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Dell_Zincht
Nov 5, 2003



It was the early 90s. Games like Mortal Kombat and Night Trap had just been released on home consoles and largely thanks to the media, caused a moral panic. The politicians swooped in and US Congress got involved. Something had to be done about stopping kiddies from playing these violent video games!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wv3HDVd22P8

The major publishers themselves stepped in and formed the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB) and the future of videogames changed forever. Games with mature content now had a recommended age rating, which while not legally enforced, gave parents an informed choice as to which games they allowed their children to play.

What of course this meant was censorship would soon follow. Before the ESRB was established, games popular for their violent content, like Mortal Kombat, had been heavily censored on the largely family friendly SNES and as a result, had seen poor sales against its rival Sega's port (which was also censored, but included a cheat code to turn on all the blood and fatalities.) Following the formation of the ESRB, Nintendo allowed the sequel, Mortal Kombat II, to be released on the SNES uncensored, with a warning about mature content on the front of the box (as ESRB ratings were not due to be implemented until after the game's release.)

Poor Japanese gamers though....

Yes, it's totally fine to watch a cartoon in which a young lady gets anally raped by a tentacled monster, but don't you dare try to play a game where you can uppercut someone's head off their torso, that's too much!

Yes, the Japanese release of MKII on the Super Famicom was heavily censored. Blood was recoloured green (and toned down), and the screen turned to black and white whenever a fatality was performed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejZ_JuMQg6g

What could be worse than being forced to play a censored version of Mortal Kombat II?

Well, not being able to play it at all, if you happened to live in Germany!

Yes, pretty much every Mortal Kombat game was banned upon release in Germany for at least 10 years. Amazingly, this ban was in effect until 2015. The most recent releases of Mortal Kombat in Germany were given heavy restrictions on its forms of advertising, including in videogame stores, effectively banning the game (most major retailers refused to stock it as a result.)

Being British, I felt smug about a lot of this as none of our games were censored.

UNTIL.

Twisted Metal: Black on the Playstation 2 was released in Europe in 2001.

This game had the entire storyline cut out of the European release, making it completely pointless to play. Twisted Metal Black: Online was released as a standalone game but multiplayer on the PS2 in 2001? Haha, yeah right.

Included in the NTSC version of the game were coded messages on the loading screens, which when deciphered, would further each playable character's story. Because these would make no sense without the cinematics, they were removed from the European version as well, giving literally no incentive to play the game.

It's one of the most bizarre censorship decisions I've ever seen and it still baffles me as to why one of my favourite games was completely butchered in my region.

So, fellow Retro Goons, what are your favourite games that have been butchered by the old censor? Anyone from other countries who have banned games for strange reasons?

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Fargin Icehole
Feb 19, 2011

Pet me.
Id's Doom and Akklaim's Mortal Kombat. Seeing how a small collection of people made something so violent and awesome out of very little. Didn't John Carmack show up in a loving Ferrarri Testarossa to testify before congress on Video Game Violence?

I guess I wouldn't say butchered, but I did not expect GTA: San Andreas to get the Adults Only treatment based on unreleased content that someone dug up from the games files that you had to go out of your way to make work.

Chunderbucket
Aug 31, 2006

I had a beer with Stephen Miller once and now I like him.

Can't believe Nintendo went and censored :catdrugs: out of Bubsy

Scalding Coffee
Jun 26, 2006

You're already dead
When Sony moved to California, it brought back the old censorship for a new decade. With their new guidelines, the PS4 versions of games are going to be censored in some way and the Xbox/Switch will show what Sonydon't.

WeedlordGoku69
Feb 12, 2015

by Cyrano4747

Scalding Coffee posted:

When Sony moved to California, it brought back the old censorship for a new decade. With their new guidelines, the PS4 versions of games are going to be censored in some way and the Xbox/Switch will show what Sonydon't.

Aren't they literally just censoring rape/sexual assault and pedophilia?

Scalding Coffee
Jun 26, 2006

You're already dead
They are censoring pictures of women in swim suits and other skimpy clothes you would find normally in swimming games.

Scalding Coffee fucked around with this message at 03:49 on Jan 19, 2020

The Kins
Oct 2, 2004

Fargin Icehole posted:

Id's Doom and Akklaim's Mortal Kombat. Seeing how a small collection of people made something so violent and awesome out of very little. Didn't John Carmack show up in a loving Ferrarri Testarossa to testify before congress on Video Game Violence?
Carmack was a big fan of both Ferarris and modifying them to add nitros and poo poo. He gave away one of them as a prize at one of the first big Quake tournaments. At some point he realised this hobby was only slightly less expensive than making literal space rockets, so he did that for a bit instead.

Here's a interesting modern example. Doom 2 has a couple of secret levels where you time-travel back to Wolfenstein 3D and use sci-fi weaponry to murder Nazis by the score.


