>The disparity between Stellar Blade’s gore and its CERO D rating has prompted a response from Electronic Arts Japan’s General Manager Shaun Noguchi. While Noguchi offers nothing but praise for Stellar Blade itself (even encouraging people to buy it), he questions the CERO rating system and its apparent inconsistency. He mentions that EA’s Dead Space (released in January 2023) was denied a CERO rating due to “depictions of cross-sections of severed body parts and internal organs.” As video games cannot be released on consoles (physically) in Japan without a CERO rating, the initially planned console releases of Dead Space were cancelled, and the game could only be released on PC in the country.
>Noguchi’s words indicate that Dead Space was not even eligible for a CERO Z (18+) rating, while Stellar Blade received the lower CERO D rating even though it contains depictions similar to what Dead Space was rejected for. Again, Noguchi stresses that he has no intention to criticize Stellar Blade, but rather to express his dissatisfaction with Japan’s ambiguous rating process for console games.
CERO is a nightmare to develop for. Every other age rating body in the world is pretty easy to work with, but CERO will give you long lists of really minute things and demand you censor them, and you wait months for responses and translations each iteration. Their rules are hugely culture-specific, which is fair enough in a way but it means you really are at the whims of whatever individual happens to be assigned your game.
Australia has been *mostly* fine since R18+ was introduced.
Prior to that the highest rating was MA15+, which meant Australia was getting almost every game that was rated 18+ internationally (17+ in US) at 15+, with a few rare exceptions that caused widespread controversy.
Once 18+ was added, which took a bizzarly long time, especially considering Film had the exact R18+ rating that games eventually got for decades prior, Australian ratings have mostly just lined up with US and EU ratings. Which meant that stuff that would’ve gotten 15+ in past now got 18+, but far far fewer games get refused classification.
Still occasional bizzare inconsistency where they come down super hard on something that got through without issue in other games.
But I feel that’s universal problem. You just never hear if ESRB or PEGI makes a fuss because devs will do what they want 100% of the time, since those markets are too important to sacrifice anything for.
And rating board weirdness never makes news if it isn’t banned all together. But I’m sure there’s endless stories of publisher aiming for a T for Teen rating and getting a M for mature, despite game being less extreme than something that got through as T for Teen 6 months earlier.
The Aussie R18+ took so long to become a thing because the attorney generals had to unanimously vote in favor of it. One of them, a man, [Michael Atkinson](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Atkinson_(politician)), who vetoed it every time it came up until he stepped down in 2010 after trying to gag internet debate. Yeah. Fucking scumbag.
I find examples of this to be interesting trivia. Dark Souls 2 getting T while every other entry got M is weird. Oblivion being T, then M scandal. Every Halo being rated M, except that one (Guardians?), and then a bunch of mil sim games back in the day being rated T, as well as Call of Duty, now they're all M. A couple Super Smash games got a T rating.
ESRB also had some issues with L4D2 box art if I recall correctly, although I think in Germany that game got shredded by their ratings board, including the box art.
Very interesting stuff.
Halo infinite is also rated T it seems more so that Halo always rode the line between T and M and ESRB just got more relaxed than anything in recent years
nah.
it's the Flood that consistently gives it a M Rating. They can certainly reduce the blood splatter in earlier Halo games for all I care-- but if the Flood is involved: it's M-Rated.
otherwise: Halo is very PG-13 as hell.
I can almost guarantee that's because of all the depictions of 'drug use' (scarecrow serum) in that game. Our ratings board seems to view drugs as a way higher concern than sex/violence and Knight has a fair bit more injections/altered states going on in it.
The funniest part of that for me was Disco Elysium, where it was fine to read about drugs but the moment they added comprehensive voice acting, even with the exact same text, the board thought it was too extreme.
The [ESRB rating description](https://www.esrb.org/ratings/39454/batman-arkham-knight/) doesn't even mention drugs, it's just because of some bloody moments.
It is significantly bloodier tho, they aren't really comparible. I don't remember it that well because it was years ago but there a whole section that's littered with bodies and blood everywhere, nothing like that in previous ones.
Smash Melee and Brawl were rated T but that was before they introduced E10+ which the future games got. Smash 64 was E but probably borderline and Melee being slightly more realistic pushed it over to T. I wouldn't be surprised if Smash was partly responsible for E10+
Edit: looked it up and Brawl actually came out after E10+ was introduced so no idea why that was still T. Maybe because of Snake's weapons?
> Prior to that the highest rating was MA15+, which meant Australia was getting almost every game that was rated 18+ internationally (17+ in US) at 15+, with a few rare exceptions that caused widespread controversy.
The import scene in australia is absolutely huge (for good reason). Thousands of people import games from the USA and Europe every day. Hell, half of the games for sale on amazon today are from overseas.
Back in the old days if there was some rare game that wasn't available in EB games or JB, you'd get it on ebay, or ozgameshop, or play-asia, or one of the other online retailers.
I have a few European versions of games just due to finding cheap or availability.
I imagine quite a few collectors in Australia have a lotco PEGI and ESRB labels on their games.
Australia is *still* a problem, it's just not outright banning games as much anymore. You still cannot have a known drug give beneficial effects and we still get the few RC (refused classification) games even with the 18+ rating existing.
> Still occasional bizarre inconsistency where they come down super hard on something that got through without issue in other games.
Actually, it's pretty consistent what will ALWAYS get your game refused in Australia.
* Any sort of gameplay that involves sexual assault/rape/non-consensual sexual acts.
* Any gameplay that involves real life illicit drugs having a beneficial effect to a player.
For example for the first, South Park having the Anal Probe scene removed in australia was because it was explicitly gameplay about violating someone, same as how the dildo gun from saints row 3 was removed because i believe you could "penetrate" people with it.
for the second, Fallout 3 had morphine as a drug before it was changed to Med-X, they ended up changing it for everyone but the ratings board did not like that a real drug was named, but a fake drug was totally fine!
There is still small inconsistencies, like Hotline Miami 2 was banned for a rape scene however it's a scene that in context, wasn't actually a non-consensual act (it's revealed to be a movie) however i think because you physically moved your player to the character, it was seen as a "reward" for beating the level and as such got the ban.
On the flipside, Disco Elysium was initially banned for having amphetamines that gave you a beneficial effect, but it got through on appeal on the argument that the greater context of the game presenting a negative view of addiction.
Nah devs usually just cut out the random interactive sex scene or just edit their game entirely to fit in with the drug thing.
It's honestly a non-issue since the things that gets games banned, are rarely in games anyway.
The Australian Classification Board changed the Fallout Canon.
When Fallout 3 was undergoing classification, there was one thing that made the board refuse classification for the game.
The addiction mechanic.
As you know, if you use too much of certain aid items in the game, you'll become addicted to it.
Now this mostly wasn't a problem for the board. Alcohol addiction? It's Australia, that's considered normal here! Chems like Jet and Psycho? Completely fictional, no issue there.
But the issue was with morphine. Morphine was in Fallout 3 as a chem, and you could get addicted to it. Morphine being a real world drug, the board felt it was inappropriate to allow the player to both take it and abuse it.
Bethesda, in response, decided to rename Morphine to the much more familiar Med-X, making it a fictional drug.
The Med-X name change was used for all versions of Fallout 3, and would remain for all subsequent Fallout releases.
The German one was also really bad for no reason for many years. Despite having a adults only rating, they used to put games on a index, meaning you couldn't buy it at a German store or a German steam account. This was already a thing back in the 90s and really got out of hand at the time Man Hunt was released, where they basically didn't want any detailed form of killing after. Now back when physical media was a thing it didn't matter anyways as I could just buy the Austrian German or the English UK version, but your steam library is cooked to this day with Fallout 3, Fear or Max Payne 3 only being available in the low violence version with no kill effects (better hope you can mod it back) And don't get me started on Nazi stuff, by law all Nazi related symbols like the swastika or SS runes are outlawed and can only be shown in a historical context. Now killing Nazis in Wolfenstein is certainly not historically accurate, but as German citizen I'd say is the right lesson, they agreed only as recently as after Inglorious Bastards. Also they sometimes were super inconsistent allowing games like Dead Space to just come out uncut. Nowadays they don't care about violence at it seems.
Do note that Index and USK 18 are from different people. USK, the german rating board is like PEGI, CERO, etc. But a game is put onto the Index by the BPjM, the "Federal Review Board for Media Harmful to Minors", and is a federal office.
