Part of the issue with created characters in gaming is that they have no "real" age. You can make a character 3 years old, but give some fantasy reason why they look and act like a 30 year old. You can also do the inverse if you wanted.

You can see this when 15-16 year olds are just changed to 18-19 year olds and suddenly it is no issue based on cultural conditioning.

It is actually quite difficult to say definitively that someone looks a certain age. I get carded at bars every time and I am 30, friend of mine 25 and he has not been carded in years. People always think he is older than me.

I think the most basic way to address this is to buy or not buy games you like and/or find offensive. I have never been a fan of banning or censoring games based on objectionable content.

Nintendo did not localize Bravely Default.

Nintendo is the publisher of the title. They ultimately make the localization decisions or at least responsible for said decisions if they choose to outsource.

I'm pretty sure sexualization of fictional characters is covered by freedom of speech (even though I'm pretty sure that's not the case legally always). Pedophilia is being sexually attracted to children and is in no way related here. Then there's the issue of molesting children, which is, again, entirely different from the two I mentioned before.

To get back on topic, games shouldn't have legal restrictions on sexualization, as long as it concerns fictional characters. That said, I somewhat OK with certain other parties (such as retailers) doing their part to oppose games with questionable sexualization in them.

There should be lots of social stigma with it within the developers community because it's freakin weird and creepy, but I don't think outright banning it would be a good idea.

The whole point of hiring an external company to localize the game is to defer the task of translating the game to someone else. If Nintendo was going through all of the dialogue telling them what to change, they might as well have just translated it themselves.

Sure, maybe Nintendo told them to change the outfits (or told Silicon Studio? Or did it themselves? Who would be able to alter the actual assets within the game?), maybe they told them to up the ages. Maybe it was Square-Enix themselves who did those things, or maybe Binari Sonori made the call on the ages themselves. There is a lot of inappropriate dialogue in Bravely Default that was toned down in the Western versions, and I doubt Nintendo was hands-on with all of it. At some point, Binari Sonori was left to their own devices. There's no clear-cut explanation anywhere of which company ordered the changed costumes or the raised ages.

With regard to the ages, first of all the character models in Bravely Default are chibi, so it's easy to smudge their ages whichever way you like. This is not the case in X. Second, there is a veeerrryyy uncomfortable sidequest in Bravely Default involving an actual pedophile/rapist and the youngest party member, 15 in the Japanese version. The subtext in this quest was toned down in the Western versions, but certainly not removed. My guess would be that this subplot is the reason the ages were upped, that rather than censor the villain's intent they simply chose to make the party member a bit older. If that is the case, then unless X has a similar subplot involving Lynlee I don't see why they would feel the need to lie about her age.

Bravely Default and Fire Emblem: Awakening are the only Nintendo-published games that were 'touched-up' during the localization process in recent memory, and they are far from the only ones with sex appeal or underaged characters or some combination of the two. They aren't in the habit of altering in-game assets from the Japanese version to just avoid controversy.

People were pretty mad about this once, and then they got over it.

No outsourced studios is going to have the authority to make game content decisions. They just do the task they're contracted to do. Nintendo's name is the putting the title outside of Japan, so any decision made was done with their approval. Really, there are hardly any games that Nintendo publishes that require (and really, none of these games required any sort of altering) their response. It's mostly an Nintendo of America thing, as most NoE go through just fine. I know that they were asked to release Senran Kagura digital only. Nintendo just runs things differently.

I'm not sure where this is going at this point, but I'm willing to wager that Treehouse will not alter the outfit designs in Xenoblade X or change Lynlee's age by more than... two years.

Nah, it shouldn't. If a developer is confortable sexualizing its underaged characters, then by all means, go with it. If someone is offended, then don't purchase the game.

Nude =/= lewd.  I think there is a big difference between simple nudity and the obvious sexualization of young looking characters (male or female).