XSEED Vice President against censorship for lower rating

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Quote :

Censorship in gaming has always been a rather controversial issue. Yet, especially lately, the general climate could easily intimidate less determined developers and publishers into mitigating the amount of skin shown in their games.

Yet the valiant folks at XSEED are having none of that, unless it actually results in an Adult Only rating from the ESRB, as mentioned by Vice President Ken Berry during an interview on OpRainfall.

   “The good and bad thing is our localization team is made up of the vocal audiences online against censorship. Tom Lipschultz is the most vocal of them, he will on his own speak publicly online saying, “Nothing should ever be censored”.

   Knowing that there’s someone like that on our internal team, there is always a very outspoken voice against censorship. We do always try to keep the original creators vision in mind when we localize stuff as long as it can be excepted in the US. The ESRB is probably more lenient then what people think because they’ve been clear to us that it isn’t their job to censor anything it’s their job to just rate the content.

   So most of the time we present the content as is and they come back with an M rating, which we understand, but if they come back with an AO than we have to have some discussions about what to censor in order to get that to an M rating. Otherwise, none of the platform holders allow an AO product on their platform.”

Source and full article: http://www.dualshockers.com/2015/10/16/xseed-vice-president-speaks-against-censoring-games-short-of-getting-an-adult-only-rating/

It's nice that XSEED not only accepts but encourages their employees to be outspoken. Already seen too many people fired for having opinions here.

ESRB is pretty reluctant to give AO ratings unless there is explicit sexual content (literally just fluids or penetration) or lolis. Even God of War got away with a lot more sexually explicit content than what NISA censored from Criminal Girls 2, though I understand some things needed to be censored from games like Dungeon Travellers and Monster Monpiece to avoid qualifying those as borderline CP. Even the crazies doing the localization for Nutaku have mentioned needing to edit some characters to make sure it's understood they're legal.

Lower ratings are pretty bs excuse too. I doubt my mom would approve any more of my games if they were rated T. The way she sees it, I'm very likely to become a mass-murdering rapist.

They also brought up about how censoring a game is just extra work just to appeal to no one and critics that has no intention to buy the games.

Pretty much double standards when it comes to sex in western games. It baffles me to think there is an entire forum that will dismiss most Japanese as pornography without actually looking at their end in terms of western games.

Reminds me of the whole Dragon's Crown thing when a shitaku journalist thought the design of one the the female characters was harmful then called the artist a 13 year old by with homophobia. When the game was a success in the west, he decided to take credit for it.