Japanese games developer discusses his own experience of being asked to remove 'boob slider' which made female characters' breasts get bigger.
Nintendo is famed for producing child-friendly video games, whilst publishers in Britain and the US focus on big, bloody affairs like Fallout and DOOM.
Nintendo has a cute image, but some of the original Japanese versions of its games are deemed ‘inappropriate’ for western audiences
But some of the games it originally releases into the the Japanese market are very different from the ones which see the light of day in North America and the rest of the world.
Nintendo follows a strategy of “localisation” in which parts of games are re-written to make more sense to players outside of Japan.
Gamers are worried that this process could allow progressive and censorious “social justice warriors” (the name for a very vocal group of censorious activists) to dictate a game’s story and character designs, overriding its original creators’ intentions.
Now Tetsuya Takahashi, CEO of the Japanese developer Monolith Soft, has revealed his own experience with Nintendo’s shadowy localisation division.
He was the executive director of Xenoblade Chronicles X, which originally featured a shocking depiction of a 13-year-old character Lin Lee wearing a bikini – as well as a ridiculous “boob slider” that allowed players to choose the size of their character’s breasts.
Both were removed from the game which was released in North America.
Players in America were not able to choose the size of their characters’ breasts (unlike in the Japanese version below)
“As a developer, I do feel like it’d be ideal to be able to adjust the content so that it’s culturally acceptable, whether it’s in the US or in the EU,” he told Kotaku.
“For example, there was a discussion about the breast slider.
“Jokingly, I said: ‘well, would it help if we had a crotch slider for the male?’ “Obviously it was a joke, but they responded obviously it’s not gonna work out. I do realise there’s a cultural difference between what Japanese people think and what the rest of the world thinks.”
In recent years, several of Nintendo’s products have come under heavy criticism from the gaming community for being badly localised for American audiences.