Which is all well and good, but it didn't fly with the German market, where depictions of Nazi symbolism in videogames were quite illegal (since videogames aren't art, or at least weren't considered as such by the German government at the time).

The original German release of Doom 2 just outright deleted those levels entirely, making it impossible to access them, and that was that. At some point after the Bethesda acquisition, Id got tired of having to do two versions of the game every time they re-released it on some console or other, so they tried making a version that altered the levels in question so they could ship the same game in all regions.

This didn't go so well - their solution was to "blank out" all of the walls bearing paintings or posters depicting Nazi stuff (which made secrets trickier to find since those are what they were typically hidden behind!), replacing all the Nazis with Zombiemen, and replacing the unique Wolfenstein music with a song from elsewhere in the game. The end result was making the levels both much more visually repetitive and much, much easier to complete. They ended up becoming just kinda pointless.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1snCRIl16ks

The latest release of the game on Switch etc. walks things back to instead alter the individual assets of the level just enough that it could slide by - The swastika was replaced with a triangle emblem from the censored versions of Wolfenstein: The New Colossus, the mustache on the Hitler portraits was removed, and the poorly-pronounced German the Nazis shout out before getting turned inside-out by your plasma weaponry was partially re-recorded to say "schutzkämpfer" instead of "schutzstaffel".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9t4lVtGKP0

This is just one of many examples of games getting altered for the German market, either by modifying or removing Nazi symbolism in World War 2 games or by replacing human opponents with robots (Command and Conquer Generals was pretty hilarious about this). Heck, Half-Life 1's German alterations (which reskinned the marines to be robots, and made scientists sit down in disappointment upon being killed) was only wound back in 2017!

If you're ever curious about this, it's a pretty deep rabbit hole to fall down!

Freakazoid_
Jul 5, 2013


Buglord
A similar german influenced censorship happened with City of Heroes. It has an npc faction called the 5th column. They're nazis, remnants of Hitler's secret forces who carried on the fight well after ww2. They are one of the original enemy factions when the game released in april 2004.

Six months after release: oops we need to release our game in germany! Ok don't panic, let's just pretend that the 5th column was taken over by an inner faction called the Council. No we don't need to hint that this is happening, just do it. Oh wait we can't even call them fascist? Fine, we'll just call them a "shadowy brain trust" and wink and nod profusely without calling them what they are.

Five years later, they brought the 5th column back. I guess germany didn't care? Whatever, it was dumb.

GWBBQ
Jan 2, 2005


Nintendo of America didn't allow any religion or sexual undertones, overtones (no boobs on characters, monsters, and statues), or religious references in their games. The Castlevania series notably lacked Christian crosses despite the obvious symbolism, Dragon Warrior joined Castlevania in not depicting crosses on tombstones, and also left dead party members as ghosts rather than coffins with crosses on them to make death and resurrection inconsequential rather than philosophical. In retrospect, this was a very good PR/marketing idea considering the growing popularity of console gaming combined with the potential to reignite the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. Parents of children and teens as well as those child/teen demographics themselves typically found nothing objectionable about playing the "good guy" and fighting against indistinctly but definitively evil enemies who were everything from non-human monsters to wink-wink-nudge-nudge [not]demons. The overarching good versus evil narrative was exactly what was needed to provoke a positive response and establish mass appeal in a time when so much of the country was obsessed with a fictitious phenomenon that, to be frank, was really loving stupid.

Fargin Icehole posted:

I guess I wouldn't say butchered, but I did not expect GTA: San Andreas to get the Adults Only treatment based on unreleased content that someone dug up from the games files that you had to go out of your way to make work.
Hot Coffee

See also: backmasked satanic messages in rock and metal music (which typically ignored non-charting but popular bands whose music contained overt satanic messages).

Thuryl
Mar 14, 2007

My postillion has been struck by lightning.
Most of you have probably already heard about this one, but it's great so somebody's gotta post it anyway. Winnie the Pooh was clumsily edited out of social media posts from gaming sites promoting Kingdom Hearts 3 in China; depicting the character can get you in trouble over there due to a proliferation of memes comparing him to President Xi Jinping.



(Some English-language sites at the time reported this as being actual screenshots from the Chinese version of the game obliterating Pooh, but that doesn't seem to be the case; the game itself never got an official release in China at all and is only available by importation.)

Thuryl fucked around with this message at 07:51 on Jan 20, 2020

John Murdoch
May 19, 2009

I can tune a fish.

Freakazoid_ posted:

A similar german influenced censorship happened with City of Heroes. It has an npc faction called the 5th column. They're nazis, remnants of Hitler's secret forces who carried on the fight well after ww2. They are one of the original enemy factions when the game released in april 2004.

