79
Stellar Blade’s uncensored release in Japan prompts criticism of rating system
(automaton-media.com)
this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2024
79 points (97.6% liked)
Games
16822 readers
431 users here now
Video game news oriented community. No NanoUFO is not a bot :)
Posts.
- News oriented content (general reviews, previews or retrospectives allowed).
- Broad discussion posts (preferably not only about a specific game).
- No humor/memes etc..
- No affiliate links
- No advertising.
- No clickbait, editorialized, sensational titles. State the game in question in the title. No all caps.
- No self promotion.
- No duplicate posts, newer post will be deleted unless there is more discussion in one of the posts.
- No politics.
Comments.
- No personal attacks.
- Obey instance rules.
- No low effort comments(one or two words, emoji etc..)
- Please use spoiler tags for spoilers.
My goal is just to have a community where people can go and see what new game news is out for the day and comment on it.
Other communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Did you read the article?
Dead Space was denied a rating entirely, which meant a console release in Japan was impossible.
Basically, Dead Space was rated "unreleaseble" on the CERO scale, while Stellar Blade, which is arguably gorier and sexier, is now getting the greenlight.
Which is a WTF moment.
Idk about stellar blade's content, but CERO is notoriously really touchy with more "macabre" gore (e.g severed body parts, especially heads, bones sticking out, that kind of thing). I suppose stellar blade just has more "acceptable" gore by CERO standards.
Source: I have worked on the Japanese internationalization for 2 Warhammer 40k games. We didn't have to remove that much gore, but there's some specific stuff they will just not budge on.
The article does explicitly state that Stellar Blade features both dismemberment and cuts showing cross-sections of internal organs.
The guidelines we had were mostly about bones iirc, especially if they still had some "meat" on them. I don't remember anything about organs specifically
Actually I remember that one of our unofficial internal guidelines was basically "if resident evil or DMC does it, we should be good". And both of these feature some gore but are usually very light on stuff like bones, (humanoid) decapitations, etc. Again, I assume stellar blade follows similar guidelines as these games regarding this stuff, because Sony (their publisher) obviously knows CERO pretty well
Let me guess Nurgle, Dark Eldar, and some random imperium shit?
The offenders were mostly some of our "generic chaos stuff" (containing, amongst other things, "clean" skulls, "not that clean" skulls, and a sprinkle of gore) and guardsmen or other humans models in various states of dismember and/or decay iirc.
Kinda surprised, Nurgle can be pretty fucken grim. Guess thats why some consider it kinda arbitrary, probably a cultural barrier in there meaning a lot of westerners see it as arbitrary. Probably makes some sense on an internal level.
Well obviously they had to release it if it was sexier.
I tried to use an obnoxious amount of "h" to signal sarcasm. I guess that didn't work 🙃
Are you saying Dead Space does have a sexy lady? Or that CERO is more lenient on gore for games that do?
Japanese media does get weird with the lewd stuff, but the rules and regulations are just as harsh and unbending on the sexual stuff as they are on violence.
I don't have a horse in this race, I was making a joke that the difference in the games appears to come down to one having a sexy Lady and one generally doesn't AFAIK.
I believe Japanese gamers should have just as much access to Dead Space and any other American titles and vise-versa. I imagine the reasoning is along the lines of "video games make people violent" or something, but I think that should be a family or parental decision, not the government.
While I'm at it, I don't think pornographic or pornographic adjacent content should be available to minors, and I cringe at some of the stuff I see on the Nintendo or Playstation stores, that's probabaly my most conservative view.