I just remembered something from when I played the German version more than ten years ago. The German version was censored and used the "stars" which you see when a human is being attacked/killed also for monsters. What surprised me is that the version provided by GOG is still using "stars" for humans while the method you had to use to uncensor the German version also allowed to activate blood effects for humans. I thought that it would be neat to share that trick with you guys.

All you have to do is this:
1. Go to your Incubation folder ("C:\GOG Games\Battle Isle Platinum\Incubation" by default)
2. Go to the "DATA" subfolder and open the file "user.gcl" via a text editor.
3. Look for the line that says "?_(2);".
4. Replace the "2" with a "3" and save the change.

Now you will also see blood effects when people are attacked and killed characters will be gibbed into chunks of meat when they die.

Of course you can also set the value to 1 if you're totally not into gore effects and want to see the completely blood free version as it was released in Germany.

Thanks. Was wondering about this. :)

Actually the German version was never censored. The blood has been added to the US version, so the US game is in fact enhanced. Something similar happened to Silent Hill, the US version replaced those little enemies from the beginning with zombie children.

It could not be added to the US version since every version of the game that exists does include all the blood effects, it's just that the German version is preset to mode "1" (no blood) and can easily be uncensored via the method described above, without the need to apply some patch or anything. This means that the developers instantly developed an international version which could be easily censored for the German release by changing one parameter (I guess that else they would have risked a USK 18 rating while they ultimately got USK 16). That the game was intended to include blood is further confirmed by the fact that in every version there's pools of blood in the intro sequence.

What's interesting is that (according to schnittberichte.com) no version uses mode "3" (blood for both factions) by default but it can be activated in all versions (it's also true for my Polish version). So to make people not bleed was obviously a creative decision. Yeah, I know, and for some reason the US release lacked one note present in the European and Japanese release which provided additional information about Alessa's background. Also IIRC only the US version of SH1 has a background image on the title screen while the series traditionally used black title screens (up to SH3). Really weird case.