Six months after release: oops we need to release our game in germany! Ok don't panic, let's just pretend that the 5th column was taken over by an inner faction called the Council. No we don't need to hint that this is happening, just do it. Oh wait we can't even call them fascist? Fine, we'll just call them a "shadowy brain trust" and wink and nod profusely without calling them what they are.

Five years later, they brought the 5th column back. I guess germany didn't care? Whatever, it was dumb.

The 5th Column is a huge clusterfuck and I would have to go digging through old resources to be 100% sure, but basically:

- At the time, they claimed this was a planned story turn all along and had nothing to do with releasing in Europe.
- For years people argued incessantly about whether or not The Law That Says You Can't Put Nazis in a Videogame is real. (Answer: Not really, but also kind of.*)
- Way after the fact they finally admitted that they did it to cover their rear end because they didn't know the full extent of the law and would rather just cut that off at the pass.
- Worth noting that around that time they were beginning to sketch out what City of Villains was going to be like, which originally involved creating your character and then joining up with existing groups, so that may have influenced their decision but it's never come up in that context so who knows.
- In the end, the Column returned and also were never at risk of running afoul of the law in the first place.

*To my (limited) understanding, the law is primarily concerned with the glorification of nazis and their symbols. I might be wildly off base, but I would assume it's less that you literally cannot ever legally have a video game with swastikas and more you need to spend time and effort arguing your case, and most of the time you'd probably fail because your example of usage is on nazi death robots or other frivolous poo poo. Better to just censor that poo poo and be done with it.

Edit: Looking it up via old story bible stuff, it looks like the original claim that it was planned all along was a complete lie. They did plot out a bunch of stuff, but seemingly with the starting point being "we need to swap out these nazis for not-nazis ASAP, and also introduce the new alien character classes, and also foreshadow City of Villains stuff"...which is exactly what they ended up doing. The alien stuff did exist beforehand in the background of the Column, but nothing in the OG story bible says anything about a secret inner group or an alien takeover or any of the stuff that came along with them being removed.

Of course, it was also always telling that they did a complete and total find and replace across the entire game to remove literally every single mention that the 5th Column existed. Even in text that was meant for in-world historical plaques, suddenly they'd be referred to as "the group that preceded the Council" or whatever.

John Murdoch fucked around with this message at 10:50 on Jan 20, 2020

The Kins
Oct 2, 2004

John Murdoch posted:

*To my (limited) understanding, the law is primarily concerned with the glorification of nazis and their symbols. I might be wildly off base, but I would assume it's less that you literally cannot ever legally have a video game with swastikas and more you need to spend time and effort arguing your case, and most of the time you'd probably fail because your example of usage is on nazi death robots or other frivolous poo poo. Better to just censor that poo poo and be done with it.
The long and short of it, as I understand it from Googling things up and occasionally researching things for TCRF (so if any actual Germans want to correct me I'd be grateful), is that the German law Strafgesetzbuch §86a outlaws the use of "symbols (which Wikipedia defines as flags, insignia, uniforms, slogans and forms of greeting) of unconstitutional organizations" unless they fall within a "social adequacy clause" that permits them within artistic, scientific, research or educational contexts on a case-by-case basis.

Videogames were not counted within that clause until August 2018, overturning a 1998 court ruling regarding Wolfenstein 3D. (Incidentally, Wolfenstein Youngblood was the first AAA game to be released under these new rules, with both censored and uncut versions released.)

John Murdoch
May 19, 2009

I can tune a fish.
Gotcha. The fact that games existed in a weird limbo state is probably why confusion was so widespread. Combine that with the deliberate misinfo from the CoH devs and the inevitable game of telephone (stuff like "no swastikas" turning into "no nazis of any kind") and it's no wonder nobody could conclusively explain why the Column had to go bye-bye.

Ritznit
Dec 19, 2012

I'm crackers for cheese.

Ultra Carp
German chiming in: The Kins basically nailed it, yeah. The question whether videogames are art was always a pretty valid one in Germany, since things with artistic merit are allowed to depict nazis. Nazi symbols such as the swastika are considered against our constitution and can thus not be depicted in "frivolous" contexts that might glorify or otherwise trivialize the symbolism. Until 2018, videogames were considered "toys/entertainment" and not artistically relevant enough to be allowed to depict nazis unfiltered.

In general, the draconian times of infamous German videogame censorship are thankfully basically over. Our intensely conservative, old politicians wrestled with this for a long time, but over the last handful of years, games getting ridiculous German versions has gone just about completely away. No more green blood and vanishing corpses for us! The last bastion of major differences in versions here was still the nazi stuff, and it's good a company finally took the plunge on actually acting on that, too.

I'm definitely going to effortpost about ridiculous German censorship examples in this thread. I promised I'd do it for Command & Conquer Generals, so I think I'll have to start with that.

