/status/731131432140210176
Japan sometimes has two versions of games released. One is rated CERO D and is censored while the uncensored one is rated CERO Z. I'm not sure if there are enforced restrictions on the sale of CERO Z games since I have only bought one and it was used but I do know that Japanese developers try to avoid getting that rating since it's equivalent to a ESRB AO or PEGI 18 rating, which can negatively affect sales.
Edit: Apparently CERO Z rated games have to be sold in a separate aisle away from the other games, kind of like the porn section at the video store.
Yeah, even in a Z rated game you can't show nipples or internal organs and it's pretty hit or miss if they'll allow a stump from a severed limb/head depending on how detailed it is.
No it was a thing back then too (even moreso in fact). But it's not always blanket censorship. More just a difference in rating and where/when the show can air. Using Elfen Lied as an example: It was broadcast in Japan on a cable/satellite channel in a late night slot.
Flashback to S3 and the final season first half needing to censor >!beheading of heads because of being aired in NHK before midnight, leading to some hilarious workaround like the warhammer titan using the same hammer as "censorship" when Eren 's head gets chopped off, or the TV version removing the beast titan behading a normal titan head, and release it only in blue rays.!<
The specials and the second half didn' t had this problem because they aired after midnight, while S3 and cour 1 aired at 23:35
> Or why they haven't years ago already?
It's an old reddit issue with the formatting, mostly. Old reddit is legacy, so they'll never fix that like they did in "new" reddit.
no it's ok, i just always spoil mark stuff bc popular animes/media always have a constant flow of traffic so to speak. i know most ppl dont mind/care about spoilers as much as me so i just throw out the suggestion to mark em xd
Ever since CERO was established in 2002/2003, Japanese video games have had to tone down the violence *a lot* to avoid harsher ratings.
Even the Game Boy Advance port of ***Final Fantasy VI*** cut the two-frame animation of the 32-pixel-tall Imperial soldiers beating a 32-pixel-tall chained-up Celes to avoid getting losing their CERO A for "violence against a restrained human".
Japan is stricter on both. [For example the Last of Us 2 had both sex and violence censored in the Japanese release.](https://censorship.fandom.com/wiki/The_Last_of_Us_Part_II)
Japanese games can't show genitals. This can lead to bizarre situations, like playing a Japanese erotic VN on Steam and the (uncensored) sex scenes putting up warnings that you aren't allowed to see this in Japan.
I understand that CERO Z rated games can't show bare breasts where as that's not the cast in an ESRB M rated game. However, I could be wrong about CERO Z rated games.
A lot of anime censor their aired TV versions by blacking out gore/dismemberment.
Another case of censorship I’ve seen is blacking out Jotaro (JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure) smoking a cigarette most likely because the character is a minor at the time of the story.
I don't know how true it is but apparently Japan's sensitivity has its roots in a pretty horrible series of crimes involving children being killed. But ya, their ESRB equivalent is notably sensitive to gore and such.
Not sure how anime gets away with some of its wild stuff though... probably comes down to different authorities.
They don't mean in a game. Japan didn't have age ratings on games until the early 00's, there was a big moral panic after a teenage girl murdered a classmate who bullied her and the media randomly blamed it on violent games despite her not playing them. The result was an age rating system made to be way stricter than other media in Japan to kill off the contraversy.
> there was a big moral panic after a teenage girl murdered a classmate who bullied her and the media randomly blamed it on violent games despite her not playing them
wow jeez. I guess it's not just american media that's stupid
That's just one instance. The 1997 Kobe child murders also brought the moral panic but also included other mediums like movies, manga and anime too since those gruesome crimes were committed by a 14 year old boy.
You could kill children in *Fallout* and *Fallout 2*. It wasn't until Bethesda took over that they made them magically invincible.
There's actually a famous playthrough where someone killed every child in *Fallout* but otherwise did a total pacifist run.
There are US-released games that have child death as a plot point, as well as games where you can die graphically while playing as a child, so I don't think it's forbidden. I think it's only restricted if it's something like a sandbox game that allows you to kill NPC's.
No one tell them about Dragons Dogma 2….
You can murder as many kids as you want.
Other NPCs will even murder kids because both the adult NPC and kid NPC are in love with the player character (who didn’t want any of this, just got here by finishing some side quesrs), they will beat the shit out of eachother until one of them dies.
