Squire Grooktook wrote:
The fact of the matter is, this is just a classic case of translation purity vs woolseyism. Whether you agree with the decisions made by a translation team or Nintendo's decision to allow those choices, is an entirely different debate. It does not have anything to do with "censorship".
Even though the argument is made that censorship has existed since the SNES/Genesis days, the reason why it only garners so much attention now is because there is
no/less enforced laws today such as in Germany which caused European versions of game to be changed strongly (it does still happen, but Contra/Probotector shenanigans rarely happen nowadays), companies do not listen to letters of concerned mothers complaining about violent video games anymore ever since
it became cool to hate on Christians, people now actually have an idea of how the source material looks like, and there is (or at least wasn't until recently) no oppressive climate where people would censor themselves to avoid outrage.
There is absolutely no reason for censorship to happen anymore. Rarely has such a change ever improved the source material other than
maybe stop audiences from getting offended like the many 9/11 changes that plagued games during that time. If you look at
this channel, you'll see that more Western versions of games were censored a decade ago than they were now. So why are people complaining about censorship?
There are instances of games being altered in the development/localization process because of orders high up, although more recently it seems those 'creative' decisions are being made by the localization staff themselves. More recently
the story of Blade and Soul being changed to a straightforward black-white morality tale filled with stereotypical characters, NIS America's many inexplicable content cuts and changes because the games
could get an AO rating
which even Kotaku thought was ridiculous, and Treehouse's job on Xenoblade, Fatal Frame, and Fates. There were no swastikas, possible 9/11 references, or racistic comments in those games, instead most of the material changed was of sexual nature. What happens here is that the loc staff decides what is acceptable or not for an entire audience. Now maybe you say these are once again orders from the executive level demanding changes because there is a little outrage about it on the internet, but once the loc staff start displaying a political bias, I really start to doubt that where the changes start coming from.
As Frank Zappa once said, if you put a younger person with different tastes in a position of power, there is a large chance said person will force his tastes onto the products that are being produced. In this case most aforementioned loc teams do tend to largely lean to the liberal side, and like you saw in Skykid's video posted before, you can expect more of these kind of people doing the translation for your Japanese games if the current situation at college campuses is an indication of the new generation in America. Expect less changes for financial reasons, but rather to appeal to the PC crowd. (Although that doesn't mean people only dislike such changes for political reasons, corporate meddling is hated equally) The worst part is that people actually encourage such removal of elements because they think it is morally abhorrent. If the removal of various sexual elements or pointless changes does not constitute censorship for you, then I do wonder what you actually consider censorship.
Many of aforementioned localizations lie from Woolseyisms to borderline Macekres, in terms of quality, atmosphere, and the original intention of the authors. I don't really consider myself a purist when it comes to translation, and I can understand when some facets of a game are changed because a gaijin simply wouldn't understand it, although Fates really seems to take it a little bit too far in some places when it comes to liberties with the translation.
Since you are probably going to play Fates anyways, you might as well tell us
how many of these elements from the Japanese version are still left intact in the Western version. Check it out for yourself what everyone is bitching about first-hand.
Quite frankly it would be better if this thread was renamed to 'the SJW in Gaming thread' or something. GamerGate has already been veering towards that direction for a long time anyways.
In this context, "censorship" is an alarmist buzz word that's only serving to whip up ignorant assholes who are currently making me facepalm with their
Even though radfems have polluted the push of female rights to the point where it has become a meme, that doesn't mean that female inequality isn't an issue in Middle-Eastern regions, for example. Just because someone is beating you to death over something doesn't mean that they have nothing worthwhile to say, it's just that they are doing a really terrible job at trying to tell you something.
horrifically bad youtube comments
what were you even expecting