Dell_Zincht
Nov 5, 2003



Ritznit posted:

I'm definitely going to effortpost about ridiculous German censorship examples in this thread. I promised I'd do it for Command & Conquer Generals, so I think I'll have to start with that.

Please do, I genuinely find it fascinating.

By the way, was I accurate in my OP about Mortal Kombat 11's advertising being severely restricted?

Ritznit
Dec 19, 2012

I'm crackers for cheese.

Ultra Carp
I might as well give a general rundown of the history of game censorship in Germany for context. Note that this is a mix of my own knowledge, some online research and hearsay so I'm not claiming to be an expert. I simply post as someone who's generally interested in this kinda thing and grew up in Germany as a game nerd. I'll be linking to sources and such where I can, but do note that most of them will be in German since there aren't a lot of English versions providing the same amount of info.



What's the Deal with Germans and Videogame Censorship?

The polemic short version is that our politicians are dumb and old and our culture leans towards abhorring violence over sexuality/drug use, ergo media heavily featuring violence are put under extra scrutiny. The longer version I'll explain here if you care to read it!



How does the Censorship work?

First off all, the German government doesn't censor anything. That would be very much against the law in the vast majority of cases since Germany is a country that supports free speech outside of extreme, societally harmful cases (such as hate speech and the likes). The German government doesn't have the right or means to just censor entertainment willy-nilly, and that's a good thing. So when people say "Germany censored Command & Conquer" or "Germany banned Mortal Kombat", things are a bit more complicated than that, albeit absolutely not uncontroversial.

In Germany, media of any sort are evaluated by our equivalents of organizations such as the American ESRB (games) and the MPAA (movies). Our version of the ESRB is the USK (Unterhaltungssoftware Selbstkontrolle) and our version of the MPAA is the FSK (Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle der Filmwirtschaft). These organisations operate "halbstaatlich", meaning "partially state-organized" - They are privately run organizations, but with direct input and involvement from the governments in the German states and their respective institutions tasked with youth protection.

Just like the boards in the US or elsewhere, the USK evalutes what content a game features and what age restriction should apply to it as a result. If a game is considered suitable for any age below 18, cool, nothing out of the ordinary. It can be advertised, sold, etc. as you'd expect, just obviously only to people on and above the required age. Things get interesting if a game is rated 18+ only.

There are two ways in which something can be for adults only - 1) if it gets the 18+ label, or 2) if it gets "keine Kennzeichnung" ("unrated"). The latter is where potential censorship comes into play, namely through another organization, the entirely government-run BPjM (Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien, translates to "Federal Ratings Agency for Youth Endangering Media"). Both of the "adults only" labels, the 18+ and the "keine Kennzeichnung", are labels companies have historically tried to avoid like the plague, since they both come with serious restrictions for the advertisement and sale of the game in question.

If a game is deemed 18+/Adults Only, it can not be advertised in public (think billboards, posters, magazine ads, etc). Additionally, these games cannot be ordered by mail in any place that doesn't guarantee the buyer is of age. In the past, especially before digital distribution for games really took off, these two factors combined would spell commercial death for any game. On top of that, games with "keine Kennzeichnung" would be treated in all senses as 18+/Adults Only, but with the additional factor of the BPjM potentially being involved. A game usually receives "keine Kennzeichnung" if it is deemed heavily youth-endangering or otherwise tasteless/lawbreaking/illegal and can be applied for evaluation by the BPjM, which is tasked with the restriction and outright ban/seizure of any such dangerous media. Older gamers in Germany will be highly familiar with the "Index" - The list of restricted/banned/seized media. Prohibition of such media can range from simple complete sales and advertising bans to outright seizure of the work in question.


How does the Index work?

The Index seperates between "Trägermedien" (physical media) and "Telemedien" (digital media). Lists A and B are for Trägermedien, Lists C and D for Telemedien.

Once a piece of media is on the Index, it is there for a whopping 25 years. A company can apply for early release from the list, but if the BPjM still deems the work dangerous in some way, there's nothing one can do about it. As long as it's on the Index, it cannot be publically advertised, sold or shown in any capacity and can only be sold on direct request to proven adults. If deemed necessary, the BPjM can add further bans on top of that, from prohibiting all and any sale of the work in Germany even to posessing it, though especially the latter is very rare. For generally sales-banned but not posession-banned titles, importing titles from Austria was a huge thing, since Austria would receive versions of the game that also featured German translations, but wasn't subject to the same changes in content.

As for what's on the Index at any given point - The German government restricts access to the actual Index lists themselves. Their argument is that an easily accessible list would have a notoriety-boosting advertisement effect. The official website of the BPjM merely publishes a list of statistics of how many things are on the Index. The contents of Lists A and B are published every quarter of the year in a magazine avaible for direct purchase from the BPjM. The contents of Lists C and D are even harder to access - Since they include not just digital-only distributed entertainment, but also websites and the like, Lists C and D are only made avaible via direct request to the BPjM itself and are usually restricted to organizations such as search engines looking to remove such sites from their search results in Germany.

