Topic: Censorship Vs Localization

@iKhan, while I get your point, Bayonetta in Smash isn't a case of self censorship. Either she was intended to be toned down from the start for the release (most likely), or was toned down due to pressure from CERO, a seperate entity, such as we know some figures in past games (and maybe some spirits here), which obviously wouldn't be self imposed.

Self censorship would be taking something that's already in the game, and changing it after the fact because you're either afraid it'd be rated higer elsewhere, or trying to cater to an audience that probably wouldn't be intwrested in the game to begin with. Examples of course would be the infamous TMS scenerio (which is probably the topic that inspired this thread), Fatal Frame 5 where they replaced lingerie costumes with Peach & Samus costumes (this would have been rated M regardless, so not a ratings issue), or Dragon Ball Fusions where Namco Bandai, apparently at the behest of Nintendo, inexplicably replaced Trunk's sword with a staff (even though it still recieved a T rating, like every other DB game).

Nintendo was just really paranoid last gen, for whatever reason.

@iKhan
In all fairness though most shows on tv nowadays are far more heavy on content not suitable for families than they were say a decade or so ago. Bayonetta is the same across all regions in smash. Comparing TMS in its original form to similar game released outside of Japan it's fairly obvious it would still have gotten the lower rating. Would DB a Fusions have still gotten Teen had they left swords alone? Considering how iconic it is to Trunks and how swords are so frequently used in games it's safe to say they were overcompensating. Senran Kagura is still rated M but the only thing removed was their ages nothing else was.

Censorship is dangerous once you start going down that road. Localization changes are one thing as you are trying to translate things that make sense to one society would not necessarily be in another. Gravure modeling? What's that? Make it swimsuit modeling instead. Comparing the original story of Ch.2 in TMS to its western censored one is like daylight and dark it's not even close and feels completely out of place.

Just make sure not to get Censorship vs. Localization 3, since Ultimate Censorship vs. Localization 3 will come out a few months later. (fittingly, with a lawyer as a playable character)

@GameOtaku
"Censorship is dangerous once you start going down that road."

But censorship is really needed especially in my country Indonesia with majority of Moslem peoples there. You might disagree but not everyone enjoy liberty (freedom in expressing something even the disturbing contents) without control. Here in Indonesia, even the scene of kissing between Diego and Sammy from Dora and the Lost City movie has been removed from the movie. It has been removed due to main audience target was kids and here in Indonesia, Dora and the Lost City was rated as General instead of Parental Guidance. And the kissing scene has been removed due to keep the rating stay on General. But the kissing scene didn't removed from other Disney Live Action movies such as Cinderella 2015, Beauty and the Beast 2017, Alladin 2019 since the movie waa rated PG in Indonesia too.

@Anti-Matter as an Indonesian I view a lot of the censorship the government does as super silly. They cut out stupid stuff and left nothing in. Heck, considering they censored swimsuit in a swimsuit contest, I think they are just being stupid puritans

Edit: just realised that Indo just cut out everything

@darkfenrir
Even on Saint Seiya anime that has ever been aired on RCTI during 90's era, Shun Andromeda was dubbed by female voice actor instead of male voice actor due to gender confusion from Shun Andromeda saint cloth that looked like female armor with breast looking. Same case with Fish Eye, one of enemy from Trio Amazon in Sailor Moon Super S that has ever aired on Indosiar during 1996 or 1997. Fish Eye was dubbed by a female voice actor due to his crossdressing tendency, in order to avoid crossdressing confusion that considered as a taboo / inappropriate thing in Indonesia.

@GameOtaku Part of the issue with localization vs censorship is that sometimes the people localizing media do so in a way that's almost insulting the intelligence of the people in the target language. Your example Brook making jelly donuts when he is clearly not is perfect for this. Of course American children in the 90s likely did not know about "onigiri" but "rice balls" are not a difficult concept to grasp.

On the other hand I think a lot of people don't realize how hard it is to do localization. Especially those who only speak one language. As someone who teaches ESL I've often run into this assumption that, much like math or science, language has absolute answers. 2+2 always = 4. But it's not the same in language. The English word "sister" does not have a simple and direct translation into Japanese because in Japanese, referring to a sibling is always done in a way that equals "big sister" or "little sister".