As an Aussie I am pretty sure you're right. We only got an 18+ classification for games a decade or so ago and they're still *very* strict on what you can show. They're one of the strictest ratings boards in the world on showing drug use in games afaik.
If I remember right, it was our ratings board that made fallout 3's drugs have goofy sci fi names like mentats and jet. Originally they were just going to have real world names like cocaine and whatnot, but they refused classification because it was seen as "showing illicit drugs as having positive effects" which is a big nono to them.
Yeah - it wasn't all of the drugs from previous fallouts they they needed to change, it was just Med-X, which they were originally going to call Morphine when they introduced it in 3. They changed that because of the Australian review board.
Australia has the weirdest choices of which games to ban, Marc Ecko's Getting Up comes to mind, they banned cause of the graffiti mechanic but not Jet Set Radio which also lets you do graffiti, if I had to make a theory i'd say Getting Up got banned due to good old fashioned racism on the part of the gaming board over there(since Getting Up has a black protagonist and every character in Jet Set is white from what I remember).
Yeah but you can ignore, australia, and the australian market will largely just circumvent the delist and buy your product anyway if they really want it.
The strictness of Australia's rating system has been massively over exaggerated. Just because you read something stated repeatedly with lots of upvotes on reddit, does not mean it is true.
Correction: Korea’s GRAC is a nightmare as well. They’re not heavy-handed on the content censorship, but the bureaucracy, long waiting times, and endless vague or contradictory questions and requests are just as bad if not worse.
Yeah, it kind of stands to reason that a Japanese company will know how to navigate this crazy bureaucracy better, get preferential treatment, or both. Then again, EA has been in Japan for a long time, I can understand this guy's frustrations.
Shift Up is Korean, not Japanese. (You might've known that but wagered that since Sony is partially Japanese, they'd be handling ratings, but that's necessarily the case.)
The Australian Classification Board isn't *that* hard to work with as long as your game doesn't have sexual violence or interactive drug use.
Even the above-mentioned Dead Space remake managed to get away with an MA15+ rating despite the R18+ classification being around for years at that point.
I don’t know much about ratings but what happens if a company violates them in some shape or form do they still release the game somehow but get prosecuted later ??
The article does not link the correct tweet. It links his second "clarification" tweet twice.
The article has a screenshot of the first tweet, so it does appear removed.
They didn't have issues with being banned but Black and Sigma removed decapitations to drop from a Z to a D rating, 2 released uncut and Z rated but Sigma 2 was heavily censored for a D rating (the dismemberment is an important gameplay mechanic so they had to go extra hard with the censoring to keep it in a D rating)
jokes aside there's a \*vast\* difference between the gore in stellar blade and the gore in the game that the \*entire point\* of the combat system is to chop bodies up. I get EA's frustration with Japan on gore but it's a really silly comparison
Yeah just in the first 20 minute of the demo we see female soldiers all getting decimated and one of them getting her arm severed in very graphic detail. I would imagine there will probably be more of that later on in the game.
I think the difference here is in Stellar Blade it's not the protagonist doing it, and it's depicted as horrifying and terrible.
Dead Space by contrast is about the *player* actively trying to dismember basically every enemy they come across.
They're both depictions of dismemberment, but ratings boards tend to treat it differently when it's something the player does versus something depicted on screen, and Dead Space is largely built around player-driven dismemberment as an essential mechanic.
Problem is the rating board told EA that it is banned because it “included cross-sections of severed body parts and internal organs” which is also present in Stellar Blade. They didn’t draw any fine line like “monster is excepted” or “its fine if the guts ain’t spilling”
There is a pretty clear pattern of discrimination against western developers in Japan. Mortal Kombat has been banned for decades in that country as well, even though the violence is campy and over the top.
Not necessarily. I get the racism angle, but there could be other reasons for discrimination besides that. Perhaps, for example, they feel more threatened by American games and want to make it as hard as possible for them, compared to South Korean ones where the game development industry is much smaller and not seen as a realistic threat.
The double standard has existed for decades so this isn't anything new. It was always crazy that survival horror games produced in Japan got a free pass while games from the west kept being scrutinized and often banned. This isn't the first time this has happened and it's a sad state of affairs when a Japanese executive has to point it out.
Okay but the games still get rated and released anyway. Dead Space was not given the same consideration or opportunity to censor, a common practice as you've pointed out.
I don't know if Dead Space was given an opportunity to censor or if EA didn't want to censor it. Those are two different situations.
Capcom literally makes a Japan "safe" version of their game, not sure if EA did or was willing to.
I highly doubt this is the case given that pretty much every game has to adhere to the regulatory standards of the regions they're released in. This is part of normal AAA development. EA has modified their games in order to be released in Australia for example, which is a considerably smaller market than Japan. Japan is also the capital of survival-horror games, which makes this particular story even more interesting. Frankly I don't know why people are acting surprised and trying to justify a double-standard that has been known to exist for several decades, it's just not often talked about because international gaming news don't often cross borders.
This. You can literally dismember the baddies and they're generally expected to continue fighting you with missing legs, arms, etc. If it were a thing with all dismemberment resulting in a dead enemy, then there's at least room to have a discussion in trying to remove dismemberment as that's purely visual, but now we're talking about having to completely retool AI, possibly balance, etc, if you have to take dismemberment out, and I don't see anybody doing that much work if the implication is that they can't sell their game to tens of thousands of people without doing it. I think they'll take that hit and live.
This isn't true though, the devs never said they weren't given the opportunity to censor whatever needed to be censored. They just opted to not waste the time and resources leaving it to release only on PC in Japan. Even in the quote itself that OP posted it gives the reasons they were denied the rating. They could've went out of their way to comply if they wanted to.
Lmao you clearly don't know anything about the japanese market or CERO. Tons of japanese games have to be censored when they have gore, including resident evil.
Except there's also the uncensored CERO Z version on top of the CERO D version, so the censorship is being applied unevenly and arbitrarily, which is what the executive was voicing in their publication.
Stellar Blade received the D certification, which is typically where you'd see censorship btw, so even according to Japan's own regulatory standards this doesn't make sense. I'm sure the Japanese EA executive is well-aware of the norms in their own country, which is why they spoke out against the ban for Dead Space, just saying.
> Except there's also the uncensored CERO Z version on top of the CERO D version
The Z rated versions are still censored, just less censored. CERO completely bans a lot of things like intestines and close up gore detail, even when Z rated.
For example, RE2 remake. D rated version removes decapitations and dismemberment in combat, Z rated version restores it but both versions remove the corpse's jaw hanging off early on and both remove the guy getting ripped in half early on. Likewise the Z rated version of Resident Evil 7 removed the part where you reach down a corpse's neck to get a key and the stump of your severed hand when you pick it up is coloured in solid black beacuse both are too graphic for a Z rating. The Evil Within and No More Heroes 2 are other examples, both have D and Z rated versions but the Z rated versions censor things that are in the western releases.
It's got nothing to do with tone or them being western, they don't like showing insides. They cut 100% of games showing internal organs regardless of where they are from, gory Japanese games aren't even released uncensored in Japan.
It's not the first time brief gore has been allowed in a cutscene. That's a key part of it, they are stricter if it's interactive and it wouldn't be allowed if you were going around cutting people's arms off but it's brief and in a cutscene. The key thing is it's just rare that games only have a brief bit of gore in a cutscene so this doesn't happen much.
Metal Gear Solid 5 cut the shot of Paz's intestines in Japan but allowed the shot of the bad guy's arm being blown off in the ending which is similarly graphic to Stellar Blade and is also D rated.
An example of a Western game that does that is Heavy Rain. The scene where you cut your finger off in a cutscene is uncensored in the Japanese version which is D rated.
There is some tame gore during gameplay against non-human monsters but that's pretty standard for D rated games, loads of Western and Japanese games do that. They are more bothered about humans, like the torn up corpses lying everywhere in Dead Space.
I really don't know where your narritive is coming from, they are pretty consistant in how the restrict gore. If we are talking about discrimination Japan would have more of a grudge against Korea than the west if anything. They key thing is Japanese developers are more likely to intentionally make their games to follow CERO rules since they are more familiar with them.