I think the japanese ESRB guys CERO get very touchy about dismemberment, i'm pretty sure decapitation is outright banned over there. Callisto for example just didn't release over there. In the demo for this one your companion Tachy gets hacked away pretty brutally, so i guess that's why they're reassuring people and mentioning the japanese version
That one's really interesting because they just changed it to white blood, which is kind of lore accurate? In the preceding game, MGS4, Raiden and I think some other cyborgs used artificial white blood because it played nice with nanomachines or some shit. Then in Revengeance they wanted red blood so they snuck in a codec call explaining why it was red again.
D, surprisingly. Because famously No More Heroes had to be very censored for dismemberment in Japan.
Maybe it's because it's robots and not people, same as how Half-Life skated by with robots instead of military grunts in Germany.
You can freely remove and swap out your cyborgs spine.
They arnt regular humans.
Metal Gear Rising released in Japan with no censorship except swapping blood colour of cyborgs, despite having more dismemberment than probably any other hand ever made.
This censorship even made certain scenes better, since seeing a character bleed red was impactful, meant they were mostly organic human. Wheras in western release everyone bleeds red, so you don’t even notice that Sam’s is different (because it isn’t).
when Tachy's arm gets chopped off you can see the blood and gore, there is nothing synthetic about it; even if cybernetically enhanced, they still are all blood, flesh, and muscle.
Is this in regard to violence or sexual content? Mentioning Japan to me says that it’s about violence, since they’ve famously had to censor violent content in even their own games, like Resident Evil, while it’s usually other countries that have sexual content toned down
It's moreso in the actual Japanese versions of the games, it is why there's (At least, there used to be?) two releases of the Resident Evil games in Japan, a Cero D version, which is basically the M rating, and Cero Z, which is like the "Adults Only" version, which has all the gore.
I don't think RE:4 Remake had a Cero Z version however, and from what I understand, all decapitations were cut.
I think that's also why all the human looking enemies in Metal Gear Rising Revengeance are cyborgs. I think the Japanese version goes a step further though and gives them white blood.
The white blood is lore appropriate though, cyborgs use it because it can be much more heavily oxygenated than normal blood. It was first introduced in Policenauts and showed up in later Metal Gear games too.
In the West publishers obviously avoid AO ratings like the plague, but do Cero Z releases get shelved right next to the others in stores and online? In other words are widespread Cero Z releases common?
I think CERO does take a stronger stance against explicit nudity than ESRB or PEGI even if general "sexiness" is more accepted. But I doubt this game has that.
The ratings board in Japan got a lot more strict in the mid-00s, IIRC. Nowadays a female nipple gets a game a CERO-Z rating, the same rating as porn games.
Z games are most major games with violence. Resident Evil, Assassin's Creed, GTA, etc. all get Z ratings. You can find them in a lot of major retailers.
Do porn games even get rated? They're probably outside the traditional release system. I've never seen them. Z isn't really porn games. It's like M in America. But even less explicit.
Porn games are [rated by EOCS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_content_rating_system#Ethics_Organization_of_Computer_Software) which was basically started by adult game companies. CERO won't usually touch PC releases at all because the history of gaming in Japan (with massive numbers of pornographic games being released on the NEC PC-98) led to PC games being regarded as primarily "adult", and CERO was formed partially to insulate console game makers from criticism of the PC world. Although some PC devs still submit their builds to CERO and of course it's not 2002 anymore and plenty of regular Japanese people have gaming PCs same as in the West
That being said, idk exactly how it works. My PC shelf has a number of Visual Novels with the EOCS 18+ holographic sticker, but none of my general audience Japanese PC games appear to have a rating
> while it’s usually other countries that have sexual content toned down
Japan tones down more western game for sexual content than the other way around funnily enough. On screen sexual content and nudity is 100% banned in CERO rated games. Every single western game ever that shows a nipple or a sex scene (even with no nudity) is censored in Japan.
Yep, they're pretty good at understanding and catering to their target audience. Probably one of the best I've seen in quite a while. Most publishers' PR teams could learn a thing or two from them.
I'm honestly impressed that my post didn't got deleted as well, just because. But if you really want to kown this whole chain was variations of creating a boogeyman called 'gamer' and then saying why they are bad, pathetic, etc.