But you also run into nuance differences too. The same word for "big sister" is also commonly used to refer to any young woman. You'll often here people at restaurants in Japan use the word to get the attention of a waitress. Of course that young woman is not everyone's big sister! But using the term "young lady" or "young woman" carries different nuances in English that also don't quite fit this example.

It gets even more complex once we start getting into expressions and sayings and complex phrases that, if translated directly, would make absolutely no sense and people localizing that media need to be extremely talented or do a lot of extra research to find a similar expression in the new language that carries about the same nuance... or just state the idea literally, even if it wasn't done that way in the original material.

As for censorship, the issue we run into is that what is socially acceptable for one culture may not be for another. Fact is there are as many descriptions of socially acceptable as there are people. Which is why we need accurate ratings systems to allow people to decide for themselves what media they wish to consume - rather than trying to establish one set of rules and then forcing those rules on everyone. Doing that will never please anyone.

@Anti-Matter which imo is another weird thing to be contentious about. But anyway I just disagree on a lot of what Indonesia do especially on censorship because a lot of them are useless and weird to be taken out. (Especially kisses, I don't care if it's gay kiss or straight kiss, kisses aren't inherently bad)

Also some things they do make things look lewder than it originally is.

@Anti-Matter
Fish eye was also changed in the American dub to female and Uranus and Neptune were made cousins (which made it creepy but that's just me and that's coming from a southerner who's always heard of the stereotypical "kissing cousins").

@kkslider5552000
Do you honestly not see a problem with censorship running rampant? Who are you to judge what's appropriate or not? The issue here is censorship changing someone's work that they put a lot of effort into. To make it something else is just a slap in the face to their hard work.

@Anti-Matter I understand where you are coming from about groups of people who do not want to view content that deem inappropriate. But who does the censorship? Do you trust the government to decide that sort of thing for you? Or would you prefer to decide for yourself what you want to view?

If you give the government the power to decide what you can and cannot view, you are giving them a huge amount of control over you. But worse so, over children. When a political group can control everything children see from an early age, that's how dictatorships like North Korea are created. If you are never exposed to anything that challenges your government issue world view it will allow governments to do whatever they want.

And if not the government, then who does the censorship? Some kind of religious board? Moral police?

What happens when they stop censoring the things you want censored and start spoon feeding you only what they want you to see?

It's actually quite the opposite tbh. I actually really dislike rampant censorship of art. I just can't be bothered over changes that often seem to purely exist because "fanservice is Japanese pandering, they've decided its pandering to America to take it away". Especially since the stuff censored are seemingly, usually minor elements to games that aren't about using that fanservice for anything other than just fanservice.

Now in an ideal world, I'm here for at least some way to be able to get every single released version of any game, uncensored in some way. Even in examples in which I don't like the fanservice, I'm here for someone being able to buy that (that's one of the reasons I hated Region Locking).

Notice how none of this goes into the many other things that have gotten art censored throughout history. And stuff that often far more compromised the artistic vision of the person creating it. If the discussion about this was more focused on that, or on the many issues in game development, or if there was more of a clear backlash from Japanese developers on how foreign versions of their games are released, I'd be more invested. But nowadays it just seems like a neverending, exhausting issue that is in fact, making a mountain out of a molehill. That doesn't mean I agree with the changes that are made in these games, it's that there's too many issues that more clearly affect the quality and artistic merit of games for me to really care much. I actually think a lot about the artistic merit of some of the weird sexy things Japanese media does, so this is not me lazily or cynically trying to ignore a real issue. Just from every perspective I try, I can't see this as the major issue people try to make it out to be.

The best explanation for my opinion on this otherwise is how the last 2 major Xenoblade releases were handled. Xenoblade Chronicles X had some localization changes that I mostly thought were a good enough compromise barring one stupid change in creating your character. It got backlash for those changes. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 had none of those types of changes (AFAIK), which I thought it was good beyond one stupid character design they should've realized just completely sucked. It got backlash for not having changes. So to me you also can't...win? So its also hard to care at that point.

That being said, Sony is a different issue. That situation does kinda cross a line for me, doubly so with the embarrassingly stupid reasoning for why supposedly that's happened lately.

I don’t see how it’s “rampant” these days. Most of the censorship involves cutting fanservice which, imo, needs cutting.

