I’m asking this in light of the recent threads that I’ve read and participated in, particularly the “Reponse to Family Project Changes” thread. Is censorship really a big issue here ? :?
I for one don’t care too much about the H content of a game; I only look at that when the game has nothing else left to offer me that I would enjoy. :arrow:
THe game has a good story, the censorship is only in 3 events. While they were clearly overreacting, I don’t think much really changed in this instance.
Anyway, the game doesn’t really have much H to begin with, the censored scenes were merely nude scenes involving a character who is implied to be underage, yet she has an H-scene later because she becomes legal. Thats about it, really.
The bigger issue on the threads seems to be that people weren’t notified of these changes until the game came out, which cotradicts a statement made earlier (After X-CHange 3) that they would inform people of changes before-hand. That seems to be the bigger issue.
Oh, and there are some whiners from 4ch who probably wouldn’t have bought the game anyway, but come here just to complain about something and troll the boards.
Well, I’d rather not have them thinking it’s okay to make further censoring with future titles with potentially even more questionable content (particularly with the Nitro+ titles), so yeah, it is a big deal. Some play games for the story, some play it for sex, but if both are in a game together in the original, I see no reason why either aspect should be treated with any less respect in a localized version. If legal issues are that big of a deal, then it’s their responsibility to look through the text/script and reject it for objectionable content before they choose to license it.
I don’t want to give my money and reward them for censoring any artwork. The erotic elements in any of the games JAST releases happens to be relevant because JAST USA uses them as a hook to get customers in. If the story in this game is “everything” and the sexual elements are “completely” irrelevant, then I see no reason why they never even considered the prospect of localizing non-h games in the first place.
I’m surprised no one’s pointed it out yet, but Chain has some mosaic in its ero scenes while the cover says it’s uncensored but I haven’t come across any threads complaining about that since I’ve been here.
I thought they patched that one up? Although it’s not ideal, sometimes, they might not have had the resources to uncensor everything (The original artist that was working with them may have bailed out when he was working with JAST, there may have been budget problems, etc.). Either way, It’s better to have them not touch the originally censored artwork than censoring it even further. It’s the attempt to hide questionable content in the localization process that irks people.
I’d garner that most people that care passionately about the topic of censorship don’t care about mosaics. Sure, there are people that care, but it’s a different and much less vocal group (perhaps even the silent majority). Censorship is about altering the original work in a way that detracts from the authors’ original vision. But in the case of mosaics, the original vision included mosaics. Furthermore, the presence or absence of mosaics has absolutely no impact on the scenario. Redrawing panties on a character that was supposed to be nude does.
Ah. So that’s what this is about.
I play games mainly for the story, but I see where you’re coming from on the sex part of it; good eroge always attracts more potential customers. :mrgreen:
It’s still no reason to simply brush aside the actual act of censoring in and of itself, though.
Bullseye.
Bullshit. It doesn’t impact the scenario one damn bit.
remember “Hani Hani: Operation Sanctuary”? one of the main characters is a grown-up teacher who had a child like body*, remember her? (sorry don’t have a link, but I remember the anime :oops: ). In my opinion, if the only thing keeping JAST from bringing HaniHani over is the teacher, then I for one wouldn’t mind the route of the English version of this one character to be replaced with the console version. (hey, Atlas need some competition… I would look forward to console games that have game play in them. Go for it JAST :mrgreen: )
JAST can even let us know in advance, put a poll asking wither we will still go ahead and get the title if this one questionable character route is modified.
what a number of people are worried about is, would JAST alter (cloth) girls which have young bodies even though they are over 18 or non-humans? (read: does the “all characters are over 18” still works or doesn’t it?). If, for the sake of argument, we assume that JAST is the one who is bringing Shuffle over, would they put panties on Primula or would her CGs remain in their original form since she is not human? (note, we are getting the original CGs, Japanese fans are getting the modified (mosaiced) CGs)
quote of the day
P.S. I still don’t view the modification of those 3 images as censoring. But that just me.
That hypothetical censoring would piss me off. I’d rather struggle through the original game in Japanese than play such an English version. Of course, in this case it’d be more than just “putting panties on her.” They’d have to remove all her sex scenes, essentially removing her entire route.
Such a poll would be meaningless (I know that means a lot coming from me :P). Forum regulars are not a representative sample of potential buyers. We just happen to be a lot louder.