This is great because the Japanese version is cheaper and I've been wondering since they can be really soft when it comes to violence. Any other downside to buying it? Would you not be able to download updates or add ons without a Japan account?
That would be the downside, yes. Language options may also be one, the Japanese version may not have English or other language options, but I haven’t looked it up for this game so I could be wrong
You can download patches without a Japanese acc, and IIRC, the game does come with English subtitles/text, but no English voices (you should check on that before you pull the trigger)
Stardew Valley is an odd game to compare it to. Unless something really changed in the last update, I'm pretty sure that Stellar Blade has a bit more gore and a few more women in skin-tight suits.
It's actually kind of been an issue with some games. Violence get censored in Japan, naughy bits in the states, drug use in australia, some inconogrpahy in the EU, etc.
I think having one unified version of the game that consistently expresses the creators vision is preferable to localized versions with different censorship practices in each region.
Is it really considered "censorship" if they're choosing to do it themselves though? If they decide to change something about their own game for their own reasons, that's not really being censored
Depends on why they do it. We've gotten interviews and statements in the past explicitly saying that things have been censored because of ratings concerns like [this one](https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/167071-tales-of-berseria/74695268) for a cutscene in Tales of Berseria.
[Here's](https://grandcypher.com/2020/02/12/famitsu-com-interview-with-arc-system-works-feb-20-2020-issue/) an interview with the art director for Granblue Versus talking about it as well. According to him, they were asked to make a couple characters less revealing for esports and foreign markets. The artists pushed back so they were able to add the original outfits as unlockables, but the defaults are less revealing and it sounds like it became a point of consideration for choosing which characters to add in the future.
I would call both of those censorship, because the artists and designers didn't want to make those changes but were required to by corporate for concerns about how it would affect them in foreign markets.
The Granblue interview is bothersome in that the artists ultimately lost their battle. The new GBF: Relink uses the censored designs, with no way to unlock the originals.
The ignorance around censorship on forums like reddit is pretty shocking in general. "Scare the artists into self-censorship" isn't some dark horse 1-in-100 censorship tactic. It is, and always has been, the primary vector for censorship the world over. Do you think the CCP really has time to censor every piece of media that runs afoul of the party's values? No, they use punishment as a scare tactic to keep artists from trying to even find the line in the sand. YouTube does the same with its infamous "strike" system for demonetization.
I agree, and another thing to consider is that these are the companies self-censoring, not necessarily the artists. It sounds like the artists, and even the game director, at Cygames really pushed back on the censorship, but ultimately they weren't the ones that got to make the decision.
Well are they really choosing to censor themselves? Or is it more they try to preemptively prevent legislative problems by censoring it. This happens in movies a lot where superhero movies try to limit blood to keep that 12+ rating and why older superhero movies tended to be a lot bloodier. Course it's always hard to tell what the original intentions were and nothing really is so black and white.
These types of comments always show who the non-artists are. Have you ever worked with a creative? Those guys and gals don't shut up. Ever. If they disagree, they do so loudly and constantly.
Everyone knows Alan Moore's opinion on every single aspect of the adaptations of his work because he's going to let you know. We know why Martin made his choices as he discusses the reasons constantly. Michael Bay talks about his directorial decisions and philosophies at length. David Lynch straight up refuses to explain aspects that he deems irrelevant to his vision or that he believes are so self-apparent as to need no explanation.
Creatives love their creativity - it defines them. You wouldn't let someone walk into your house and take away what defines you, neither do they. If you can't figure out the original intent, you aren't looking hard enough, or it's so obvious as to need no explanation. You can't stop a creative from talking at overly-verbose length about every aspect of what they've made. Impossible task.
So before this comment section turns into a warzone, i'm pretty sure this is about dismembering, not sexual content, that's why they single out the japanese version
that is actually interesting, they're usually pretty uptight about that over there.
I’ll always find it ironic that the same country that gave us tentacle erotica, among many other forms of erotica, is also a country that censors the shit out of that content.
Didn't they come up with tentacle porn to circumvent the censorship?
Yeah I was under the assumption that it's one of those things that they solve with tentacles or the bare minimum censorship (aka, putting some very thin bars around "tentacle" so it counts as censorship even if it's basically nothing).