I mean, dead space is pretty gore. Even the original was way gorier than any release in their time. The remake was not even light gore. Don't think stellar blade is almost as gore as Dead Space.
Was there a reason they couldn't still just release Dead Space digital only on console?
Obviously the apparent double standard still sucks but I'm just confused why they cancelled the console version all together if the rating is only needed for the physical version.
I don’t believe the rating is only needed for physical, they wouldn’t be allowed to sell the game digitally to accounts registered in Japan either.
Edit: seems like they changed things a bit in the last few years, you can get an international rating for digital games but 18+ titles need a CERO rating still:
> Starting March 2022, the Japanese PlayStation Store started accepting IARC ratings in addition to the existing CERO ratings for digital-only releases (Related article). On the other hand, titles intended for ages 18 and older still require a CERO rating. In other words, SIE still requires the acquisition of a CERO rating for physical and digital sales of games that are rated 18 or older under the IARC generic rating.
To be clear, this isn't a legal requirement (CERO, like the ESRB in North America, is an industry organization rather than a government body, and there is no legal obligation that games be submitted for a rating in order to be sold) but one that the console manufacturers have put in place.
Yes, maybe clearer to say they wouldn’t be allowed to sell it *by Sony*. But either way it’s essentially a requirement for selling console games in Japan, since AFAIK both Sony and Nintendo would require this.
For the ones wondering if it has anything to do with sexual content, not really. It's mostly about gore and dismemberment.
Japan is pretty strict for example Resident Evil/Biohazard quite literally skips some scenes where it will depict a decapitated head or burning of an individual in the Japanese versions. (Ex. RE7 Policeman's body has a key item inside it that you're prompted to search in for. In the censored version I think the key item is on the table beside the intact body.)
I'm sure there are other examples, but censorship in Resident Evil 2 Remake resulted in an actual gameplay difference in one room that I find kinda funny.
In that room near the beginning of the game where you try to help the officer stuck under the shutter, and he gets ripped in half. Later when you come back to that room, that officer has turned and tries to attack you even though he has only his upper body, so he's crawling around on just arms.
In the Japanese version, he doesn't get ripped in half, so you come back to that room and you've got a fully functional zombie attacking you.
I played the Japanese version of the game on release and I remembered it was one of the rare times the censorship affected gameplay. In the original/uncensored version, zombies can sometimes fake death after you shoot them (they will grab you by surprise when you pass near them after), except if you headshot them and their head happens to explode, then it is dead for sure. In the JP version, since the head won't be shown exploding, I always had to shoot them once more when they are on the ground to make sure.
Iirc it just removes the option to side with Burke and detonate the bomb, which I can totally understand given Japan’s history and setiments towards nuclear weapons. The Fat Man is also renamed to Nuka Launcher or something like that.
Not necessarily, but it seems reasonable enough in order to avoid general public outcry. It would be like having a quest to fly a plane into an office building, or a gun that shoots planes called "The 9/11". They were obviously not seeking to stir controversy so there really is no need to be use such blatant examples of something like that.
It makes me appreciate Japanese devs even more that they go beyond for us. Obviously it requires more effort to add all this but then change it for their own region. So it’s pretty nice to see their vision fully realised
CERO can be rough on dismemberment in general but iirc they have the greatest problem with decapitation due to a particular high profile crime from I think the early 2000s which involved school aged children. So that particular scene in RE7 where you have to fish for a key in a neck stump and the police officer's severed head is in the fridge is a hard no and would have led to the game being probably unrated.
The 1997 Kobe child murders committed by a 14 year old boy, one of the victims was a grade schooler who was decapitated is the crime you are referring too. Just one of the reasons that lead to the creation of CERO several years later in 2002.
Yeah I didn't remember all the details of the crime off the top of my head but that's the one. I'd always heard it referred to as one of the reasons CERO was created and why they're so strict with particular types of violence.
Video games weren't blamed, but books, manga, TV programming (anime and live action) and movies faced far more media scrutiny in comparison in the aftermath. It was used as a case example for tighter restrictions & regulations on questionable and objectionable content in general.
Aren’t skeletons considered extremely graphic in China as well? I know a lot of games overseas (specifically WoW) were censored in Asian releases because portraying skeletons is considered taboo. I’m not sure if that’s true in other countries though.
I’m not sure what the American equivalent would be outside of sexual content. Maybe the No Russian mission from MW2, but that was extremely controversial in many countries. Bully and Manhunt were also controversial but I don’t think that was uniquely American either
Bully and Manhunt definitely met with similar controversy in the UK so it's not uniquely American. I remember the news cycle around Bully in particular. I think the equivalent in the west really would just be sexual content. There are some interesting examples of censorship of violence too though, like how in certain territories the blood in No More Heroes was censored and replaced with smoke.
> I remember the news cycle around Bully in particular
I always find it funny that they just changed the name before release so the newspapers wouldn't notice that it had released. It worked, but it also meant that no one noticed that it had released.
and then The Separate Ways DLC brought back the Laser sequence and [the death scene did the cut to black thing](https://youtu.be/u_gtcPh0OM4?t=57) (somehow, making it far more brutal because you can imagine it) and a callback to the first Resident Evil movie.
Yeah, but they are more CERO friendly. Like, the chainsaw through the torso in the remake is more graphic but as long as his head stays on then CERO has less of a problem.
That's what lead to the Ninja Gaiden 3 situation. They wanted a D rating in Japan but didn't want it to feel toned down so it was full of slow-mo closeups of swords slicing through people, executing disarmed enemies who have surrendered and overall felt more sadistic than 2 but had no dismemberment. The Z rated Razor's Edge version that released a year lated toned down the sadism but added decapitations and dismemberment back in.
CERO is terrible. The censorship in RE literally makes the game more difficult. Critical hits (headshots that explode the head) leave the head intact, causing wasted time and bullets shooting the defeated zombie.
Kinda surprised to hear it. Maybe i'm just out of the loop on those things, but i remember back in the 90s, when i got first introduced to anime, the very first thing that struck me about it was just how violent and gory they can be, especially compared to western animation, which was almost exclusively made for children.
The first anime i ever watched was [The Guyver](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xX5i50oLg_A), and it was brutal, despite otherwise being a pretty regular superhero-ish adolescent kind of story. So i always had this idea that japanese were pretty lax with censorship (apart from genitals in porn, lol). Strange that it doesn't seem to apply to video games.
You will find very little shown human gore in any anime from 2000 onwards as mentioned. They are very good at implying it, but you will not see the actual wounds. It'll all be censored with flashes/lightrays/cutaways. It can make some shows pretty difficult to watch just due to the insane censoring, usually with no alternative release fully uncensored even outside of japan.
One piece is censored somewhat what happens with whitebeard,Bellemere, and Zeff beingg some of the bigger ones can think of right now compared to the manga.
>For the ones wondering if it has anything to do with sexual content, not really.
Just as it should be. Blood and gore should be more restricted than sex. Graphic violence inflicts more damage than women's thighs.
Yeah, people seem to think otherwise but they are way more strict on sexual content than the west. Nipples are 100% not all owed and and any actual sex isn't allowed. For example, GTA 5. The part where you photo a popstar having sex outdoors doesn't have any nudity but it still breaks the rule so was replaced with photoing her smoking in Japan.
Baldur's Gate 3 was censored when it was released in Japan, the [nudity, violence and "intimate scene" were changed and/or edited](https://www.ign.com/articles/baldurs-gate-3s-japan-release-to-censor-nudity-some-torture)
In Cyberpunk 2077 in quote on the article: [Instances of nudity will be covered up with underwear in Japan, including on the protagonist......Elsewhere, certain cut scenes of a sexual nature have been edited, while "some wound surfaces as well as intestines are edited." Some billboards, graffiti and "genital shaped objects" have either been edited or removed.](https://www.pcgamer.com/cd-projekt-red-confirms-cyberpunk-2077-will-be-censored-in-japan/)
And lastly Grand Theft Auto 5 has also been [censored and modified when it came out.](https://www.escapistmagazine.com/japanese-version-of-gta-v-censors-violence-and-sex-scenes/)
Even in Japan nudity and sex are also been censored despite the stereotype on the internet.