@kkslider5552000 iirc the problem of XC2 is the localization is a biiiit weird? Especially concerning some stuff

Like I don't really remember off the top of my head and I don't really search it up, but for example, Sheba's characterization is more explicit that she wants to be with girls in the Japanese version than in the USA I think. Like explicitly wanting them to be in her harem...

Do take some grain of salt though since I don't really remember it, but I'm pretty sure there's some youtube video talking about this :V

Oh, really? I did not know that. I've not played Xenoblade 2 yet, I'm just aware of the issues I heard about from the internet, and tried to look at it based on what info I knew and what people had said. Well if what you've said is true, that's probably not a good idea to change that, especially nowadays. I think something similar happened with Fragile Dreams (which is a shame, as Fragile Dreams is legit an all time great video game narrative).

Maybe I would know if censorship in gaming wasn't entirely focused on the same stupid issue, ahem ahem. This kinda reminds me of when a stupid controversy about Fire Emblem Fates pre-release overshadowed the actual problems the actual localization had.

Yeah, there's also naming problems imo. After thinking I'm agreeing that names should be one of the few things that shouldn't need to be changed no matter how weird they are (unless they are going for pun based name, and the name is then localized to punny things? Man sometimes wordplay is so hard. Reminds me how I'm fan translating a light novel and the characters are both called Reimu but one is with hiragana and the other is with Kanji. It's even a problem highlighted by the character later on so I can't use a slightly different pronunciation with the older character!)

To be fair, there's some name stuff I kinda get. Like when Tina became Terra for FFVI. It's supposed to not sound like a normal, average name to the audience I presume. But it would for...us, so they changed it. Name stuff I think is overrated. I remember in One Piece back during the dark ages of 4kids, it bothered me when changing Zoro to Zolo was somehow as offensive as how hard they hilariously butchered all the violence and death. I don't like that change, but the letter r is not why I like the character, y'know?

see this is actual interesting discussion, other than just being mad at fanservice that only exists to be fanservice.

btw: just consider my points less to like every change a game makes in localization but more to earnestly look at how much of an affect it actually has and what you could be doing or caring about or doing with your time in general. people probably shouldn't waste all their time angry at things if they aren't worth getting angry at. it just seems a bit sad.

Nah for Zoro to Zolo I can understand because that's indeed how the romanizations should be iirc. It more bothers me when they went from... Byakko to Dromarch? Like he went from a shoutout to the 4 cardinal creatures thing into... something so obscure I have no idea what they are referencing.

Also changing from the grail to other things but I think that one follows the old localization of XC so I can't speak much.

Localization is quite the controversial topic and it's hard to completely understand one way or another. I'm following some official translator on twitter and they have been quite enlightening occasionally

@kkslider5552000 With regard to your point about how Xeno X got backlash for changes and Xeno 2 got backlash for not having the same kind of changes - it's the simple fact that the backlash comes from different groups.

Rather than trying to please one group or another, games should just be rated based on their content and people should take 5 minutes on a search engine to see if a game fits their "morality".

@kkslider5552000
Some games allow you as the player to self censor yourself. If you want a younger kid to play the recent Mortal Kombat you could turn off blood and gore in the options. You could dress up your DQ11 characters in more revealing clothes but it's the users choice. TMS swimsuit dlc was entirely optional but it was there if you wanted it.

Some risqué things make sense for some characters. Take Maya (or is it Meena?) in DQ4. She's a dancer and therefore wears more revealing clothing than her modestly dressed sister. Zero Suit Samus is also the most revealing of the Smash cast but it's not like she gets any backlash at all. I don't know about you but I'm afraid if a future the series Shimoneta paints where you have to wear government monitored collars for if you say anything obscene you are arrested. Or to make it worse as the series goes to wear government monitored chastity belts all because the purityrannicals took over and set their morals higher than anyone else.

Games are art too!

@GameOtaku
Gaming or Entertainment shouldn't gone too far when the peoples given a freedom to express.
For what cost to risk your life or ruining your brain with such inappropriate contents ?
Freedom should be consider the morality in public.
Freedom without control will lead to chaos.
I would rather take over the freedom and replace them with very strict standard rather than overexpressing something that just only want to express the desire for inappropriate things without control.