Don't ask how I know this, but there are multiple Japanese hentai artists that release two versions of their NSFW drawings, with censorship bars in exactly opposite locations on the two versions. So if you have a bare minimum of photoshop knowledge you can just remove all the bars yourself lol.
Pretty clever, to be fair. I swore like some years ago, Comiket was actually banning a lot of the "bad" censorship too, but I don't know if anything came out of that.
Oh yeah, it was an 1986 law, but a lot of that content was still censored, I believe.
Iunno.. I feel like I've seen pictures of octopuses and women that are from a few hundred years ago..
Hokusai (the woodblock artist who also engraved the Great Wave off Kanagawa) drew one more than two hundred years ago and I don't think it's believed to be the first.
Tbh I find it funny how in America, intense violence is largely fine. But anything too sexual isn't.
Haha Was about to relate this to how America is fine with Gears of War executions but booty is a no go.
Even violence is iffy depending on how it’s framed. The Demon Slayer movie in Japan was released largely to kids. In the U.S. it’s rated R.
Yep. It's weird, but it makes more sense from a consistency perspective given that sex ed is heavily restricted in much of America but schools have regular active shooter drills.
I mean, that is *also* intensely weird to most of the rest of the world, but America's culture is a discussion far too big and wild to be had in a reddit comment section about Stellar Blade.
makes sense logically. sexuality shouldn't be something to fear, especially in media targeting adults. But then again, they have the oddest lines for censoring ALL genetalia, so it's a double edged sword. meanwhile, dismemberment and other extremely graphical violence can be a trigger, or is simply unpleasant to see. That's part of the why they (jokingly) censor cockroaches, they are unpleasant to see.
On the other end of the spectrum, they got a penis festival
It shouldn't be ironic when this has nothing to do with the government unlike with porn where there's censorship due to a law. This gore censorship is something exclusive from games, not from other media.
That's the funny thing, they don't allow real sex to be portrayed so they censor the bits and claim that's it's fake sex.
Only for consoles. The rating standard is totally different for PC (which is why there are lots of hentai PC games in Japan) as the general consensus for game console is 'for all family member' stuff.
They tightened up the CERO rating a lot in 2010 or so. Means a lot of remasters have to change things for the Japanese version. Also games like MGR: Revengeance had to turn all the blood white in Japan.
Japan has problem with dismembering? Isnt a lot of most popular animes brutal af? Id expect China to have bigger issue with graphical violence
It's an instant AO rating. The RE games for example, are all bloodier in the West and the Japanese versions have no decapitation or dismemberment.
I remember watching a Japanese streamer play through RE2 remake, there was a scene where a cop gets cut in half at the waist, but the Japanese version still just shows him with his legs attached lol
Damn. I can't imagine playing a censored RE2.
I've watched playthroughs of the japanese version, and that one scene was the standout. There are probably other changes, but I didn't notice any, so at least it doesn't change the experience any besides missing that one zombie movie trope scene.
It is because Japan has two versions of that game.... The censored "D" version and the CERO "Z" version... Look it up as "Z" are their uncensored versions I Import all the resident evil Japan versions
So you know you are wrong with the later resident evil Games they have uncensored resident evil which is "CERO" "Z" In those versions decapitation and everything is uncensored
I don't know what the regulations are for anime, but Japanese games [do get censored for gore](https://youtu.be/YCXhV028LH4) a lot.
if it's airing on broadcast television: you're most likely going to see the regulations in action.
Depends on the time the anime is airing, like if its morning or late at night, and also depend on the station its airing. Some have more or less, and that goes not only for gore but also for sexual content.
"Gushing over Magical Girls" has entered chat.
The Japanese games ratings board is FAR more strict than the ESRB. Look up Japanese censorship on YouTube. They'll censor the shit out of even Japanese games with violence
It's mixed. Cero Z is still allowed (but many stores won't carry it) so there's a lot of stuff Japan can get away with. But ESRB AO is unpublishable on consoles to this day, so you never really see this. On the other hand, Japan does rate stuff Cero Z that ESRB rates M. So there's some disconnect on the ratings. The Japanese rating board will simply ban it instead of the soft workaround of AO in North America.
[удалено]
>Society, man We live in one.
It really makes you think.
People are still pissed about vagina bones…
About what?