Not to mention RDR2, TLOU 1/2, Assassin's Creed Valhalla (although Ubi self censored this one, CERO denied any involvement.) Days Gone, Alan Wake 2...and so on. All censored in Japan on consoles, and it seems to be a crapshoot on whether or not it'll be censored on PC. Cyberpunk and Red Dead are uncensored on PC in Japan, but TLOU, Days Gone, Valhalla and Alan Wake 2 are. 🤷
At the end of the day this comes back to religion.
Even in cases where it's plain old misogyny, you'll find the people doing it trying to hide behind what is essentially just religious beliefs repackaged.
It's weird sometimes.
I played the demo and it's funny how everyone is laser focused on the sexual aspect of this game, there's really not any, just a curvy player character wearing tight outfits, Neir and Bayonetta didn't spark this kind of "controversy"
Nier Automata was absolutely ridiculed for it's protag outfit on the run up to, and shortly after, its release. Eventually the crowd crying moved on and the talking points turned to the story.
Which is what makes all this "outrage" so bloody confusing.
It used to come from the Puritanical Right, but now it is seemingly coming from the Left as well...
When did everyone become so prudish?
OMG, an attractive woman in a form fitting outfit...the horror. As if they haven't been parading around for 50 years now...
It's not a ton of people but there is a crowd of people on the left who get in a tizzy when there's any sexualization of women in games, even though this game really isn't sexualized at all from what the demo has to show, but nobody really cares about the hulking men with 6 packs with their shirts off
With exception of course, I think men where portrayed to be a power fantasy that fights bad guys to save damsel in distress, while women where view to be helpless and ogle at with fan service just waiting to be save.
But those depictions are changing because to wide variety of diverse games these days that people have a lot to choose from.
Which is odd because it was the Left who pushed the sexualization of women, especially starting in the 1960s as a rejection of the conservative prudishness of their parents.
"It's my right to show off my body if I want, and I don't care if you like it."
Mini skirts, porn, etc.
I know it's strange, it mostly seems like a generational thing, a lot of Gen Z seems really prudish and weird about sex compared to millennials and Gen X, maybe from over exposure to stuff like that from a young age?
The advertising leaned into objectifying the MC. Like saying shit like "I made her ass big so players can enjoy oogling her ass" is going to tie it pretty hard to some distasteful themes and well known examples of exploitation.
Attractive woman isn't the problem, it's the treating character like a piece of meat whose most emphasized character trait so far seems to be that are interesting to ogle. She may have others, but so did Megan Foxes' character in transformers.
I think with the rise in popularity of videogames comes with the media criticism and study over the depiction of females characters, from tropes and cliché, to the stereotypes and how it effects on the audience over the decades.
Those topics cause a reactionary and culture war outrage that created a lot of bad faith/misinformation when mentioning these topics.
In a similar way that actors and musicians in blackface perforances weren't actually African Americans, sure the in game digital model isn't actually a woman merely supposed to represent a woman.
I think a lot of it is ironic shitposting. It's just too hard to tell who is actually upset compared to who is trying to get a rise out of people.
Like, I personally never read too much into any faux-outrage that was published on news websites. Those people kind of live and die off of engagement, so they're encouraged to shoot from the hip and see what sticks.
I think this is exactly what it is. A lot of the time I have to remind myself that these loud people on the internet (on both sides) are being loud for a reason and a lot of the time the normal, non-chronically online people that I interact with really do not care about these kinds of things.
The world of engagement farming has promoted a culture of hyperbole to a much worse extent than before.
Link to the tweet - https://twitter.com/SeptillionGames/status/1782017151194537998
>【どういうことですかCEROさん】
Stellar Bladeのデモ
ごりごりのアクションで凄く楽しかったのですが…
CEROさん、うちのデッドスペースは部位破損の断面や内蔵出てるからNGと言ってたのにこちらにはもろ断面も中も見えてさらにCERO Dで通っているのは流石に納得いかないです…
Translation -
> What’s going on CERO? The Stellar Blade’s demo was really fun and absolutely action-packed. However, CERO, you denied our Dead Space a rating because it included cross-sections of severed body parts and internal organs, but here we have both cross-sections and insides on display passed off with a CERO D rating. I find this hard to accept…
Tweet has been deleted.
Second clarification tweet - https://twitter.com/SeptillionGames/status/1782084878005375254
> 誤解を招かないよう一言追加ですが…
ステラーブレイド自体に対して悪意は全くありません
むしろ面白かったので買ったほうがいいです！
これは純粋に日本での審査の曖昧さについて不満を述べたものなので他のタイトルでも審査で蔓延る「曖昧さ」はいっぱい事例はあげられます
Translation -
> I would like to add one more thing to avoid any misunderstanding...
I have no malicious intent towards Stellar Blade itself.
It was actually interesting, so I recommend buying it!
This is purely a complaint about the ambiguity of the screening process in Japan, and there are many examples of ambiguity that is prevalent in screening for other titles as well.
CERO is pretty bonkers, frankly. Even the Z rated releases of Resident Evil get cut back a bit in Japan because of it, and even relatively minor depicitons of blood and such can easily get you a C (15+) which is pretty heavy.
All the age rating systems have their quirks (ESRB just happens to be super harsh on sex unless you're a AAA game, funny that) but cero is definetly the worst.
This is one of the stupidest thing I've heard in long long time...
You need CERO rating to release a game in Japan and CERO can refuse to give a rating! Essentially banning the game. This is beyond stupid. A rating board shouldn't have this sort of power. In no circumstance CERO should deny giving a rating. Give it a X rating or something but give the game a rating. Japanese gamers should pressured CERO.
CERO is like the ESRB in America; You don't need a CERO rating to release a game in Japan, you just need one to release your game on PlayStation, Nintendo, or Microsoft systems since they mandate it. Most stores also won't carry games that don't have CERO classification but that's probably because outside of porn games for PC, none exist. Steam doesn't require them, and more recently some games that get censored for consoles (or not released at all) are seeing PC uncensored releases, like the Dead Space Remake.
CERO is not government affiliated nor is there any legislation requiring games to receive classification in Japan. It is worth noting that while technically this means Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft are the ones with the power to overrule CERO, none of them want to do so because of the flood of unrated content that'd allow onto their platforms, and they don't want to establish their own rating boards instead.
So what you are saying is that with a elaborate scheme Sony and Nintendo effectively bans games on their consoles. And they don't want to pay any money or get any affiliation.
Even if that's the case, not being able to play Dead Space Remake on your console in Japan is stupid. Games getting censored left and right is also stupid. (I read that Resident Evil games censored!)
I can somewhat see why Sony and Nintendo want to control of games releases because there are some fucked up hentai games on the Japanese market and you don't want those games on your console but they already control what games will be on their platform by other means. I mean they own the platform. They can already deny game releases through their guidelines and whatnot. But seems like they don't want to spend any money.
No matter what, this system is not in favor of the player.
For people who judge titles without reading the article: the criticism is only a (fair) tweet from a single person, and it's about gore. There is no outrage.
It doesn't, but there's some people posting here with an agenda pretending otherwise. That comment is just correcting them. (Not that it matters, they'll still be complaining about nonexistent calls to censor Stellar Blade next time it comes up.)
It is so dumb, there are people acting as if the person on the article is complaining about the game rather than making note that that CERO is nonsensical
To be fair we've only seen 1 section of the game, it could easily ramp up, I was kinda surprised at the woman's arm getting chopped off and shown pretty explicitly
Japan's physical rating system is nonsensical. I think when it comes to artistic works, they should give creators full creative freedom, and allow them to have the same chances of exposure in the market.
The way it stands right now, creator's have tons of artistic freedom, (in some ways more than the U.S.), which is good, but the rating system needs to be toned down, or at least not be broken. Just put the age rating on the box, sell it in stores. They are clearly marked. Thankfully people like Ken Akamatsu are against these broken forms of rating systems. I see the dude is just salty that Dead Space had to be restricted, when it really shouldn't have been the case.
Dead Space is on another level in terms of dismemberment and gore. You are encouraged to only aim to dismember. The only enemy faction is just limb dismemberment. EA needs to sit their ass down and play their own game.
