The problem is that in the game the girl is a lesbian and after she after the "potions" effect wears of she "switches" to being straight just because she had a taste of the man. No matter the culture, that's just messt up.

1. That's not what happens, see links in the first page
2. That's exactly "I don't like this, it shouldn't be there"

As long as it reworks squeaky and creepy stuff that's more appropriate for the culture of origin, I'm fine. Even with ridiculous aging.

I draw the line at the drastic changes to script for the sake of memes.

Maybe they shouldn't have thrown the musket into the corn so early. Sure, a translation might have been hard and not the yellow of the egg, but try makes smart.

In memoriam Heinrich Lübke

More surprisingly is Earthfall, but that's just Nintendo being a massive failure on all things Virtual Console.

Earthfall?

Or whatever the campaign was called to get the Earthbound games onto the Virtual Console.

Here is the thing: If the original content is sufficiently bad, as I believe it is in this case, it will cause enough people to not buy the game (and could easily trigger boycotts) that censoring it is, indeed, the most sound business decision.

If I were in the market for the game and heard about this support conversation, it would actually be bad enough for me to not get the game, and to tell others not to get the game.

Also, could whoever has downrated my posts in this thread please explain why?

Edit: Another point; I wouldn't be surprised if some later Japanese versions of this game end up having this support conversation replaced with something more tame.

What Ted Woolsey used to do for Square = localization. Some departures from the source material, but all in the name of creating something coherent that avoids the awkward word jumbles found in the original Final Fantasy IV translation. Some of the Nintendo-mandated changes, like removing crosses and anything remotely religious, though? Removing something because it might be seen as offensive is censorship, full stop. Take Chrono Trigger. Frog's manner of speaking fit the game despite it not being true to the original, but then there's blatant censorship like the "heaven" element being changed to "lightning."

It gets muddier when you factor in things like Witcher 2 removing Islamic textures in one of the early patches. They weren't being pressured to do so, and the textures were completely irrelevant to the point where most people didn't even notice them, so is removing them more true to the developer's vision for the game or is it censorship? Or both?

No kidding. The stuff in Seisen No Keifu alone could fuel a year's worth of blogger outrage.

The special edition for Fates sold out within like 30 minutes back before the change was announced (but after the initial outrage), so I don't think that's even remotely a factor.

There are many ways that could have been handled. Depending on the target country for the localisation: Pig Latin, Spanish, French, etc. The point would be to choose a language that the majority of the target audience understands and which fits an exchange student situation. Changing the text completely in that context was just laziness. First of all, the original "translation" when that first came to light, was incorrect. It was taking the situation out of context and adding to it to fit the translators bias. Whether that was an intentional mistranslation or not will probably never be admitted to by the person who did that.

But the actual context of the situation was more along the lines of the character asking for someone to help cure their ailment by any means possible. Their ailment being that they faint around cute women to the point that they cannot even fight a battle. For the record, that characters actual sexuality is never clarified. While they faint around cute women, it is never specified whether they are homosexual or bi-sexual. That again, was the assumption of the people bastardizing the original Japanese text.

Now whether you agree or not with the actions of the character that "spiked" her drink with a potential cure or not, has no bearing. Do you think GTA characters should be rewritten because you don't agree with their wanton murder? Changing a character's traits as originally assigned to that character by its designer, should never be acceptable. It's fine to disagree with their actions, and to perhaps hate the character for it. But sterilising the story and removing that character flaw because people disagree with it is not acceptable. Ever.

For the original content to be so bad that enough people (a large majority) might agree to boycott / censor it, it would basically require for it to be literally on the level of "Ethnic Cleaning" (nazi-propaganda game, google at own risk), or otherwise outright illegal, and frankly, at that point neither have the devs any intention to change it, since they intentionally made such a game / movie / etc to begin with, nor do their customers care, given what they just bought.

And in any case that doesn't fall under the above category (hateful propaganda games), having dimwits call for censors actually increases their sales (look GTAV, or Hatred, which sold far more than it would have without people calling for censoring), especially if the devs don't bow / give in. As lots of people who are against censorship will now protest-buy it to offset the almost inexistant loss made by these people and reward the devs / publishers for standing up to them.

Again, YOU. Most sane adults would either not give a fuck about it instead of being a huge drama llama (just one line of text among about 100k to 1M ) or buy something they like instead of forcing others to change things just because "they" don't approve.

And if a friend really told me to not get a game for such a fallacious reason, I'd either laugh in their face and tell them to mind their own business... or ask them if they're alright in the head.

There is a huge difference in proportion between a single line / bad joke and a genocide simulator promoting nazi-culture. Sadly some peope have such issues in their head that they literally need to blow everything out of proportion and can't distinguish between real issues and complete bullshit.

I doubt it. Japan doesn't give a rats ass about offended gaijins (just look at some nice tweets from a known japanese dev about how some whiners can suck his "guess what" ). Japanese companies rarely care about the western market, and instead focus mostly on the domestic one. And rather than censoring something like this, they would rather just not release abroad (at least they know their customers and rather care about their opinion than that of non-buyers... western devs should really start taking example on this)

I agree, Earthbound has examples of both localization and censorship.

Maybe this will be helpful.

You mean Xenoblade Chronicles X? I got that game recently. I'm a little disappointed in that decision, but I do enjoy the music.

Tell me about this stuff.

Also, Ted Woolsey was an amazing man, right up there with Bill Trinen.

Actually, I would imagine that this conversation is bad enough to offend some Japanese people, and therefore happen regardless of what gaijins say.

Consider the case of Final Fantasy 6. In that game, there is a scene where a guard hits a female prisoner (Celes) and knocks her down. When the game was re-released for the GBA, that scene was changed so that the guard does not hit her, but she still falls down. Note that this change applies to all GBA versions (including the Japanese release), and from what I hear, is due to something that happened in Japan around that time.

Final Fantasy 12 was also censored in Japan (for a similar reason). Unlike FF6 Advance, FF12's censorship does not affect the overseas version.