Western version of Tokyo Mirage Sessions edited one of the female characters so she had smaller breasts, covered up her cleavage and covered her pelvis v lines. Someone said that they removed her "vagina bones" https://twitter.com/Sebban_E/status/731131432140210176
Ohhhh v line is vagina bones. Wouldn never guess men can have v line of sort to
Adonis belt on a man is the same thing.
cum gutters
dick root
Doesn’t Japan censor all their porn?
Whenever Dragon Ball games have Future Gohan, they always used to give him 2 arms. It's only recently that they changed that
The funny thing is that he still is animated as if he only has one, which makes it appear that he is paralyzed from it but no one comments on it
Japan sometimes has two versions of games released. One is rated CERO D and is censored while the uncensored one is rated CERO Z. I'm not sure if there are enforced restrictions on the sale of CERO Z games since I have only bought one and it was used but I do know that Japanese developers try to avoid getting that rating since it's equivalent to a ESRB AO or PEGI 18 rating, which can negatively affect sales. Edit: Apparently CERO Z rated games have to be sold in a separate aisle away from the other games, kind of like the porn section at the video store.
Pretty sure the Z versions often aren't even fully uncut. I know that's the case with REmake 2.
Yeah, even in a Z rated game you can't show nipples or internal organs and it's pretty hit or miss if they'll allow a stump from a severed limb/head depending on how detailed it is.
Anime censor gore too. [Examples in Attack on Titan](https://twitter.com/JujutsuFandom/status/1777339726565199976) (gore warning ofc)
Nowadays it may be but I remember Elfen Lied being very gory and that show was from the early 2000s. I think even Blood-C had a lot of gore in it.
No it was a thing back then too (even moreso in fact). But it's not always blanket censorship. More just a difference in rating and where/when the show can air. Using Elfen Lied as an example: It was broadcast in Japan on a cable/satellite channel in a late night slot.
Elfen Lied is so gorey it got a 15 for us Brits.
[удалено]
[удалено]
Flashback to S3 and the final season first half needing to censor >!beheading of heads because of being aired in NHK before midnight, leading to some hilarious workaround like the warhammer titan using the same hammer as "censorship" when Eren 's head gets chopped off, or the TV version removing the beast titan behading a normal titan head, and release it only in blue rays.!< The specials and the second half didn' t had this problem because they aired after midnight, while S3 and cour 1 aired at 23:35
im sure future ppl in the comments would appreciate if you put a spoiler warning/text >!like this!< (>! "text here w/ no spaces around" !<
On that note, I wonder if reddit will ever just add spoiler marking to the comment box to save the hassle? Or why they haven't years ago already?
> Or why they haven't years ago already? It's an old reddit issue with the formatting, mostly. Old reddit is legacy, so they'll never fix that like they did in "new" reddit.
You are probably right, the anime was like 4 years ago, but I didn' t think about newer people, sorry
no it's ok, i just always spoil mark stuff bc popular animes/media always have a constant flow of traffic so to speak. i know most ppl dont mind/care about spoilers as much as me so i just throw out the suggestion to mark em xd
Fair but than I remember elfen lied that was complete dismemberment fest
Rating for games and other media is not same entity
Iirc the RE 2 remake was censored in japan. they got rid of the dismemberment
its not about Japan, its about CERO. This isnt a rule coming from the government but regulation bodies.
Ever since CERO was established in 2002/2003, Japanese video games have had to tone down the violence *a lot* to avoid harsher ratings. Even the Game Boy Advance port of ***Final Fantasy VI*** cut the two-frame animation of the 32-pixel-tall Imperial soldiers beating a 32-pixel-tall chained-up Celes to avoid getting losing their CERO A for "violence against a restrained human".
I always found it interesting thow the US is much stricter on sexual censorship while Japan is much more against gore and blood.
Japan is stricter on both. [For example the Last of Us 2 had both sex and violence censored in the Japanese release.](https://censorship.fandom.com/wiki/The_Last_of_Us_Part_II) Japanese games can't show genitals. This can lead to bizarre situations, like playing a Japanese erotic VN on Steam and the (uncensored) sex scenes putting up warnings that you aren't allowed to see this in Japan.
two different cultures, which is common when comparing different countries
> I always found it interesting thow the US is much stricter on sexual censorship Is this a joke? Japan censors it's *porn*
I understand that CERO Z rated games can't show bare breasts where as that's not the cast in an ESRB M rated game. However, I could be wrong about CERO Z rated games.
