In 2013 Bravely Default’s Happy Merchant class was not considered overly problematic…
Cowardly Default
Everything fun and frivolous in daily life is being quickly eroded. Hot on the heels of numerous completely retarded college costume crises over the course of Halloween 2015, comes Square Enix’s latest genius decision to outsource all creative decisions to America’s adult campus babies. Apparently the act of dressing up as an old-timey Indian as a bit of fun is now to be treated as though it were as much of an affront as erecting a burning cross in front of a black ‘safe space’ while pinching out a poop swastika. Never mind that tee-pee Indians serve as an inextricable vein of our Western pop culture identity, never mind the central role they play in historic retellings of how the West was won and the founding of the United States of America, and never mind the fact that we all played cowboys and Indians when we were young. No, dressing up as an Indian is literally worse than Hitler, and this is the message that Square Enix took to heart when deciding to censor Bravely Second.
Given the current climate of censorship on the Wii U, one feels pretty comfortable in saying that this decision has Nintendo’s fingerprints all over it. That being said, Bravely Second, unlike its predecessor, is being published by Square Enix rather than Nintendo, so we cannot conclude for a fact that Nintendo is to blame. Whatever the case, one of the parties concerned has decided that the class of Tomahawk is too ‘problematic’ for Western audiences, and so the class has been unceremoniously transformed into the Cowboy class, which apparently is not considered to be cultural appropriation for use in a Japanese game on account of being derived from white culture. Identity politics, people, get with the program! Nintendo has! It is right about now that the people looking forward to Shin Megami Tensei X Fire Emblem should be becoming extremely anxious.
A little bit of peeping never hurt anyone!
‘Problematic’ Blade & Soul Quest Censored into Blatant Propaganda
One would love to report that the censorship of one of Bravely Second‘s job classes was the only censorship news for the week, but sadly that is not the case. This story carries with it echoes of the Prison School debacle from several months ago, in that it sees a writer on the localisation team working on NCsoft’s martial arts MMO, Blade & Soul, making the decision to completely violate another person’s creative work in order to push an agenda. This is a move that has not gone over at all well with gamers, not least on account of NCsoft’s previous promises that the game would not be subject to censorship. Needless to say that all discussions pertaining to the game’s censorship have been banned on the official Blade & Soul forums, because attempting to suppress the spread of inconvenient information worked out so well for Mrs Streisand!
In the business of localisation the localisation team has one job, and that is to translate the spirit of the original content as accurately as possible. Sometimes this may involve changing particular details to provide Western consumers with a more intuitive frame of reference, or it may involve substituting one joke or turn of phrase with another, so as to make sense in a foreign market, but this small degree of creative freedom does not grant license for writers to transform the work into their own personal fanfiction. Such a thing appears to have happened during the Blade & Soul localisation process.
The questline in question was altered by the localisation team’s lead writer, known on the Blade & Soul forums as Last Writer Standing [which is presumably their only qualification for the job], who found it to be ‘uncomfortable’. It involves an NPC who is an impotent pervert that tasks the player with carrying out various quests to cure his impotency. Several quests involve the player obtaining aphrodisiacs and home remedies to cure the NPC’s impotency, but the questline culminates in the NPC spying on a group of Lycandi as they bathe, and instructing the player to steal their clothes so that they will be unable to dress upon emerging. This is fairly harmless stuff, and is essentially no worse than the hijinks one would observe in Porky’s or Revenge of the Nerds, but it was certainly sufficient to trigger Last Writer Standing. The questline has been fundamentally rewritten so that the perverted NPC is now a thirsty Tumblr-tier whiteknight cuck who tasks the player with obtaining information on Lycandi culture so he can better understand them. The quest’s story-arc then concludes with this beta tool meeting a Lycandi who turns out to be a scholar that is interested in learning about his own culture. Basically the quest has been transformed from a lewd comedy caper into a love story for people who find forced propaganda to be sexy.
Obviously there is absolutely no aspect of the author’s original tone or intent that has survived translation in this instance, and the arsehole responsible is as unapologetic as they are shameless:
“It’s not a matter of censorship or anything like that. There are a number of quests and NPC interactions in the game that go into playful innuendos and the like. It’s more a question of whether or not we wanted to include some genuinely questionable and uncomfortable content when we had the ability to make it something more welcoming. When I’m presented with the choice of writing a character and story line that is pretty reprehensible without it being critical commentary on his actions, or reworking it to a more positive direction that isn’t going to make me and others squirm, I’m not exactly going to hesitate to go for the latter.”
This is what you get when you hire a sophist to translate your game. Apparently no censorship took place – content was merely suppressed to avoid offense! It is no surprise that so much censorship takes place within this industry when an ever increasing number of people do not even understand what the word means. At any rate, once one gets past all the weasel words the real meat of the above statement is the localisation team behind Blade & Souls brazenly telling gamers that they are “not exactly going to hesitate” to fundamentally alter game content that they personally disagree with. Way to keep things professional, cucks!
‘Too sexist? I think you mean too sexy.’ ~ Play-Asia
Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 Cancelled in the Wake of SJW Hostility
Time and again SJW shills have protested that they are not going to take our games away, and that all they are doing is standard criticism as is befitting of art – and every single time this is shown up for the utter lie that it is. The jewel in the crown of news this week would have to be the fact that Tecmo Koei have decided to cancel the Western release of Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 because they do not want to have to deal with our awful Social Justice Warriors. This is not even an issue of the SJW hassle not being worth the cost of localisation, as the Asian version of the game is set to offer English language support, meaning that at the very least they could have slapped the game up on PSN to earn some extra dollars.