Public discussion of the contents of the Index is difficult due to the afforementioned lack of knowledge what's really on it, and uncertain legal situations in some cases. For instance, it's still not entirely clear whether a magazine could publish a critical review of something on the Index. Generally speaking, you should be able to, but there is no clearcut ruling on it. Also, even though the standards of the BPjM obviously change over time just as society's view on media and their contents do, no ruling is reviewed unless directly prompted by the rights owners - That means a bunch of now generally ridiculous bans are upheld to this day.

The worst issue is that nobody in the BPjM is required to have actually consumed the media they are evaluating. Yeah, that's right - They bring in people who have, and who describe the contents of the media to the board. It makes sense that the board isn't expected to have 100% completed every Ubisoft open world collectathon, obviously, but the standards for who is brought in to evaluate cases for the BPjM and describe the content for them are very unclear and badly defined. Since the BPjM is a government organization, it is also subject to the general attitudes of the current government, which tends to lean conservative in Germany, particularly during the years where videogames became a big topic. Add to that that Germany had its own string of discussions on videogames causing real life violence, especially after a school shooting was directly linked to gaming, and you can imagine why things like the BPjM are subject to a lot of controversy among nerds.


So, who actually performs the Censorship?

The publishers/game companies themselves do, to avoid the afforementioned heavy restrictions on sale and advertisement. Even if your game is supposed to be hip with the dark and edgy stuff kids like these days, what good is that if you cannot sell it to them?

When a game is evaluated by the USK, they give feedback to the game's publisher with warnings if potential 18+ or even "keine Kennzeichnung" ratings might be on the horizon. Companies will also look into previous cases and experiences with similiar titles in Germany and often even pre-censor their work to avoid losing time and money to the evaluation process. Why waste your breath when you already know your hyperviolent game will fall under heavy scrutiny? Might as well remove some blood and get a 16+ age rating so you can run those sweet, sweet magazine ads.

Now, just because the companies know that the censorship is necessary to sell in the pretty sizable German market doesn't mean that the censorship is done with particular care. In fact, a ton of cases of such censored games would range from silly to extremely silly to outright intelligence-insulting. Particularly egregious cases would include games that are rated 18+ but still receive censorship to avoid the "keine Kennzeichnung" rating and extra restrictions from the BPjM. You can imagine an adult German customer might feel a bit stupid when the game they can buy is not equivalent to the one an adult American customer can buy for reasons that seem (and sometimes very much are) entirely arbitrary. Things get especially hairy when cut content goes beyond simple graphics changes and affects the quality of the game, its story, or any vital features. And boy howdy, that kinda thing sure happened quite often, and not just with nazis.

--------------

As said, attitudes in Germany have changed, even among our crusty government agencies. Mortal Kombat 1 was banned entirely from sale, advertising and display in Germany back in 1994 - You were allowed to own it if you imported it, but anything else was strictly prohibited. All future entries in the series followed suit ... until Mortal Kombat 10, in 2015, which was much to people's surprise back then not censored, merely rated 18+/Adults Only. 11 got the same. As I explained further up, that means the game wasn't allowed to get public advertising in mainstream media, but you can get it just fine in German retail, Steam and elsewhere with zero content censored. We've come a long way since green blood, sentient bombs, soldiers turning into backpacks and everyone being robots all the drat time, but I'm looking forward to describing that nonsense in future posts anyway!

Rockman Reserve
Oct 2, 2007

"Carbons? Purge? What are you talking about?!"

I'm sure most people posting in this thread would be familiar with at least some of the censorship around the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles through the years, and if not someone on the UK/Europe side of things could almost certainly sum it up better than I could, but I still did a double take when I noticed that in Injustice 2 Michelangelo's nunchaku have been replaced by a skateboard.

The Kins
Oct 2, 2004

food court bailiff posted:

I'm sure most people posting in this thread would be familiar with at least some of the censorship around the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles through the years, and if not someone on the UK/Europe side of things could almost certainly sum it up better than I could, but I still did a double take when I noticed that in Injustice 2 Michelangelo's nunchaku have been replaced by a skateboard.
As I understand it (and I'm open to correction as always) from the mid-80s through to the mid-90s, the British Board of Film Classification had an inexplicable hate-on for "martial arts weaponry", which they considered easy to attain (somehow) and easy for the impressionable youth to imitate. You know the drill.

In order to avoid bad press, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon changed its name to "Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles" and replaced Mikey's 'chucks with a grappling hook.