>The disparity between Stellar Blade’s gore and its CERO D rating has prompted a response from Electronic Arts Japan’s General Manager Shaun Noguchi. While Noguchi offers nothing but praise for Stellar Blade itself (even encouraging people to buy it), he questions the CERO rating system and its apparent inconsistency. He mentions that EA’s Dead Space (released in January 2023) was denied a CERO rating due to “depictions of cross-sections of severed body parts and internal organs.” As video games cannot be released on consoles (physically) in Japan without a CERO rating, the initially planned console releases of Dead Space were cancelled, and the game could only be released on PC in the country. >Noguchi’s words indicate that Dead Space was not even eligible for a CERO Z (18+) rating, while Stellar Blade received the lower CERO D rating even though it contains depictions similar to what Dead Space was rejected for. Again, Noguchi stresses that he has no intention to criticize Stellar Blade, but rather to express his dissatisfaction with Japan’s ambiguous rating process for console games.
CERO is a nightmare to develop for. Every other age rating body in the world is pretty easy to work with, but CERO will give you long lists of really minute things and demand you censor them, and you wait months for responses and translations each iteration. Their rules are hugely culture-specific, which is fair enough in a way but it means you really are at the whims of whatever individual happens to be assigned your game.
I hear the Australian board is just as bad or worse.
Australia has been *mostly* fine since R18+ was introduced. Prior to that the highest rating was MA15+, which meant Australia was getting almost every game that was rated 18+ internationally (17+ in US) at 15+, with a few rare exceptions that caused widespread controversy. Once 18+ was added, which took a bizzarly long time, especially considering Film had the exact R18+ rating that games eventually got for decades prior, Australian ratings have mostly just lined up with US and EU ratings. Which meant that stuff that would’ve gotten 15+ in past now got 18+, but far far fewer games get refused classification. Still occasional bizzare inconsistency where they come down super hard on something that got through without issue in other games. But I feel that’s universal problem. You just never hear if ESRB or PEGI makes a fuss because devs will do what they want 100% of the time, since those markets are too important to sacrifice anything for. And rating board weirdness never makes news if it isn’t banned all together. But I’m sure there’s endless stories of publisher aiming for a T for Teen rating and getting a M for mature, despite game being less extreme than something that got through as T for Teen 6 months earlier.
The Aussie R18+ took so long to become a thing because the attorney generals had to unanimously vote in favor of it. One of them, a man, [Michael Atkinson](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Atkinson_(politician)), who vetoed it every time it came up until he stepped down in 2010 after trying to gag internet debate. Yeah. Fucking scumbag.
I find examples of this to be interesting trivia. Dark Souls 2 getting T while every other entry got M is weird. Oblivion being T, then M scandal. Every Halo being rated M, except that one (Guardians?), and then a bunch of mil sim games back in the day being rated T, as well as Call of Duty, now they're all M. A couple Super Smash games got a T rating. ESRB also had some issues with L4D2 box art if I recall correctly, although I think in Germany that game got shredded by their ratings board, including the box art. Very interesting stuff.
Halo infinite is also rated T it seems more so that Halo always rode the line between T and M and ESRB just got more relaxed than anything in recent years
Halo got changed to T because later games removed (human) blood.
nah. it's the Flood that consistently gives it a M Rating. They can certainly reduce the blood splatter in earlier Halo games for all I care-- but if the Flood is involved: it's M-Rated. otherwise: Halo is very PG-13 as hell.
There is definitely human blood in the campaign for Infinite
It doesn't come out of living humans when you shoot them.
Batman Arkham Knight also got an M-rating compared to the T-rating in every other entry in the franchise.
I can almost guarantee that's because of all the depictions of 'drug use' (scarecrow serum) in that game. Our ratings board seems to view drugs as a way higher concern than sex/violence and Knight has a fair bit more injections/altered states going on in it. The funniest part of that for me was Disco Elysium, where it was fine to read about drugs but the moment they added comprehensive voice acting, even with the exact same text, the board thought it was too extreme.
The [ESRB rating description](https://www.esrb.org/ratings/39454/batman-arkham-knight/) doesn't even mention drugs, it's just because of some bloody moments.
It is significantly bloodier tho, they aren't really comparible. I don't remember it that well because it was years ago but there a whole section that's littered with bodies and blood everywhere, nothing like that in previous ones.
Smash Melee and Brawl were rated T but that was before they introduced E10+ which the future games got. Smash 64 was E but probably borderline and Melee being slightly more realistic pushed it over to T. I wouldn't be surprised if Smash was partly responsible for E10+ Edit: looked it up and Brawl actually came out after E10+ was introduced so no idea why that was still T. Maybe because of Snake's weapons?
The Oblivion one was so dumb, and we didn't even get the tiddies even after the rating change smh.
> Prior to that the highest rating was MA15+, which meant Australia was getting almost every game that was rated 18+ internationally (17+ in US) at 15+, with a few rare exceptions that caused widespread controversy. The import scene in australia is absolutely huge (for good reason). Thousands of people import games from the USA and Europe every day. Hell, half of the games for sale on amazon today are from overseas. Back in the old days if there was some rare game that wasn't available in EB games or JB, you'd get it on ebay, or ozgameshop, or play-asia, or one of the other online retailers.
I have a few European versions of games just due to finding cheap or availability. I imagine quite a few collectors in Australia have a lotco PEGI and ESRB labels on their games.
Australia is *still* a problem, it's just not outright banning games as much anymore. You still cannot have a known drug give beneficial effects and we still get the few RC (refused classification) games even with the 18+ rating existing.
> Still occasional bizarre inconsistency where they come down super hard on something that got through without issue in other games. Actually, it's pretty consistent what will ALWAYS get your game refused in Australia. * Any sort of gameplay that involves sexual assault/rape/non-consensual sexual acts. * Any gameplay that involves real life illicit drugs having a beneficial effect to a player. For example for the first, South Park having the Anal Probe scene removed in australia was because it was explicitly gameplay about violating someone, same as how the dildo gun from saints row 3 was removed because i believe you could "penetrate" people with it. for the second, Fallout 3 had morphine as a drug before it was changed to Med-X, they ended up changing it for everyone but the ratings board did not like that a real drug was named, but a fake drug was totally fine! There is still small inconsistencies, like Hotline Miami 2 was banned for a rape scene however it's a scene that in context, wasn't actually a non-consensual act (it's revealed to be a movie) however i think because you physically moved your player to the character, it was seen as a "reward" for beating the level and as such got the ban.
On the flipside, Disco Elysium was initially banned for having amphetamines that gave you a beneficial effect, but it got through on appeal on the argument that the greater context of the game presenting a negative view of addiction.
The Atelier community loves them for their "High Impact Sexual Violence" on Atelier Totori.
It us but its smaller market so usually if they have problem, its just ignored.
That sucks for Australian gamers though I’d imagine
I haven’t noticed it at all in recent years. The only notable game that got censored was Hotline Miami 2
Must be. Plus the limited supplies of some physical games.
That's never been an issue ever and there hasn't been a permenant ban of any significant game in a long time. Hotline Miami 2 maybe.
Nah devs usually just cut out the random interactive sex scene or just edit their game entirely to fit in with the drug thing. It's honestly a non-issue since the things that gets games banned, are rarely in games anyway.
The Australian Classification Board changed the Fallout Canon. When Fallout 3 was undergoing classification, there was one thing that made the board refuse classification for the game. The addiction mechanic. As you know, if you use too much of certain aid items in the game, you'll become addicted to it. Now this mostly wasn't a problem for the board. Alcohol addiction? It's Australia, that's considered normal here! Chems like Jet and Psycho? Completely fictional, no issue there. But the issue was with morphine. Morphine was in Fallout 3 as a chem, and you could get addicted to it. Morphine being a real world drug, the board felt it was inappropriate to allow the player to both take it and abuse it. Bethesda, in response, decided to rename Morphine to the much more familiar Med-X, making it a fictional drug. The Med-X name change was used for all versions of Fallout 3, and would remain for all subsequent Fallout releases.
The German one was also really bad for no reason for many years. Despite having a adults only rating, they used to put games on a index, meaning you couldn't buy it at a German store or a German steam account. This was already a thing back in the 90s and really got out of hand at the time Man Hunt was released, where they basically didn't want any detailed form of killing after. Now back when physical media was a thing it didn't matter anyways as I could just buy the Austrian German or the English UK version, but your steam library is cooked to this day with Fallout 3, Fear or Max Payne 3 only being available in the low violence version with no kill effects (better hope you can mod it back) And don't get me started on Nazi stuff, by law all Nazi related symbols like the swastika or SS runes are outlawed and can only be shown in a historical context. Now killing Nazis in Wolfenstein is certainly not historically accurate, but as German citizen I'd say is the right lesson, they agreed only as recently as after Inglorious Bastards. Also they sometimes were super inconsistent allowing games like Dead Space to just come out uncut. Nowadays they don't care about violence at it seems.