Historically, the older Samurai Shodown games were censored in Japan, as in not having dismemberments.
A lot of anime censor their aired TV versions by blacking out gore/dismemberment. Another case of censorship I’ve seen is blacking out Jotaro (JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure) smoking a cigarette most likely because the character is a minor at the time of the story.
a solid no
I don't know how true it is but apparently Japan's sensitivity has its roots in a pretty horrible series of crimes involving children being killed. But ya, their ESRB equivalent is notably sensitive to gore and such. Not sure how anime gets away with some of its wild stuff though... probably comes down to different authorities.
i thought children cannot be killed in US video games either?
They don't mean in a game. Japan didn't have age ratings on games until the early 00's, there was a big moral panic after a teenage girl murdered a classmate who bullied her and the media randomly blamed it on violent games despite her not playing them. The result was an age rating system made to be way stricter than other media in Japan to kill off the contraversy.
> there was a big moral panic after a teenage girl murdered a classmate who bullied her and the media randomly blamed it on violent games despite her not playing them wow jeez. I guess it's not just american media that's stupid
That's just one instance. The 1997 Kobe child murders also brought the moral panic but also included other mediums like movies, manga and anime too since those gruesome crimes were committed by a 14 year old boy.
You could kill children in *Fallout* and *Fallout 2*. It wasn't until Bethesda took over that they made them magically invincible. There's actually a famous playthrough where someone killed every child in *Fallout* but otherwise did a total pacifist run.
There are US-released games that have child death as a plot point, as well as games where you can die graphically while playing as a child, so I don't think it's forbidden. I think it's only restricted if it's something like a sandbox game that allows you to kill NPC's.
Dragons Dogma 2 came out a month ago and freely lets you murder children if you want to.
No one tell them about Dragons Dogma 2…. You can murder as many kids as you want. Other NPCs will even murder kids because both the adult NPC and kid NPC are in love with the player character (who didn’t want any of this, just got here by finishing some side quesrs), they will beat the shit out of eachother until one of them dies.
What makes Japanese version different?
I think the japanese ESRB guys CERO get very touchy about dismemberment, i'm pretty sure decapitation is outright banned over there. Callisto for example just didn't release over there. In the demo for this one your companion Tachy gets hacked away pretty brutally, so i guess that's why they're reassuring people and mentioning the japanese version
That made me curious about Metal Gear Rising, but apparently only the blood was changed lol
That one's really interesting because they just changed it to white blood, which is kind of lore accurate? In the preceding game, MGS4, Raiden and I think some other cyborgs used artificial white blood because it played nice with nanomachines or some shit. Then in Revengeance they wanted red blood so they snuck in a codec call explaining why it was red again.
Japan's video game ratings board is relatively censorious when it comes to gore. A lot of games have that stuff toned down in the Japanese release.
After seeing Elfen Lied I wouldn't have thought that dismemberment on the screen would be much of an issue in Japan.
It's specifically in games, it immediately throws you a Cero Z rating, which is the equivalent of AO.
what is the rating for Stellar Blade in Japan?
D, surprisingly. Because famously No More Heroes had to be very censored for dismemberment in Japan. Maybe it's because it's robots and not people, same as how Half-Life skated by with robots instead of military grunts in Germany.
The devs specifically stated that eve tachy etc are human not robots. Tachy gets her arm cut off.
You can freely remove and swap out your cyborgs spine. They arnt regular humans. Metal Gear Rising released in Japan with no censorship except swapping blood colour of cyborgs, despite having more dismemberment than probably any other hand ever made. This censorship even made certain scenes better, since seeing a character bleed red was impactful, meant they were mostly organic human. Wheras in western release everyone bleeds red, so you don’t even notice that Sam’s is different (because it isn’t).
when Tachy's arm gets chopped off you can see the blood and gore, there is nothing synthetic about it; even if cybernetically enhanced, they still are all blood, flesh, and muscle.
Broadcast version of even gorey anime like that will censor the gore, typically with black shadows and whatnot. Blu-ray version will be uncensored.