There was a patch for the mosaic.
Double bullshit. It doesn’t fucking matter whether it changes the story or not, it changes what the the artist had originally intended to show when he drew the CG.
Here’s my two cents on the matter of “artist’s intentions”… Most artists don’t draw the mosaics; those are added later. Furthermore, the writer originally intended to convey the story in Japanese. Now, additional changes do bring the game further away from the artists’ intentions, but you can’t really think of any translated game as a “pure representation” of the artists’ intentions, even if it’s an ideal that many translations strive for.
Depending on how the game creation process went, which you probably don’t know, the ARTIST’s intentions may not be that important… quite often someone’s telling the artist what to draw. And that decision may be motivated by artistry or by business decisions. We really don’t know.
It could happen that the designer said to the artist, “Draw character X changing clothes.” And the exact state of undress was left totally up to the artist. It could happen that the designer said to the artist “Draw character X in her panties” and the artist thought nude was better and drew something else, and the designer didn’t want to argue. It could happen that the designer thought “And then he walks in on her changing clothes… But we’d better make sure that she’s fully exposed so that we can put this towards the HCG count for the marketing.” I’m not saying any of these things DID happen, obviously, just that it’s silly to stake your reputation on the ARTISTIC PURITY of a particular image with complete disregard for the intent and importance of whatever’s being altered.
All sorts of things can happen. Even if there’s one central figure completely in charge of a game they still generally have to make compromises with artists and business needs.
Peach Princess also hires the original artist to redraw the images wherever possible. So the artist’s vision was not really compromised, they agreed to make the changes.
The game always was made for the purpose of making money, so it’s not like these considerations never came into play when the original was created in the first place.
Another thing to note is that some games are envisioned as All-ages games, but have H-scenes inserted for marketing purposes. Look at most Key games for an example.
What the artist intends, and what the marketers and others want, are often completely different. So “artistic Integrity” is hardly the best argument.
You wouldn’t be sure whether this particular game had H-scenes put in for marketing purposes unless the creators said so themselves. Regardless, the principle of anti-censorship still applies here. I don’t happen to support acts of censorship in any size or shape during the localization processes. I don’t want to reward them for cutting/censoring scenes, and I don’t want them thinking that it may be somehow okay to do it for future games. How’s that for you?
I operate under the assumption that by the time a company announces a title, they looked through the content, checked the scenes and images for anything that may be undesirable, and made sure that everything in the original could be released without trouble before they licensed it.
NONE of us support game censoring (and yet we’ve stopped complaining), and certain forum users made the second part of this quote quite apparent in the flame war and continued arguing that went on in the Family Project thread.
I don’t know much about this (probably less than everyone here), but I can contribute that (from what it seems from the FP thread), it was some sort of potential legal issue that caused the censoring. Correct me if I’m wrong, but please try not to shove it my face that you’re a know-it-all about this.
Out of curiosity, why the hell do you carry on with this B173 M3? I believe the last 50 posts you’ve made over the last 2-3 days have been about the exact same deal with the same context, just in different wording… I mean seriously, don’t you get tired of this yourself? Now you’ll probably defend yourself saying that you don’t wish for this issue to die out, and it’ll just be ‘brushed over’ or whatever if you don’t continue. But I highly doubt you have that sort of impact of this forum, I might be wrong… but I just can’t see how people can take you seriously after all these posts and the tone you connect to them.
Personally, I’m just skimming through your post on this matter… as well as the ones trying to talk back to you and hoping there is something new in there once in a while, it’s just so rare though. :?
From my personal stand I’ve never been fussed about the ‘little’ things, hence the censorship this time around really didn’t give me that huge a blow. And I’ll probably be playing the game with the same impression as I would without the pictures being censored. It has nothing to do with just rolling over, it’s just that I can’t be bothered with such minor details… And saying that opinions like mine will make it easier for them to pull stunts like this in the future is probably also wrong, as I highly doubt I’ve got such impact on what goes on in this forum either, no matter how many post I’ll make arguing that fact.
In short, they can probably do what they want, and they may loose out of ‘some’ customers, but those will probably be gained elsewhere considering the size of the English marked. I must admit that I rarely join in on arguments like these and It’s not likely I’ll respond to what you’re going to say (depends on what I’d assume) but as I stated in the beginning, it’s just me being curious again.