The Heroes in a Half-Shell weren't the only ones to get affected by this weird fixation; The film Enter the Dragon was hit with cuts to remove Bruce Lee's nunchaku, and the PS1 game Soul Edge (Soul Blade in Europe) remodelled Li Long's nunchaku to be a three-part staff.

kirbysuperstar
Nov 11, 2012

Let the fools who stand before us be destroyed by the power you and I possess.
There was also the thing with Soulcalibur where Korea in particular shunned depictions of samurai, so Mitsurugi went blonde, got renamed to Arthur and..uh, that was it. New character, totally not a samurai.

Dell_Zincht
Nov 5, 2003



food court bailiff posted:

I'm sure most people posting in this thread would be familiar with at least some of the censorship around the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles through the years, and if not someone on the UK/Europe side of things could almost certainly sum it up better than I could, but I still did a double take when I noticed that in Injustice 2 Michelangelo's nunchaku have been replaced by a skateboard.

All three live action films also suffered cuts and censorship. The whole TMNT/TMHT thing was and still is weird.

Dell_Zincht fucked around with this message at 08:56 on Jan 22, 2020

Ritznit
Dec 19, 2012

I'm crackers for cheese.

Ultra Carp
I think the idea was that the authorities believed kids could easily build or appropriate something nunchuck-esque and then smack each other in the head over and over. I reckon in reality, a lot of it was good ol' xenophobia and "kids these days" handwringing.

EDIT: And yeah of course Germany used the "Hero Turtles" thing for a long time, do you even need to ask?

Chunderbucket
Aug 31, 2006

I had a beer with Stephen Miller once and now I like him.

Ritznit posted:

I think the idea was that the authorities believed kids could easily build or appropriate something nunchuck-esque and then smack each other in the head over and over.


lol if you didn't do this as a kid. wrapped in electrical tape just like a REAL ninja.

Rockman Reserve
Oct 2, 2007

"Carbons? Purge? What are you talking about?!"

Well, I mean, there were some actual deaths attributed to nunchaku, which are like....an actual weapon. Like the swords, sai and beatstick the other Turtles used. But still, it's not like those got censored.

excellent bird guy
Jan 1, 2020

by Cyrano4747
NOA took the crosses out of Lufia and changed the priest to a weird looking old man sprite. The original looked a lot better!

Scalding Coffee
Jun 26, 2006

You're already dead
NISA has a habit of censoring or needlessly changing pretty much every game they localize and La Pucelle Tactics is among their most heavily censored. Based around a demon-hunting organization in a church, NISA removed or altered crosses, spells, places, people, and dialog related to religion. They also removed smoking and typical anime innuendo. It was chopped up like a 4kids Entertainment anime.

ColdPie
Jun 9, 2006

PROBOTECTOR

kirbysuperstar
Nov 11, 2012

Let the fools who stand before us be destroyed by the power you and I possess.

Scalding Coffee posted:

NISA has a habit of censoring or needlessly changing pretty much every game they localize and La Pucelle Tactics is among their most heavily censored. Based around a demon-hunting organization in a church, NISA removed or altered crosses, spells, places, people, and dialog related to religion. They also removed smoking and typical anime innuendo. It was chopped up like a 4kids Entertainment anime.

NISA didn't exist at the point where La Pucelle came out, that was all Mastiff - NISA was only really formed after Disgaea 1. NISA don't really censor things either.

Anyway here's a spokesbloke at Mastiff remarking on it: https://web.archive.org/web/20070927213521/http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3125625&did=1

Scalding Coffee
Jun 26, 2006

You're already dead
Thanks for the correction.

NISA does still censor games. https://nichegamer.com/2020/01/18/nisa-responds-to-claims-of-changing-sexist-japanese-jokes-to-be-culturally-appropriate/

quote:

NISA have seemingly been heavily criticized for their localization work in that past. These complaints center around the titles such as Criminal Girls Invitation, the DanganRonpa series, the Disgaea series, Fairy Fencer F, Hyperdimension Neptunia series, Mugen Souls, Witch and the 100 Knight, and more.

Scalding Coffee fucked around with this message at 12:55 on Jan 23, 2020

SUPERMAN'S GAL PAL
Feb 21, 2006

Holy Moly! DARKSEID IS!

PC versus NES versions of Maniac Mansion, from off the top of my head:

- changing “pissed off” to “ticked off”
- totally removing a classical statue of a nude woman
- changing an arcade game title from “Muff Diver” to “Tuna Diver”
- totally removing all of Nurse Edna’s sexual innuendos (telling male characters she ought to tie them to her bed) and indicators (the mirror over her bed)
- removing several items from Dead Cousin Ted’s room, including the organ dispensing machine and his Egyptian mummy pinup

I know these aren’t the only things, and I can understand removing the overtly sexual bits, but some changes played it really safe to a point of my even noticing how ridiculous it was as a preteen. Thankfully nothing rendered the game unbeatable or locked out any of the endings, which I know has happened to censored games in the past (the German release of “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” comes to mind).

kirbysuperstar
Nov 11, 2012

Let the fools who stand before us be destroyed by the power you and I possess.