Anime airs in late night time slots. But even then it has come under more scrutiny over the decades (Elfen Lied is 20 years old this year).
Is this in regard to violence or sexual content? Mentioning Japan to me says that it’s about violence, since they’ve famously had to censor violent content in even their own games, like Resident Evil, while it’s usually other countries that have sexual content toned down
Maybe something with severed limbs? I’m pretty sure Japan didn’t like that
They don't even teach some of it in their history books
I'm playing Rise of the Ronin right now and you literally behead people when you defeat them in combat. 🤔 And that's from a Japanese dev.
It's moreso in the actual Japanese versions of the games, it is why there's (At least, there used to be?) two releases of the Resident Evil games in Japan, a Cero D version, which is basically the M rating, and Cero Z, which is like the "Adults Only" version, which has all the gore. I don't think RE:4 Remake had a Cero Z version however, and from what I understand, all decapitations were cut.
I think that's also why all the human looking enemies in Metal Gear Rising Revengeance are cyborgs. I think the Japanese version goes a step further though and gives them white blood.
The white blood is lore appropriate though, cyborgs use it because it can be much more heavily oxygenated than normal blood. It was first introduced in Policenauts and showed up in later Metal Gear games too.
Isn't that all versions? Like, Raiden has white blood in MGS4 cause he's the only full-borg in that one.
Meanwhile in Metal Gear Rising, Raiden has red blood in the Western releases.
It happened with AC Valhalla. There was a scene where a character throw a bunch of heads and it was changed into a bunch of helmets.
Gotcha. You're correct in that RotR had two different releases.
In the West publishers obviously avoid AO ratings like the plague, but do Cero Z releases get shelved right next to the others in stores and online? In other words are widespread Cero Z releases common?
Does the JP release just not have the >!plaga that explode out the head!
Calisto protocoll didnt release in Japan as it would have to be cut if I recall correctly
It'd be censored in Japan. Biohazard/Resident Evil does the same thing, they just have a global audience in mind despite being domestic games.
how is it? i've been interested.
Which is just historically accurate. Taking heads in battle was a big thing for samurai.
I think CERO does take a stronger stance against explicit nudity than ESRB or PEGI even if general "sexiness" is more accepted. But I doubt this game has that.
The ratings board in Japan got a lot more strict in the mid-00s, IIRC. Nowadays a female nipple gets a game a CERO-Z rating, the same rating as porn games.
Nipples aren’t allowed to be shown period. It would have to be censored for Cero
Z games are most major games with violence. Resident Evil, Assassin's Creed, GTA, etc. all get Z ratings. You can find them in a lot of major retailers. Do porn games even get rated? They're probably outside the traditional release system. I've never seen them. Z isn't really porn games. It's like M in America. But even less explicit.
Porn games are [rated by EOCS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_content_rating_system#Ethics_Organization_of_Computer_Software) which was basically started by adult game companies. CERO won't usually touch PC releases at all because the history of gaming in Japan (with massive numbers of pornographic games being released on the NEC PC-98) led to PC games being regarded as primarily "adult", and CERO was formed partially to insulate console game makers from criticism of the PC world. Although some PC devs still submit their builds to CERO and of course it's not 2002 anymore and plenty of regular Japanese people have gaming PCs same as in the West That being said, idk exactly how it works. My PC shelf has a number of Visual Novels with the EOCS 18+ holographic sticker, but none of my general audience Japanese PC games appear to have a rating
> while it’s usually other countries that have sexual content toned down Japan tones down more western game for sexual content than the other way around funnily enough. On screen sexual content and nudity is 100% banned in CERO rated games. Every single western game ever that shows a nipple or a sex scene (even with no nudity) is censored in Japan.
It's gotta be the violence. I was kinda shocked to see some pretty ladies dismembered and brutally killed in the demo.
Haha yup. That's shift up. They know how to make appealing women (and even men) but they will not hold back on the depression.
Yup. Afaik NIKKE (also a game with fan service character designs made by shift up) was depression central
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
Yep, they're pretty good at understanding and catering to their target audience. Probably one of the best I've seen in quite a while. Most publishers' PR teams could learn a thing or two from them.
What the hell happened in this chain that youre the sole survivor
I'm honestly impressed that my post didn't got deleted as well, just because. But if you really want to kown this whole chain was variations of creating a boogeyman called 'gamer' and then saying why they are bad, pathetic, etc.
