Monster Monpiece coming to Europe and North America

Quote :

IGN has just confirmed that Monster Monpiece will come to both North America and Europe this spring.


Here’s a few details they’ve listed about the title;

• Monster Monpiece is developed by Compile Heart (Hyper dimension Neptunia)
  
• It’s a 3×3 grid based card game, in which you summon monster much like in yugioh and Magic the gathering
  
• There is an story with plenty cutscene and store segments
  
• It has some content that you may rate as NSWF as for example “rubbing” system, which you will see in the trailer
  

 
 
Unfortunately....  

Quote :

Idea Factory also wrote that it “would like to inform fans and prospective users of Monster Monpiece that [they] have made the decision to cut several Monster Girl images from the North American and European versions of Monster Monpiece. This decision was made solely due to the intense sexual nature of Monster Girl card images. We’d like to emphasize that the gameplay, game system, and storyline are still fully intact.”

 
 
In the original, the amount of clothes worn by Monster Girls decreased as you powered them up.  I imagine they removed some of those later ones.  Still, it's nice to see this get out of Japan, as the West is a bit to anal about the censorship of sex.  Suburban Moms are probably going to go nuts.

http://thevitalounge.net/monster-monpiece-coming-west-this-spring/

Why can't we have nice things?

Might consider it. Not really big on card games tho.

Padders wrote:

Why can't we have nice things?

Might consider it. Not really big on card games tho.

Me neither, but they're a nice novel genre. This one seems to be somewhat story-oriented too, and Monster Girls (<3) are always a plus. I'll probably pick it up if/when it goes on sale.

"this is a story about a girl"

typical vita game :S

Sawed-Off_Orc wrote:

"this is a story about a girl"

typical vita game :S

It was pretty much an ecchi game in Japan. I guess it still qualifies by Western standards. Anyway, to say the least, t's not a very girly game. "If you don't you want it, you're obviously gay."

god dammit.

they should offer an english patch on the jp PSN store. that way people that choose to import the jp version can play it in english and uncensored.

Shigdig wrote:

god dammit.

they should offer an english patch on the jp PSN store. that way people that choose to import the jp version can play it in english and uncensored.

They should include a simple English text translation in each game, IMO. I'd import a lot more if they did.

http://forum.marvelous-usa.com/index.php?showtopic=27138&st=150#entry832441

Tom from XSEED wrote:

Ahem! Do I have a sketchy image, then?

Note that this is all me talking -- I do not represent XSEED as a whole here.

Just wanted to chime in to say that I am 100% opposed to IFI's decision to censor this game, and if I had any interest in buying it before, I definitely wouldn't now. In my opinion, censorship is the single biggest problem afflicting the video game industry today, and while it's easy to say "oh, it's lolis, so it's no big deal," the problem with that is... well, it sets a precedent. To quote myself from the Hardcore Gaming 101 forums:

I've seen first-hand how casually people bring up the concept of censoring Japanese games. And not just from us with Senran Kagura, but from other companies we've spoken with as well -- management types look at a game with risque elements, and I swear the first words out of their mouths are, "How can we censor this to make it more palatable to a larger audience?"

When I've argued in favor of NOT censoring games with these types of people, their defense is usually, "Well, X game did it, so it's not like there's no precedent!" Upon suggesting we not remove the ages from Senran Kagura Burst, for example, I was immediately accosted with statements such as, "Well, Otomedius did it!" I even heard some people say things like, "Well, Mugen Souls had much worse censorship than that, so it's not like we're going too far or anything."

The more examples of this that the industry provides -- the more options we give management types to use for filling the blanks in statements like, "Well, ____ did it!" or, "Well, ____ had worse censorship than that!" -- the harder it will be to convince anyone to leave games intact in the future. No one wants to be the first person ever to censor a game in a specific manner, but if someone else has done it before, or if someone has done something even worse, the floodgates are open. And the more often people do it, the wider those floodgates get, until that form of censorship becomes so commonplace as to be expected. And once that happens, it could take years to undo the damage -- if it can even be undone at all!

Censorship laws are the biggest problems out there, but to me, it's a worse personal offense for a company to voluntary censor something. Obeying an unjust law is one thing, but going above and beyond that law just... seems akin to being a scab during a strike or something. It's just plain uncool, and really does create a culture of censorship. Anytime something like that becomes normalized, the art suffers.

If we don't want to see something we really care about get censored in the future, we need to make sure we stick up for the things we DON'T care about (or even actively want to SEE censored) now. Any censorship, big or small, inexplicable or requested, creates a very, very dangerous slope.

And in cases like this, there's simply no excuse to have censored anything. I can tell you right now, the censored images would not have boosted the ESRB rating beyond an M, and only *possibly* would've boosted the PEGI rating to a 16 instead of a 12. But if there were any concerns... no problem! The ESRB and PEGI alike are totally cool with publishers emailing them about concerns like this. IFI could've easily emailed them all the cut pictures and asked them, "Would these put our game at risk of being unclassified or receiving too high a rating to be marketed?" And if either ratings board said yes, THEN they could've censored the images and told people, "ESRB/PEGI indicated that the game would likely be unsalable if these images were to remain, so we decided to remove them in favor of reaching a wider audience."

Instead, IFI chose to voluntary censor the images based on marketing concerns based on personal moral judgments. And that, to me, is not something a purveyor of art should do. It may make sense from a business standpoint, and even from a moral standpoint... but in my opinion, it does not make sense from an ethical standpoint.

Once again, though, this is just my opinion -- and once again, it's an opinion not shared by my coworkers and not representational of XSEED's stance as a whole, so please don't think I speak for the company here. But I do feel that this is a much bigger issue, at its core, than simply "IFI censored some mostly-naked lolis and now pervs are angry at them for it." And I do feel it's an issue that needs to be looked at from a distance. Whether you approve of Monster Monpiece's depiction of women or lolis, that's part of the game, and IFI signed up to publish the game. They knew what they were getting into, and they should've stuck to their guns. Maybe they'd get some negative backlash... but let's face it, they're going to get negative backlash anyway by virtue of the game being what it is. At least if they left it uncensored, they'd have a leg to stand on in defending themselves.

-Tom

 
 
Kinda agree.  Censorship is kinda dumb.  
 
Really stupid when you consider the fact that every suburban mom now keeps erotica out on her counter.

He also has arguments on siliconera...

Tom from XSEED wrote:

"The borderline of what is “acceptable” will always be extremely gray and
vary from person to person, but as a responsible company working in the
U.S., we had to make the difficult decision that we did."

No, you really didn't. You could've just run the 40 questionable images by the ESRB and asked them, "Hey, would any of these be unacceptable for an M rating?" And they would've most likely said nope, all good, and then you could've released the game completely uncensored. Maybe you'd get crap from activist groups, but the thing is, you STILL WILL, even with the censored version of the game, because it's still a game about rubbing the clothes off of women (many of whom look very young) to power them up.

This is definitely a case of "you knew what you were getting into when you took on this project." If you weren't willing to stick to your guns, you shouldn't have worked on this game at all.

I will definitely not be purchasing it, and frankly, I'm really disappointed that this is how you debut your western publishing branch. You had a chance to rock the boat and make a name for yourselves by releasing a really risque game uncensored, but you chose instead to go the "safe" route, and I'm betting that decision will come back to bite you.

Hopefully this means that XSEED games won't get localized with tons of censorship.