The fact that Tecmo Koei was concerned about a feminist backlash was in evidence earlier in the year when they mooted the possibility of bringing Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 to the West with edited content, so as not to attract the ire of the feminist gaming press. Subsequently, Western coverage for Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 has been unrelentingly negative for the most part, which ultimately appears to have led Tecmo Koei to decide that releasing the game in the West simply was not worth the blowback they would receive:
“We do not bring DOAX3 to the west and won’t have any plan change in the future.
Do you know many issues happening in video game industry with regard to how to treat female in video game industry? We do not want to talk those things here. But certainly we have gone through in last year or two to come to our decision.”
Having Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 cancelled at the assistance of hipster feminists came as a blow to be sure, but in the aftermath of this something amazing happened. Play-Asia made absolutely no bones about the fact that they held SJWs responsible in their unambiguous condemnation:
“#DOAX3 will not be coming to the US due to #SJW nonsense. However, we will have the English Asia version available: http://par.bz/87f”
This sentiment was then effectively co-signed by Direct2Drive who quoted Play-Asia’s tweet and told them “Well played“. Tecmo Koei also effectively co-signed Play-Asia’s tweet, with their official European Twitter account sending a tweet linking to the Play-Asia product page for Dead or Alive Xtreme 3, accompanied by the message:
“Kudos to the TN’s CM for being honest. But if you really want it, you can import the EN version.”
Play-Asia are now effectively the publisher-approved source for the game in the West. They later continued the Play-Asia love-in by congratulating them for the comprehensive support they were receiving from the gaming community:
“@playasia Congrats <3”
And there really was a lot to congratulate. Play-Asia followed up their initial tweet with a full day of mocking Social Justice, and rubbing SJW noses in the impotency of their threats to blacklist and boycott. Play-Asia started the day with 9,000 Twitter followers and ended it with 24,000 followers, extending their social media reach by over two and a half times what it had been, which led Play-Asia to note:
“now this is some social media justice, don’t you think?”
For their part, SJWs were absolutely infuriated by this turn of events. A double digit list of game bloggers publicly decried Play-Asia, and pledged to never buy from them again [as though hipster bloggers ever have to buy their own games]. A couple of said game bloggers made the threat that Play-Asia would now be placed upon an industry blacklist [the kind made famous by GameJournoPros], and one pedophilic owner of Final Fantasy Shrine even suggested that s/he would be attempting to get Play-Asia shut down by the government for victimising poor Social Justice Warriors. The SJWs sure were angry – part of this was of course down to the fact that Play-Asia effectively legitimised gamers, and SJWs are wont to treat providing a platform to gamers as a declaration of war – but the affront to SJWs also went beyond this.
The aspect of this incident which the SJWs appeared to find most upsetting was the fact that the charges laid at their feet by Playasia and Tecmo Koei forced them to engage in a spell of self-reflection, even if just for a moment, and of course they did not like what they saw. The core of every SJW is ugly, barren, and twisted with contradiction. Cognitive dissonance is a hell of a thing; most of these people appear to have blinded themselves to the fact that their conduct is causing very real harm to the video game industry, so when a mirror was held up to their worthless existence they recoiled in surprise and confusion. This confusion then quickly turned into anger at being made to feel bad feelings about themselves, and it was soon accompanied by denial to salve the rupture caused by the sundering of their worldviews. Everyone from John Flynt [Brianna Wu] to Tauriq Moosa publicly protested that nobody they knew had said a single thing about Dead or Alive Xtreme 3, which is perhaps a foolish lie to make when it is so easily falsifiable. It certainly stood in stark contrast to the collage of hit-pieces that gamers were able to screen capture, depicting Social Justice game bloggers bad-mouthing the game. At any rate, TotalBiscuit probably had the best response to all the bluster and impotent threats being spewed by these identity politicians:
“If I were a retailer, alienating people that don’t buy videogames to begin with would not be a big concern of mine.”
13+ means no overt lewdness…
Anime Spotlight: Shomin Sample: I Was Abducted by an Elite All-Girls School as a Sample Commoner
In the world of Shomin Sample Japan’s high class noble girls are educated in a hidden school, surrounded by mountains, where they are taught everything that a lady of standing aught know. This is done in order to maintain their purity and innocence. Unfortunately graduates of the school are increasingly failing to cope with integration into the outside world on account of their secluded upbringings. To remedy this deficit in the girl’s upbringing the school decides that the best course of action is to abduct a male commoner. Kimito Kagurazaka is the normal everyman through which this narrative is framed. He is just an average high school student until he is abducted by the secret girls academy due to their mistaken belief that he is a homosexual with a muscle fetish, and thereby would pose no risk to the girl’s chastity.
Obviously Shomin Sample is a harem series, but its 13+ rating pretty much guarantees that it will not feature the kind of lewdness that Lusipurr.com favours. That being said, one figures that the unusual premise pretty much still ensures that it is worth a viewing. Shomin Sample began airing on Funimation on the 7th of October, and there are currently eight episodes available to stream.
