On one hand, I do think it's weird when people sexualise girls that clearly look underaged.

But on the other hand, I don't think game developers should have censor their work due to pressure from the West. It's their art so if they want to have an 18 year old girl wear a particular type of underwear, that's their own decision. It's not a huge detail anyway so why should it matter?

Publishers need to grow some balls.

Just ignore the minorities and send in your original work to the rating board.
In case you don't get the desired rating, just do another version of the game and change the stuff there. Then let the customers make the choice if they want the original M rated version or the "pussyfied" T rated version.
Especially for offline games, this shouldn't be a problem at all.

18 is legal in the US so, idk what the fuck is the problem.

Well ok. At least Play asia did justice to this kind of crap with DOAX3. Oh the SJW butthurt.

You can't win 'em all.

Either way someone's missing out

There's a lot of white knighting for voyeurism on this site. Hiding behind a rallying cry for "artistic freedom" does not make it any less creepy.

Someone's gotta play devil's advocate, you're welcome world!

This just isn't true at all. Companies make decisions to appease minorities knowing that it will not have any tanigble positive impact. At best case, it gets people talking about the game. Looking at Star Ocean 5's sales, it's not hard to argue that this could have negatively impacted sales.

Also TQ, this wasn't changed from the Japanese release, they changed the game for all regions. Hence, the scathing comments about "Square bowing down to the West". I mean, I'd at least read some information about this beforehand

In that case they did it because they thought the potential negative PR from not doing it would impact their bottom line in the future. They wouldn't have done shit with it if they literally thought it would not have any positive impact to their bottom line in the long run at all.

In the end, my point was that SE wasn't forced to do anything. They made this decision themselves. I don't care that they did it to appease someone else, it was still their decision, and they wouldn't have had to do it if they didn't want to. So too bad for SE!

What you're also missing is that no one believes that Tri-Ace did this decision on their own. Square making a decision would mean that something forced on them from someone not actually making the game.