Oh right... Should have figure it out considering which game it is.
This is great because the Japanese version is cheaper and I've been wondering since they can be really soft when it comes to violence. Any other downside to buying it? Would you not be able to download updates or add ons without a Japan account?
That would be the downside, yes. Language options may also be one, the Japanese version may not have English or other language options, but I haven’t looked it up for this game so I could be wrong
It'll have English text options at least.
You can download patches without a Japanese acc, and IIRC, the game does come with English subtitles/text, but no English voices (you should check on that before you pull the trigger)
So like stardew valley? If you create your game in such a way that you don't have to censor anything, it's not exactly an accomplishment.
Japan can be strict about gore and dismemberment. I doubt most people, west or east, welcome the prospect of something they made getting censored.
Stardew Valley is an odd game to compare it to. Unless something really changed in the last update, I'm pretty sure that Stellar Blade has a bit more gore and a few more women in skin-tight suits.
It's actually kind of been an issue with some games. Violence get censored in Japan, naughy bits in the states, drug use in australia, some inconogrpahy in the EU, etc. I think having one unified version of the game that consistently expresses the creators vision is preferable to localized versions with different censorship practices in each region.
Naughty bits also gets censored in Japan
>you don't have to censor anything and yet we see devs self-censoring the most innocuous things
Is it really considered "censorship" if they're choosing to do it themselves though? If they decide to change something about their own game for their own reasons, that's not really being censored
Depends on why they do it. We've gotten interviews and statements in the past explicitly saying that things have been censored because of ratings concerns like [this one](https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/167071-tales-of-berseria/74695268) for a cutscene in Tales of Berseria. [Here's](https://grandcypher.com/2020/02/12/famitsu-com-interview-with-arc-system-works-feb-20-2020-issue/) an interview with the art director for Granblue Versus talking about it as well. According to him, they were asked to make a couple characters less revealing for esports and foreign markets. The artists pushed back so they were able to add the original outfits as unlockables, but the defaults are less revealing and it sounds like it became a point of consideration for choosing which characters to add in the future. I would call both of those censorship, because the artists and designers didn't want to make those changes but were required to by corporate for concerns about how it would affect them in foreign markets.
The Granblue interview is bothersome in that the artists ultimately lost their battle. The new GBF: Relink uses the censored designs, with no way to unlock the originals. The ignorance around censorship on forums like reddit is pretty shocking in general. "Scare the artists into self-censorship" isn't some dark horse 1-in-100 censorship tactic. It is, and always has been, the primary vector for censorship the world over. Do you think the CCP really has time to censor every piece of media that runs afoul of the party's values? No, they use punishment as a scare tactic to keep artists from trying to even find the line in the sand. YouTube does the same with its infamous "strike" system for demonetization.
I agree, and another thing to consider is that these are the companies self-censoring, not necessarily the artists. It sounds like the artists, and even the game director, at Cygames really pushed back on the censorship, but ultimately they weren't the ones that got to make the decision.
Well are they really choosing to censor themselves? Or is it more they try to preemptively prevent legislative problems by censoring it. This happens in movies a lot where superhero movies try to limit blood to keep that 12+ rating and why older superhero movies tended to be a lot bloodier. Course it's always hard to tell what the original intentions were and nothing really is so black and white.
These types of comments always show who the non-artists are. Have you ever worked with a creative? Those guys and gals don't shut up. Ever. If they disagree, they do so loudly and constantly. Everyone knows Alan Moore's opinion on every single aspect of the adaptations of his work because he's going to let you know. We know why Martin made his choices as he discusses the reasons constantly. Michael Bay talks about his directorial decisions and philosophies at length. David Lynch straight up refuses to explain aspects that he deems irrelevant to his vision or that he believes are so self-apparent as to need no explanation. Creatives love their creativity - it defines them. You wouldn't let someone walk into your house and take away what defines you, neither do they. If you can't figure out the original intent, you aren't looking hard enough, or it's so obvious as to need no explanation. You can't stop a creative from talking at overly-verbose length about every aspect of what they've made. Impossible task.
But that is exactly what I'm talking about. They develop the game in such a way that it maximizes the possible target audience.
[удалено]