Everyone who is having a fit here needs to step back and take some deep breaths. Is it bad that people were not told about this ahead of time? Of course. Is ranting, raving, and carrying on here by repeatedly posting angry comments going to solve anything? No. You made it abundantly clear with your first posts that you were displeased. It is time for you all to let Peter, Shingo, or Lamuness have a chance to respond here to us directly, instead of through a third-party website.
As for how I personally feel, my thinking is generally in line with what Kabraxal and Narg have already said. I agree that they should have told us before the game was released. However, I also understand why they altered the images. For those of you who talk about JAST “not having balls” and the possibility of legal action being remote, might I remind you of what happened in the UK: there is now a law there banning sexually explicit images of characters “who appear to be” under 18. This law was brought about by an eroge, not an adult manga or anime. I somehow doubt that the eroge fan base in the UK is any larger (as measured by percentage of the population) than that in the US; in fact, I would surmise it is quite a bit smaller. Lastly, given Onigiri’s description (since my copy of the game hasn’t arrived yet 
), I tentatively agree that the impact of the scene is lessened.
Sure, unless he decided to cancel the title after licensing it–It would actually mean he’s paying attention to content that he deems unreleasable before he pisses off fans and people who preorder from them. Release it right or don’t waste two years worth of your resources releasing it at all. Just because you have them to be thankful for releasing games that wouldn’t otherwise be released doesn’t me you can’t have standards.
No wait… my bad… it was denied by the US Appeals Court, not the US Supreme Court.
Basically the primary laws against lolicon - real or fake - are still handled predominantly on a state-per-state level. Thus just because something is cool in one state, doesn’t mean it’s cool in the other 49. That’s 50 times something can be found illegal… that’s not counting the US territories I mean.
I can understand why the game was censored, however not telling customers about any changes that have been made beforehand and why they were made (despite repeated assurances that these mistakes wouldn’t happen again in the wake of the X-Change 3 fiasco) is very duplicitous. At the very least, I won’t be pre-ordering anything from JAST again, (thankfully, I didn’t pre-order Kazoku Keikaku). I think I’ll get the Japanese version from dlsite instead, as whilst I don’t really care about the changes themselves, I also don’t want to support a company that deliberately misleads their customers. This doesn’t bode well for the upcoming Nitro+ releases. :roll: Edit: Not solely because of loli issues, but also because of rape scenes and the like - some of the scenes in Nitro+ are darker than the rape scenes that were originally edited in X-Change 3.
the loli’s in demonbane are mostly books the only one that could be considered real loli is ruri hadou
Well, all I can really say is “Great job, Peter!”.
For those of you that don’t remember, here’s some examples of why I am so mad about this.
Quote Peter Payne, Wed Jul 26, 2006 2:51 am:
"I apologize to everyone who is upset by the (very small) changes made to the game, which were completely and absolutely necessary for us to release the game. Perhaps I should have posted beforehand, essentially asking fans if they’d prefer to have the game cancelled, or the small changes made. I will do so in the future (although it would only affect the fans who happen to be active readers on this BBS – someone who didn’t happen to read a post here would feel equally slighted)…
I am honestly very sorry that I didn’t make a post about the changes ahead of time. It was not my intention to hide anything and really, the changes amount to something like 0.03% of the game. And really, we had no choice but to make the changes we made.
I welcome your feedback!"
Thu Aug 31, 2006 3:35 pm, same thread:
"I’ve been following the discussions. I apologise again for not signaling that there would be some changes to the game, and in the future I promise that I will leave notes here if changes are going to be made. On the other hand, we had no choice, and I hope that we can count on the understanding of fans on this one. Well, the choice was make some changes to some of the graphics, or don’t release the game.
The issue is that “nothing” is illegal in the U.S., and yet “everything” potentially is. It’s all a grey area, which is how it’s set up, to create maximum FUD. We are always concerned about the direction of the so-called reasonable countries like the U.S. as things progress politically. We all know that these games are harmless fun, but still, in order that we can continue to bring you games you will enjoy in the future, we have to be realistic about things sometimes.
Really, there was no way we could leave that segment in the game. Again, I apologize for not mentioning it here."
Lamuness, same thread, Fri Sep 15, 2006 2:32 am, upon locking thread:
“in closing, i am pretty sure peter has learned his lesson this time and will consult with you guys if anything needs to be butchered”
Above shows just how much community backlash there was.
I just can’t comprehend a company dealing with all this, PROMISING ITS COMMUNITY that it will learn from its mistakes, then doing the same exact thing to them.
I guess now I know for sure that Yin-Yang 2 will never come out here, god forbid someone think that one of the characters is too loli. You’ve reopened a very nasty wound, Peter. That goes for you and your company. You can either fix it, or sleep in the grave you dug for yourselves.
I guess what really makes me upset is that Peter gave me his personal word regarding letting us know about the changes.
I used to have an account here before, under another name. I think enough time has passed to let that information out, although I won’t name the account name. I was one of the main people involved with the X-Change 3 issue, and after a few misunderstandings had my account disabled. I was allowed to continue under this new name by the moderators.
Peter… give me something to work with. Anything. You promised me. I believed you. I even ended my boycott of your company because of what you DID fix with X-Change 3 in a patch. You told me you’d let us know if you changed things, that they wouldn’t be sold as “uncensored”, that you would listen to the community and get feedback. Now… you do this. Why?
Was it really necessary to post two times in a row umarekawari? You couldn’t have just added to the first post?
That said, I plead with you all: If you are unhappy, and want them to know, make a post telling them how you feel and then step back and wait for them to respond. Might I remind everyone that while not against the rules, it states in the post regarding rules that “‘beating on dead horses’ is strongly discouraged as it is unconstructive”. This horse is long dead and beaten to a pulp.
In terms of honesty, I think even if the game was never marketed as “100% uncensored” (if the PP thing was a mistake), that would still be a bit dishonest. It’d be an overly narrow definition of “honesty.” If you bought peanut butter, and found it had animal feces in it, you certainly wouldn’t forgive the vendor if he said, “Hey, I never said it didn’t contain animal feces!” Ideally, it would have been noted before hand that Family Project contained censorship, not just never mentioned.
I think it’s also unreasonable to expect warm-blooded Americans to speak rationally about, or expect compromises to, Freedom of Speech…it’s a sacred precept of the state religion, after all.
Okay, so does this mean Matsuri has no ero scenes in this game?
Also is the part with the 4chan references true?
Well, either way, I’ll just grin and bear it since the ero scenes aren’t that important, according to the review I read, and as for the 4chan thing, I can take that considering I played through EVE burst error and could take the Americanization (seriously, you could play a drinking game with all the Bill Clinton jokes they made in that).
Still, if Nitro+'s stuff ends up like this, I don’t know… 
The only thing about this that has me a little iritated is that if you’re going to give us an edited version of a game like KK, then why not just go ahead and give us a mosaiced version of Cleavage and make an uncensorship patch if uncensored CG are ever found?
Hello, all. The torches are out in force again, I see 
Working on a post for everyone right now.