Nintendo Removes Infamous Drugging Scene From Western Localisation Of Fire Emblem Fates

[outlawauron]

JWeinCom said:
Eh... It's not really censorship. Far as I can see, noone is forcing Nintendo to change anything. They're just adjusting the game to a different market. I'd rather the final product be as close to the original vision as possible but meh.

I'm sorry, but editing your content out of fear for backlash is exactly what censorship is.

spemanig said:

FragilE^ said:
Its a fictional story, with fictional characters in a fictional world. Why does anything matter at all?

Even if they all expressed disgust for homosexuals and made a drug to *save* a character, who cares?! It reflects on the people in the game, the fictional characters, not anyone else. I just don't understand what they're thinking when they do things like this.

Because, and this may be hard to believe, fiction does not exist inside a bubble. It exists within culture and business, and most of modern western culture sees giving a player the agency to borderline date-rape someone out of their natural born sexual orientaion to be extremely creepy. Condoning that kind of gameplay is bad for PR and it's bad for sales. You know what's bad for neither. Localizing it out.

But this isn't what happens. I agree that this would have been bad PR because of how people like to post articles and react without actually playing. Localizing it out was always what Nintendo was going to do.

TheLegendaryWolf said:

teigaga said:

Or Japanese devs could have a backbone... When conservative media launched an attack on video game violence, western devs didn't budge.

Western Developers vs Conservative Western Media is somewhat different from Japanese Developers vs Conservative Western Media. Western Devs won't budge because they can "fight" on home turf while Japanese devs don't get that liberty. 

It goes back to the whole "what's acceptable in the East isn't always acceptable in the West" situation so they have to make some precautionary edits, which may or may not be executed properly. Not only that but don't forget the ESRB ratings and CERO ratings are significantly different, which could possibly hinder sales to a degree.

JP Developers vs Western Liberal Media is lose/lose (yeah, none of the sites criticizing this are conservative), because the only people covering it are going to do so in a negative light and there's not a very good way to respond due to cultural and language barriers. It's like the Dragon's Crown/Kotaku thing where his response just got more backlash.