Well Nichegamer is a goobergraper site so I'm not going to click that poo poo

From the stuff you quoted - Criminal Girls and Mugen Souls did have stuff changed but they're also abysmal games with gross poo poo content and never should have been made or localised so there's no loss there unless you really feel the need to see pictures of small girls being "punished".

No idea on Danganronpa stuff, Disgaea's had some changes but most of those bled back through to re-releases for Japan anyway (mostly thinking of the torture horse in D4), NISA only did Neptunia 1 and I don't know what changed there, Witch and The Hundred Knight still had the witch turning her mother into a rat and having a horde of male rats go after her so I doubt much else changed there (it's also a poo poo game that shouldn't have seen the light of day).

Pakistani Brad Pitt
Nov 28, 2004

Not as taciturn, but still terribly powerful...



SUPERMAN'S GAL PAL posted:

- changing an arcade game title from “Muff Diver” to “Tuna Diver”

This seems like it got dirtier in censored form

Kchama
Jul 25, 2007

kirbysuperstar posted:

Well Nichegamer is a goobergraper site so I'm not going to click that poo poo

From the stuff you quoted - Criminal Girls and Mugen Souls did have stuff changed but they're also abysmal games with gross poo poo content and never should have been made or localised so there's no loss there unless you really feel the need to see pictures of small girls being "punished".

No idea on Danganronpa stuff, Disgaea's had some changes but most of those bled back through to re-releases for Japan anyway (mostly thinking of the torture horse in D4), NISA only did Neptunia 1 and I don't know what changed there, Witch and The Hundred Knight still had the witch turning her mother into a rat and having a horde of male rats go after her so I doubt much else changed there (it's also a poo poo game that shouldn't have seen the light of day).

I'd be surprised if anything got censored in Labyrinth of Refrain, considering all the stuff I've seen in it so far.

WeedlordGoku69
Feb 12, 2015

by Cyrano4747

kirbysuperstar posted:

Well Nichegamer is a goobergraper site so I'm not going to click that poo poo

From the stuff you quoted - Criminal Girls and Mugen Souls did have stuff changed but they're also abysmal games with gross poo poo content and never should have been made or localised so there's no loss there unless you really feel the need to see pictures of small girls being "punished".

No idea on Danganronpa stuff, Disgaea's had some changes but most of those bled back through to re-releases for Japan anyway (mostly thinking of the torture horse in D4), NISA only did Neptunia 1 and I don't know what changed there, Witch and The Hundred Knight still had the witch turning her mother into a rat and having a horde of male rats go after her so I doubt much else changed there (it's also a poo poo game that shouldn't have seen the light of day).

yeah this is basically what I thought

they're only censoring stuff because they're 95% on Sony consoles and Sony America decided to go hard on censoring rapey and pedo-y nonsense, and everything that isn't along those lines (and even some stuff that is) is remaining untouched

so, in other words, nothing of value was lost

DemoneeHo
Nov 9, 2017

Come on hee-ho, just give us 300 more macca


I'm going to talk about the first two Persona games and their troubled localization. A good chunk of my post is going to focus on that nebulous line between localization and censorship, but i'll definitely touch on censorship later.

Way back in 1996, Atlus released a game Revelations Persona, aka Persona 1. The game itself was a spinoff of their series of post-apocalyptic cyberpunk rpgs, Shin Megami Tensei, in which the player recruits various demons and mythological beings to their side while roaming through the ruins of Tokyo. Persona instead ran with the concept of high school students living in a modern Japanese city who summon their inner demons called Personas who appear as ghostly spirits and cast spells and poo poo. So basically Stands from Jojo, literally everything in japan is derived from either DBZ or Jojo. The game took place in the very Japanese city of Mikage and a cast of Japanese teenagers attending a Japanese high school.

You'll notice I keep repeating the word Japanese over and over again. That's because Persona 1 is not only know for kickstarting the Persona series of games, but also for its infamous translation for the original PS1 release in America. Similarly to a 4kids production, the newly formed Atlus USA division changed names of everyone and everything to make you think that the setting was in the US. So Mikage became Lunarvale USA, Maki became Mary, Kandori became Guido Sardenia, and even mythological and literary names like Nyarlathotep turned into Massacre. But then Atlus USA went a step further and straight up altered the skin color of the cast to make them more American. Most characters received whiter skin and brown/blonde hair; but one character in particular, Masao, was turned into Mark, a jive-talking African American kid.