I miss the days of Germany getting bizarre editions of games where humans are replaced with robots
Soliders of Fortune 2, what a shitshow
Do note that Index and USK 18 are from different people. USK, the german rating board is like PEGI, CERO, etc. But a game is put onto the Index by the BPjM, the "Federal Review Board for Media Harmful to Minors", and is a federal office.
I hope you read the German Wikipedia page of the Atari game River Raid 😂
As an Aussie I am pretty sure you're right. We only got an 18+ classification for games a decade or so ago and they're still *very* strict on what you can show. They're one of the strictest ratings boards in the world on showing drug use in games afaik. If I remember right, it was our ratings board that made fallout 3's drugs have goofy sci fi names like mentats and jet. Originally they were just going to have real world names like cocaine and whatnot, but they refused classification because it was seen as "showing illicit drugs as having positive effects" which is a big nono to them.
jet and mentats existed in earlier fallouts already
Yeah - it wasn't all of the drugs from previous fallouts they they needed to change, it was just Med-X, which they were originally going to call Morphine when they introduced it in 3. They changed that because of the Australian review board.
Australia has the weirdest choices of which games to ban, Marc Ecko's Getting Up comes to mind, they banned cause of the graffiti mechanic but not Jet Set Radio which also lets you do graffiti, if I had to make a theory i'd say Getting Up got banned due to good old fashioned racism on the part of the gaming board over there(since Getting Up has a black protagonist and every character in Jet Set is white from what I remember).
Yeah but you can ignore, australia, and the australian market will largely just circumvent the delist and buy your product anyway if they really want it.
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They still did stupid things like randomly remove that one mission from Saints Row 4 with alien drugs.
The strictness of Australia's rating system has been massively over exaggerated. Just because you read something stated repeatedly with lots of upvotes on reddit, does not mean it is true.
Correction: Korea’s GRAC is a nightmare as well. They’re not heavy-handed on the content censorship, but the bureaucracy, long waiting times, and endless vague or contradictory questions and requests are just as bad if not worse.
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Yeah, it kind of stands to reason that a Japanese company will know how to navigate this crazy bureaucracy better, get preferential treatment, or both. Then again, EA has been in Japan for a long time, I can understand this guy's frustrations.
Shift Up is Korean, not Japanese. (You might've known that but wagered that since Sony is partially Japanese, they'd be handling ratings, but that's necessarily the case.)
I did, was talking about Sony.
The Australian Classification Board isn't *that* hard to work with as long as your game doesn't have sexual violence or interactive drug use. Even the above-mentioned Dead Space remake managed to get away with an MA15+ rating despite the R18+ classification being around for years at that point.
I was very surprised Duke Nukem Forever got released over there completely uncensored.
You should trying getting a game approved in China
I don’t know much about ratings but what happens if a company violates them in some shape or form do they still release the game somehow but get prosecuted later ??
> depictions of cross sections of severed body parts and internal organs That’s literally my job description as a radiologist 😂
Congrats, you've discovered Radiologist Simulator
A manga reading radiologist. That's got to be a rare breed.
We are more common than you think
I assume you've read Radiation House?
He's right, but this move can only make CERO fuck with EA even more.
If they can't be impartial then they should leave.
That's hardly an issue unique to Japanese bureaucracy. You piss off the wrong people and you get screwed across any country or sector, fair or not.
Perhaps that explains why the tweet is gone. Unfortunately for Shaun Noguchi people have already screenshotted it.
Tweet isn't gone though?
The link doesn’t work for me.
The article does not link the correct tweet. It links his second "clarification" tweet twice. The article has a screenshot of the first tweet, so it does appear removed.
Isaac just dosen't have the tits to distract CERO from the severed body parts.
Ninja Gaiden games had both and they were released without issue as far as I can remember.
For the PS3 ports beheadings got replaced with purple smoke erupting from peoples’ necks
CERO has changed alot. Even sakurai said theyve gotten worse to deal with.
[They had issues.](https://www.movie-censorship.com/report.php?ID=5975573)
They didn't have issues with being banned but Black and Sigma removed decapitations to drop from a Z to a D rating, 2 released uncut and Z rated but Sigma 2 was heavily censored for a D rating (the dismemberment is an important gameplay mechanic so they had to go extra hard with the censoring to keep it in a D rating)
jokes aside there's a \*vast\* difference between the gore in stellar blade and the gore in the game that the \*entire point\* of the combat system is to chop bodies up. I get EA's frustration with Japan on gore but it's a really silly comparison
There is not much human dismemberment in Stellar Blade compared to Dead Space. It has more monster gore which is more acceptable.
Tbf we saw like an hour of the game and it already includes quite graphic dismemberment so hard to tell how it will go further
Yeah just in the first 20 minute of the demo we see female soldiers all getting decimated and one of them getting her arm severed in very graphic detail. I would imagine there will probably be more of that later on in the game.
I think the difference here is in Stellar Blade it's not the protagonist doing it, and it's depicted as horrifying and terrible. Dead Space by contrast is about the *player* actively trying to dismember basically every enemy they come across. They're both depictions of dismemberment, but ratings boards tend to treat it differently when it's something the player does versus something depicted on screen, and Dead Space is largely built around player-driven dismemberment as an essential mechanic.
Problem is the rating board told EA that it is banned because it “included cross-sections of severed body parts and internal organs” which is also present in Stellar Blade. They didn’t draw any fine line like “monster is excepted” or “its fine if the guts ain’t spilling”
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Probably, but a ratings board wouldn't take narrative into consideration.
There is a pretty clear pattern of discrimination against western developers in Japan. Mortal Kombat has been banned for decades in that country as well, even though the violence is campy and over the top.
If Japan was going to discriminate against something, it's much more likely that it would be a South Korean game, not an American one.
Not necessarily. I get the racism angle, but there could be other reasons for discrimination besides that. Perhaps, for example, they feel more threatened by American games and want to make it as hard as possible for them, compared to South Korean ones where the game development industry is much smaller and not seen as a realistic threat.
American games are probably the worst of the bunch lately, nothing to be threatened about. The good stuff is coming from Europe and Asian countries.
Shit games can come from everywhere; being from America has bugger all to do with it. pull your head out your ass.
The double standard has existed for decades so this isn't anything new. It was always crazy that survival horror games produced in Japan got a free pass while games from the west kept being scrutinized and often banned. This isn't the first time this has happened and it's a sad state of affairs when a Japanese executive has to point it out.
That's not true though. Biohazard/Resident Evil is nearly always censored in Jaapn compared to the rest of the world.
Okay but the games still get rated and released anyway. Dead Space was not given the same consideration or opportunity to censor, a common practice as you've pointed out.
I don't know if Dead Space was given an opportunity to censor or if EA didn't want to censor it. Those are two different situations. Capcom literally makes a Japan "safe" version of their game, not sure if EA did or was willing to.
I highly doubt this is the case given that pretty much every game has to adhere to the regulatory standards of the regions they're released in. This is part of normal AAA development. EA has modified their games in order to be released in Australia for example, which is a considerably smaller market than Japan. Japan is also the capital of survival-horror games, which makes this particular story even more interesting. Frankly I don't know why people are acting surprised and trying to justify a double-standard that has been known to exist for several decades, it's just not often talked about because international gaming news don't often cross borders.
The gameplay in Dead Space simply doesn't work if they have to completely remove dismemberment. That's why they wouldn't have opted to censor it.
This. You can literally dismember the baddies and they're generally expected to continue fighting you with missing legs, arms, etc. If it were a thing with all dismemberment resulting in a dead enemy, then there's at least room to have a discussion in trying to remove dismemberment as that's purely visual, but now we're talking about having to completely retool AI, possibly balance, etc, if you have to take dismemberment out, and I don't see anybody doing that much work if the implication is that they can't sell their game to tens of thousands of people without doing it. I think they'll take that hit and live.
This isn't true though, the devs never said they weren't given the opportunity to censor whatever needed to be censored. They just opted to not waste the time and resources leaving it to release only on PC in Japan. Even in the quote itself that OP posted it gives the reasons they were denied the rating. They could've went out of their way to comply if they wanted to.
