Topic: Why is NOA going back to their old ways on making Nintendo seem like a baby console?

@Kuroyumu @JohnnyMind @GameOtaku Your comments are well-said and very thoughtful. I personally think some of the stuff being censored is a bit cringe, but realize that it sets dangerous precedent and is a SUPER slippery slope to tread. I imagine well thought out series like Trails and Ys would have the potential of being banned if we start sliding down that slope, and if we reach the bottom we could even see games like Tales of, Star Ocean, and Xenoblade being banned here to name a few. As a HUGE fan of Eastern series and a lukewarm fan of Western ones at best "most just don't click with me" censorship has me more than a bit concerned at the moment.

@WiiWareWave Thank you, you made some well-said and thoughtful additional points in your comments, too!

@VoidofLight "the only people who want to see that are people who are attracted to underaged human beings. I genuinely don't get how you people can't get that through your heads."
We really are getting into dehumanizing territory with this arm-chair amber alert, aren't we?

What, am I not obligated to have a bit of personal life nostalgia of things that happened in my childhood in the media I experience? lol

Besides that, due to the nature of sexuality in the human experience, sexualization is often in the eye of the beholder. So you can point those devil's fingers as much as you want here, but I'm not convinced you are entirely clean of what you are accusing. I'm probably misusing the word right now, but the whole thing feels like a fallacy. Perhaps "Sexualized Fallacy" is a good term for this behavior?

@WiiWareWave
Yes I’m very surprised at the amount of people wanting MORE government and corporate oversight of their everyday lives. I’m sure that will work out splendidly with no consequences whatsoever. Government and corporate controlled morality can’t be a bad thing right? If no one hasn’t seen the anime series Shimonetta or read Fahrenheit 451 go and do that.

The concern for me is that these are games which did pass the government regulations and in the case of the neptunia rebirth trilogy they passed with a Teen rating in the US and a pegi 12 iirc in europe but were blocked from release on switch due to what i imagine are new restrictions which also does make me concerned about future releases both in terms of new games and potential re-releases of older games (like @WiiWareWave mentioned franchises such as the Trails, tales or other rpgs, )

In the case of the other game Death end re:quest that did get an M rating though from what i gather that game also has a lot more in terms of violence and bad language.

part of me did think the sudden shift could have been some form of attempt to clampdown on those "hentai" games flooding the eshop and that the neptunia games were collateral but looking at the eshop those games still seem to be on it (alongside those ai generated "visual novels" which mimic disney and the like) so it may not be that.

I wonder if there is lag time for rule changes. Like maybe the company that puts H games out every week got 2 years of games pre-approved and so their current queue of games is grandfathered into older rules.

As for the random ai generated visual novels, I can't think of any rule those would break, they are just bad... I don't know if those should even be banned, they should maybe just be marked as 'generated with ai' and put at the bottom of the list for discoverability assuming Nintendo fixes the eShop discoverability issue. If Nintendo stops rewarding the slop games, they will slow down.

@FishyS
Yeah the ai stuff was more related to the idea of cleaning the eshop but i may have worded it badly.

definitely agree with the idea of the use of gen-ai being made more transparent as things go forward though in terms of discoverability hopefully the "switch 2" will allow people to better filter games or something similar

@Mgalens
Would be great if they would publish their guidelines so everyone knows what is exactly going on. A little transparency would be welcome.

@GameOtaku If you want a look at the guidelines you'd have to register as a developer and accept an NDA.

So, although we can't discuss them openly on here, everyone making games for the Switch knows what they are.

@Matt_Barber
Why wouldn’t they make that public knowledge? If anything else that will inform the consumer what products are likely to be on their hardware.

@GameOtaku I'm not sure why Nintendo keep their guidelines confidential but for the most part they're dull as dishwater things that only a developer would need to know. So far as what consumers need to know, I'd think that the ESRB ratings are already adequate for that.

One platform holder who does give open access to their guidelines however, is Steam, and you can see them here:

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/gettingstarted/onboarding

I'd note that even though Steam allows adult-only and unrated games, which is something that Nintendo have never done, they've still got a blanket ban on "Content that exploits children in any way."

@Matt_Barber
Yes and the Neptunia rebirth games are on steam and rated by the ESRB so what exactly is Nintendo’s beef with it?

@GameOtaku Not so much Nintendo, but the American branch of Nintendo. The games were released for the Japanese market. Unfortunately, but NoA's decisions have mostly had their effect on the entire "Western" market including Europe. Even on this topic, you can see that the mentality of American gamers and views are different from other parts of the world. Probably it can have with various problems appearing more often in the US and media scandals and looking for fault in everything but the real sources of the problem.

What is quite funny is that many of the games in the neptunia series including the one that started this topic have an age rating of usk6 in Germany, meaning they are available for 6 years and the content in the game does not cause much of a stir or outrage in anyone.

As an interesting note, for a very long time many games were censored in Germany or banned completely because of brutality. Many politicians used exactly the same anology, saying that it is the player who keeps his finger on the trigger and this makes him a murderer and any person who wants to see realistic violence in games is a potential criminal, because normal people do not want to see such things. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

Thankfully, censorship in Germany has become less and less over the years, but it still unfortunately exists. However, it wasn't a big problem, as most gamers simply imported games from a neighboring country, or in the case of Steam, regional restrictions were taken off by a simple patch or by changing one line of code in the config file.

Unfortunately, but in the case of such NoA, the decision is more global in nature, plus other American corporations would like to get their tentacles into Japan as well and dictate various rules and restrictions as they see fit.

This particular game isn't on Steam.

Try asking Idea Factory or Nintendo if you want a definitive answer. Everyone on here is just speculating.

@Matt_Barber
The reason why the neptunia rebirth games were brought up was because while they were released on steam with a Pegi 12/esrb Teen rating the switch versions of the games were canceled due to not "complying with nintendo guidelines" which was the same reason they cited regarding the DLC for the upcoming game.