Hello, loyal fans of Japan’s PC dating-sim games. This is our response to the discussions about the changes to the English version of Family Project, which was recently released on CD-ROM and (just now) as a Download Edition. We’d be happy to hear and respond to your thoughts in this thread.
First of all, we sincerely apologize for not providing appropriate warning to fans who dislike any changes being made to their games without having notification posted. We really have no excuse for not posting a proper warning early enough so that fans who had preordered the game could remove their orders from our system. We were rushing to get the game out as quickly as possible and did not properly think things through as we prepared for the summer conventions. I am really sorry that we failed in this, since we exist only because of the trust and support of bishoujo game fans, and promise to do better in the future – more on that below.
(The “Over 9000” line was an error by the way, which was put in the script during the editing process as a joke and commented out. Obviously, something went wrong and the line made it into the game. While we’re happy with the game translation overall, it’s not the only problem with the game script, and we’re working on a patch to correct some English errors, and we’ll have this fixed soon.)
A few sections were changed in the English version of the game, to make it clear that all characters engaged in any sexual activity or nudity were 18 or older. This is unfortunately required by the world in which we live in and is really something we can’t ignore or do anything about. We are an independent publisher of a unique kind of erotic game for adults, and just as we have to follow the rules of English spelling and grammar for the localized versions of any game we publish, all characters must be clearly represented as being 18 or older if there is “naughtiness” going on.
This game was a unique experience for us, because of its extremely complex story and characters, which will not be a surprise to anyone familiar with Hajime Yamada’s other two localized games. Essentially, it’s the story of a group of people with nowhere to go, who decide to for a family for their mutual benefit and protection. The main character Tsukasa becomes the “older brother” of a homeless girl Matsuri, and eventually they fall in love. The game is extremely well done and tasteful – they have feelings for each other, but she is too young for a physical relationship, so they both wait until she is old enough to become sexually active. No problem, right? The issue is that there are a few scenes of her in a state of undress when she cannot possibly be considered of legal age by anyone reading the game story, which is why we had to add panties and the “underbra.” And this is the decision that we went with.
We could have had some kind of blanket declaration that all characters are aged 18 or older, despite the incredibly clear context that she was not emotionally or physically an adult, ready to take on the complex challenges of sexual love with another human being. We could have changed every instance of “high school” to some nonexistent type of school that comes between high school and college. We might instead have removed all lines that refer to her being under the drinking age, which would (I think) have been a lot worse than the rather small changes we did make. In effect, we changed nothing important in the story at all – the two fall in love but must wait for Matsuri to become old enough to decide if a sexual relationship is what she wants, which is what happens. However, we couldn’t release the game with images of Matsuri in the nude when she was clearly not of age, so we made the alterations, which was done right before GM.
So that’s that. As with some other games we’ve released in English, we’ve had to take some steps to contextualize the characters as being aged 18. We failed to properly warn our dedicated fan base about the changes ahead of time, in part because the game was being edited by an outside team for many months, and I again apologize for this. In the future I promise that a post WILL be made by myself or another staff member outlining any changes that were made, so that fans will have a better opportunity to make a decision about which games they want to support with their game-buying dollars. We obviously can’t make this post six months before the game is released, but we will do it very near to the Golden Master date, so you’ll still have time to cancel an order if you have preordered. (And as always, we strive to make zero changes unless they’re absolutely necessary, as they were in this case unfortunately.)
We’ll be happy to offer an unconditional refund to anyone who feels we didn’t do right by them with this release, either packaged version or download edition, with shipping refunded too if you paid shipping. It’s one of the most awesome games we’ve ever had the pleasure of working on, and I think it’s such a great game that I’ll even agree to giving a refund to any customer who plays through the game but still wants their money back at the end. To request a refund, please contact me personally at https://help.jlist.com (choose “website feedback” to contact me directly). Feel free to hit me with any comments you don’t want to post here.
Thanks again for letting us know how strongly you feel about this issue. I look forward to reading everyone’s comments.
Peter Payne
J-List / JAST USA