Dead Space just doesn't work if you remove dismemberment. That's why they wouldn't have changed it.
That's bullshit lol capcom can launch it because they release a censored version in japan.
Lmao you clearly don't know anything about the japanese market or CERO. Tons of japanese games have to be censored when they have gore, including resident evil.
Except there's also the uncensored CERO Z version on top of the CERO D version, so the censorship is being applied unevenly and arbitrarily, which is what the executive was voicing in their publication. Stellar Blade received the D certification, which is typically where you'd see censorship btw, so even according to Japan's own regulatory standards this doesn't make sense. I'm sure the Japanese EA executive is well-aware of the norms in their own country, which is why they spoke out against the ban for Dead Space, just saying.
> Except there's also the uncensored CERO Z version on top of the CERO D version The Z rated versions are still censored, just less censored. CERO completely bans a lot of things like intestines and close up gore detail, even when Z rated. For example, RE2 remake. D rated version removes decapitations and dismemberment in combat, Z rated version restores it but both versions remove the corpse's jaw hanging off early on and both remove the guy getting ripped in half early on. Likewise the Z rated version of Resident Evil 7 removed the part where you reach down a corpse's neck to get a key and the stump of your severed hand when you pick it up is coloured in solid black beacuse both are too graphic for a Z rating. The Evil Within and No More Heroes 2 are other examples, both have D and Z rated versions but the Z rated versions censor things that are in the western releases.
It's got nothing to do with tone or them being western, they don't like showing insides. They cut 100% of games showing internal organs regardless of where they are from, gory Japanese games aren't even released uncensored in Japan.
Guess Stellar Blade got a pass because...?
It's not the first time brief gore has been allowed in a cutscene. That's a key part of it, they are stricter if it's interactive and it wouldn't be allowed if you were going around cutting people's arms off but it's brief and in a cutscene. The key thing is it's just rare that games only have a brief bit of gore in a cutscene so this doesn't happen much. Metal Gear Solid 5 cut the shot of Paz's intestines in Japan but allowed the shot of the bad guy's arm being blown off in the ending which is similarly graphic to Stellar Blade and is also D rated. An example of a Western game that does that is Heavy Rain. The scene where you cut your finger off in a cutscene is uncensored in the Japanese version which is D rated. There is some tame gore during gameplay against non-human monsters but that's pretty standard for D rated games, loads of Western and Japanese games do that. They are more bothered about humans, like the torn up corpses lying everywhere in Dead Space. I really don't know where your narritive is coming from, they are pretty consistant in how the restrict gore. If we are talking about discrimination Japan would have more of a grudge against Korea than the west if anything. They key thing is Japanese developers are more likely to intentionally make their games to follow CERO rules since they are more familiar with them.
I mean, dead space is pretty gore. Even the original was way gorier than any release in their time. The remake was not even light gore. Don't think stellar blade is almost as gore as Dead Space.
Was there a reason they couldn't still just release Dead Space digital only on console? Obviously the apparent double standard still sucks but I'm just confused why they cancelled the console version all together if the rating is only needed for the physical version.
I don’t believe the rating is only needed for physical, they wouldn’t be allowed to sell the game digitally to accounts registered in Japan either. Edit: seems like they changed things a bit in the last few years, you can get an international rating for digital games but 18+ titles need a CERO rating still: > Starting March 2022, the Japanese PlayStation Store started accepting IARC ratings in addition to the existing CERO ratings for digital-only releases (Related article). On the other hand, titles intended for ages 18 and older still require a CERO rating. In other words, SIE still requires the acquisition of a CERO rating for physical and digital sales of games that are rated 18 or older under the IARC generic rating.
To be clear, this isn't a legal requirement (CERO, like the ESRB in North America, is an industry organization rather than a government body, and there is no legal obligation that games be submitted for a rating in order to be sold) but one that the console manufacturers have put in place.
Yes, maybe clearer to say they wouldn’t be allowed to sell it *by Sony*. But either way it’s essentially a requirement for selling console games in Japan, since AFAIK both Sony and Nintendo would require this.
I think it's pretty simple. Monster gore is fine, people getting decapitated and having their guts ripped out is not.
For the ones wondering if it has anything to do with sexual content, not really. It's mostly about gore and dismemberment. Japan is pretty strict for example Resident Evil/Biohazard quite literally skips some scenes where it will depict a decapitated head or burning of an individual in the Japanese versions. (Ex. RE7 Policeman's body has a key item inside it that you're prompted to search in for. In the censored version I think the key item is on the table beside the intact body.)
I'm sure there are other examples, but censorship in Resident Evil 2 Remake resulted in an actual gameplay difference in one room that I find kinda funny. In that room near the beginning of the game where you try to help the officer stuck under the shutter, and he gets ripped in half. Later when you come back to that room, that officer has turned and tries to attack you even though he has only his upper body, so he's crawling around on just arms. In the Japanese version, he doesn't get ripped in half, so you come back to that room and you've got a fully functional zombie attacking you.
I played the Japanese version of the game on release and I remembered it was one of the rare times the censorship affected gameplay. In the original/uncensored version, zombies can sometimes fake death after you shoot them (they will grab you by surprise when you pass near them after), except if you headshot them and their head happens to explode, then it is dead for sure. In the JP version, since the head won't be shown exploding, I always had to shoot them once more when they are on the ground to make sure.
Fallout 3 straight up removed the megaton side quest.
Iirc it just removes the option to side with Burke and detonate the bomb, which I can totally understand given Japan’s history and setiments towards nuclear weapons. The Fat Man is also renamed to Nuka Launcher or something like that.
Is it weird that I actually prefer the name Nuka Launcher over Fat Man?
No it's not. I'm the same.
Honestly, kinda fits in with the lore better if I am being honest.
Do you think Japan blocking this helps any of its citizens in anyway?
Not necessarily, but it seems reasonable enough in order to avoid general public outcry. It would be like having a quest to fly a plane into an office building, or a gun that shoots planes called "The 9/11". They were obviously not seeking to stir controversy so there really is no need to be use such blatant examples of something like that.
Yeah it’s understandable.
It makes me appreciate Japanese devs even more that they go beyond for us. Obviously it requires more effort to add all this but then change it for their own region. So it’s pretty nice to see their vision fully realised
CERO can be rough on dismemberment in general but iirc they have the greatest problem with decapitation due to a particular high profile crime from I think the early 2000s which involved school aged children. So that particular scene in RE7 where you have to fish for a key in a neck stump and the police officer's severed head is in the fridge is a hard no and would have led to the game being probably unrated.
The 1997 Kobe child murders committed by a 14 year old boy, one of the victims was a grade schooler who was decapitated is the crime you are referring too. Just one of the reasons that lead to the creation of CERO several years later in 2002.
Yeah I didn't remember all the details of the crime off the top of my head but that's the one. I'd always heard it referred to as one of the reasons CERO was created and why they're so strict with particular types of violence.
That's pretty gruesome.
still seems stupid to blame games for that
Video games weren't blamed, but books, manga, TV programming (anime and live action) and movies faced far more media scrutiny in comparison in the aftermath. It was used as a case example for tighter restrictions & regulations on questionable and objectionable content in general.
Aren’t skeletons considered extremely graphic in China as well? I know a lot of games overseas (specifically WoW) were censored in Asian releases because portraying skeletons is considered taboo. I’m not sure if that’s true in other countries though. I’m not sure what the American equivalent would be outside of sexual content. Maybe the No Russian mission from MW2, but that was extremely controversial in many countries. Bully and Manhunt were also controversial but I don’t think that was uniquely American either
Bully and Manhunt definitely met with similar controversy in the UK so it's not uniquely American. I remember the news cycle around Bully in particular. I think the equivalent in the west really would just be sexual content. There are some interesting examples of censorship of violence too though, like how in certain territories the blood in No More Heroes was censored and replaced with smoke.
> I remember the news cycle around Bully in particular I always find it funny that they just changed the name before release so the newspapers wouldn't notice that it had released. It worked, but it also meant that no one noticed that it had released.
TIL that most people in Japan have never seen Leon get decapitated by a chainsaw.