EDIT: I completely forgot about God Kandori turning into Super Guido



Why they felt it necessary to de-Japanify the game, I will never know. Normally i wouldn't consider name changes in a localization to be outright censorship. But Atlus took that extra mile to convince you that these were American kids, so thats gotta count for some form of censorship. Regardless, Atlus would learn their lesson and when Persona 1 was remade for the PSP, the international version kept the original names and skin colors for everyone. Furthermore, future games would receive translations that would stick to the original script much closer. This would include Persona 2, which had its own case of censorship.

--

Persona 2 was actually released as a duology of games for the PS1: Innocent Sin in 1999 and Eternal Punishment in 2000. Innocent Sin would focus on a different cast of high schoolers living in Sumaru City, as they used their personas to battle a villainous masked organization and robo-nazis. Eternal Punishment was the direct sequel, with adults becoming the playable cast, taking on a government conspiracy to raise dragons.

Now, Eternal Punishment was released to America with a faithful translation and nothing major censored. Innocent Sin, on the other hand, wasn't so much as censored as it was just outright skipped for international release. There are three generally accepted reasons as to why it was not released overseas:
1. Columbine had just happened, and a good chunk of the plot involved schoolyard violence.
2. One of the main characters, Jun, was gay and had feelings for the protagonist, which you could in fact reciprocate. This being 1999, people weren't too keen on gays at the time.
3. Remember when i mentioned robo-nazis earlier? Well Hitler himself shows up halfway through the game, leading his army of robo-nazis and ends up as the second-to-last boss fight of the game.

The potential for controversy, as well has having a thinly-stretched staff at the time, led to Atlus skipping IS and only translation EP for America. IS would eventually be re-released internationally for the PSP.

But even the PSP version had to deal with some actual censorship. Apparently CERO, the Japanese equivalent of ESRB, introduced a new rule stating that people with real backgrounds could not appear in fictional games. Which meant that Hitler, who was the effectively the main villain for the second half of Innocent Sin, could not be depicted in game. So the game devs came up with a brilliant solution: give him sunglasses and never refer to him by name. They'll never know the difference.

DemoneeHo fucked around with this message at 22:59 on Jan 24, 2020

kirbysuperstar
Nov 11, 2012

Let the fools who stand before us be destroyed by the power you and I possess.
I like how whatever Very American City Persona 1 took place in just happened to have Shinto shrines or whatever the hell

The Kins
Oct 2, 2004

kirbysuperstar posted:

I like how whatever Very American City Persona 1 took place in just happened to have Shinto shrines or whatever the hell
Eat your hamburgers, Apollo.

TheBystander
Apr 28, 2011
Good post, DemoneeHo. I find it pretty funny, considering that the most common complaint I hear about Persona 5 is how overly literal the translation is.

I didn't play Persona 1 back when it came out, but I was interested in it after reading a walkthrough of the first few areas in a gaming magazine. When I finally tried it out years later on the PSP, I actually busted out that old magazine, and was a little confused to see that one character had apparently changed race.

Edit: actually, speaking of Persona 1, didn't they remove an optional dungeon in the original US release? What was up with that?

Kchama
Jul 25, 2007

TheBystander posted:

Good post, DemoneeHo. I find it pretty funny, considering that the most common complaint I hear about Persona 5 is how overly literal the translation is.

I didn't play Persona 1 back when it came out, but I was interested in it after reading a walkthrough of the first few areas in a gaming magazine. When I finally tried it out years later on the PSP, I actually busted out that old magazine, and was a little confused to see that one character had apparently changed race.

Edit: actually, speaking of Persona 1, didn't they remove an optional dungeon in the original US release? What was up with that?

I always got the impression that the complaint about Persona 5's translation was just because people wanted to stir poo poo about it and accusing the translation of being bad in some vague way is a good way to do so.

Also yes they cut out the Snow Queen quest, which was actually less an optional dungeon and more a second campaign, as you basically just leave the actual regular plot and instead do an alternate second half of the game or so if you recruit a certain character. I'm not entirely sure why they cut it out.

Item Getter
Dec 14, 2015

kirbysuperstar posted:

I like how whatever Very American City Persona 1 took place in just happened to have Shinto shrines or whatever the hell

The Shinto shrine was out of place but my favorite part of the localized Persona 1 is that all the drugstores in the very American city are always playing an advertising jingle that is sung entirely in Japanese. Just like the Shinto shrine where naturally none of the characters mention it or think it's weird.
This is definitely a song you would hear on the radio in an average drug store in the USA:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNV5zBxV-lQ

Though I would call the original US version of Persona 1 not censorship but a misguided attempt at trying to make the game appeal to an American audience in an era before anime had really made it big in the US and games about Japanese highschoolers weren't very commonly brought overseas.

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AngryRobotsInc
Aug 2, 2011

The Snow Queen path was almost certainly cut because of lack of time and manpower. It was apparently a very small localization team, and P1 released in the US only about three months after it released in Japan. Game has a lot of text, so on top of all the other changes they made, they most likely just ran out of time and cut access to the quest.

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