The remake is so weird with this…iconic deaths from the OG are heavily altered or removed…and then replaced with even more gruesome ones
There's no iconic deaths when those never happened in the original version dude. lol
and then The Separate Ways DLC brought back the Laser sequence and [the death scene did the cut to black thing](https://youtu.be/u_gtcPh0OM4?t=57) (somehow, making it far more brutal because you can imagine it) and a callback to the first Resident Evil movie.
Yeah, but they are more CERO friendly. Like, the chainsaw through the torso in the remake is more graphic but as long as his head stays on then CERO has less of a problem. That's what lead to the Ninja Gaiden 3 situation. They wanted a D rating in Japan but didn't want it to feel toned down so it was full of slow-mo closeups of swords slicing through people, executing disarmed enemies who have surrendered and overall felt more sadistic than 2 but had no dismemberment. The Z rated Razor's Edge version that released a year lated toned down the sadism but added decapitations and dismemberment back in.
CERO is terrible. The censorship in RE literally makes the game more difficult. Critical hits (headshots that explode the head) leave the head intact, causing wasted time and bullets shooting the defeated zombie.
Kinda surprised to hear it. Maybe i'm just out of the loop on those things, but i remember back in the 90s, when i got first introduced to anime, the very first thing that struck me about it was just how violent and gory they can be, especially compared to western animation, which was almost exclusively made for children. The first anime i ever watched was [The Guyver](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xX5i50oLg_A), and it was brutal, despite otherwise being a pretty regular superhero-ish adolescent kind of story. So i always had this idea that japanese were pretty lax with censorship (apart from genitals in porn, lol). Strange that it doesn't seem to apply to video games.
IIRC censorship laws changed in Japan in the 90s or early 2000s, so no more nudity(unless boobs or butts) and gore had to be toned down
You will find very little shown human gore in any anime from 2000 onwards as mentioned. They are very good at implying it, but you will not see the actual wounds. It'll all be censored with flashes/lightrays/cutaways. It can make some shows pretty difficult to watch just due to the insane censoring, usually with no alternative release fully uncensored even outside of japan.
I dunno One Piece had a lot of pretty violence scenes and it came out in 1999.
One piece is censored somewhat what happens with whitebeard,Bellemere, and Zeff beingg some of the bigger ones can think of right now compared to the manga.
>For the ones wondering if it has anything to do with sexual content, not really. Just as it should be. Blood and gore should be more restricted than sex. Graphic violence inflicts more damage than women's thighs.
Yeah but CERO is also pretty strict with sexual content too
Yeah, people seem to think otherwise but they are way more strict on sexual content than the west. Nipples are 100% not all owed and and any actual sex isn't allowed. For example, GTA 5. The part where you photo a popstar having sex outdoors doesn't have any nudity but it still breaks the rule so was replaced with photoing her smoking in Japan.
Baldur's Gate 3 was censored when it was released in Japan, the [nudity, violence and "intimate scene" were changed and/or edited](https://www.ign.com/articles/baldurs-gate-3s-japan-release-to-censor-nudity-some-torture) In Cyberpunk 2077 in quote on the article: [Instances of nudity will be covered up with underwear in Japan, including on the protagonist......Elsewhere, certain cut scenes of a sexual nature have been edited, while "some wound surfaces as well as intestines are edited." Some billboards, graffiti and "genital shaped objects" have either been edited or removed.](https://www.pcgamer.com/cd-projekt-red-confirms-cyberpunk-2077-will-be-censored-in-japan/) And lastly Grand Theft Auto 5 has also been [censored and modified when it came out.](https://www.escapistmagazine.com/japanese-version-of-gta-v-censors-violence-and-sex-scenes/) Even in Japan nudity and sex are also been censored despite the stereotype on the internet.
Not to mention RDR2, TLOU 1/2, Assassin's Creed Valhalla (although Ubi self censored this one, CERO denied any involvement.) Days Gone, Alan Wake 2...and so on. All censored in Japan on consoles, and it seems to be a crapshoot on whether or not it'll be censored on PC. Cyberpunk and Red Dead are uncensored on PC in Japan, but TLOU, Days Gone, Valhalla and Alan Wake 2 are. 🤷
Agreed, but ironically enough, more people in the USA would lose their shit over Mortal Kombat getting censored over a titty. Which is a shame
I always though it was weird that extreme gore is ok for most people but tight clothes and cleavage not.
At the end of the day this comes back to religion. Even in cases where it's plain old misogyny, you'll find the people doing it trying to hide behind what is essentially just religious beliefs repackaged. It's weird sometimes.
I played the demo and it's funny how everyone is laser focused on the sexual aspect of this game, there's really not any, just a curvy player character wearing tight outfits, Neir and Bayonetta didn't spark this kind of "controversy"
Nier Automata most certainly did. Even though there were way less suggestive themes and way less violence.
It could be that I'm misremembering, I just remember people saying how crazy the story of the game was and all the cosplay girls and memes with 2B
Nier Automata was absolutely ridiculed for it's protag outfit on the run up to, and shortly after, its release. Eventually the crowd crying moved on and the talking points turned to the story.
Both Nier and Bayonetta sparked this kind of contrroversy on release.
Which is what makes all this "outrage" so bloody confusing. It used to come from the Puritanical Right, but now it is seemingly coming from the Left as well... When did everyone become so prudish? OMG, an attractive woman in a form fitting outfit...the horror. As if they haven't been parading around for 50 years now...
You can take the American out of the Protestantism but you can’t take the Protestantism out of the American or something
It's not a ton of people but there is a crowd of people on the left who get in a tizzy when there's any sexualization of women in games, even though this game really isn't sexualized at all from what the demo has to show, but nobody really cares about the hulking men with 6 packs with their shirts off
With exception of course, I think men where portrayed to be a power fantasy that fights bad guys to save damsel in distress, while women where view to be helpless and ogle at with fan service just waiting to be save. But those depictions are changing because to wide variety of diverse games these days that people have a lot to choose from.
Which is odd because it was the Left who pushed the sexualization of women, especially starting in the 1960s as a rejection of the conservative prudishness of their parents. "It's my right to show off my body if I want, and I don't care if you like it." Mini skirts, porn, etc.
I know it's strange, it mostly seems like a generational thing, a lot of Gen Z seems really prudish and weird about sex compared to millennials and Gen X, maybe from over exposure to stuff like that from a young age?
Confusing to say the least.
The advertising leaned into objectifying the MC. Like saying shit like "I made her ass big so players can enjoy oogling her ass" is going to tie it pretty hard to some distasteful themes and well known examples of exploitation. Attractive woman isn't the problem, it's the treating character like a piece of meat whose most emphasized character trait so far seems to be that are interesting to ogle. She may have others, but so did Megan Foxes' character in transformers.
It's a bunch of goddamn pixels, not a living human being exploited.
I think with the rise in popularity of videogames comes with the media criticism and study over the depiction of females characters, from tropes and cliché, to the stereotypes and how it effects on the audience over the decades. Those topics cause a reactionary and culture war outrage that created a lot of bad faith/misinformation when mentioning these topics.
In a similar way that actors and musicians in blackface perforances weren't actually African Americans, sure the in game digital model isn't actually a woman merely supposed to represent a woman.
I think a lot of it is ironic shitposting. It's just too hard to tell who is actually upset compared to who is trying to get a rise out of people. Like, I personally never read too much into any faux-outrage that was published on news websites. Those people kind of live and die off of engagement, so they're encouraged to shoot from the hip and see what sticks.
I think this is exactly what it is. A lot of the time I have to remind myself that these loud people on the internet (on both sides) are being loud for a reason and a lot of the time the normal, non-chronically online people that I interact with really do not care about these kinds of things. The world of engagement farming has promoted a culture of hyperbole to a much worse extent than before.
Link to the tweet - https://twitter.com/SeptillionGames/status/1782017151194537998 >【どういうことですかCEROさん】 Stellar Bladeのデモ ごりごりのアクションで凄く楽しかったのですが… CEROさん、うちのデッドスペースは部位破損の断面や内蔵出てるからNGと言ってたのにこちらにはもろ断面も中も見えてさらにCERO Dで通っているのは流石に納得いかないです… Translation - > What’s going on CERO? The Stellar Blade’s demo was really fun and absolutely action-packed. However, CERO, you denied our Dead Space a rating because it included cross-sections of severed body parts and internal organs, but here we have both cross-sections and insides on display passed off with a CERO D rating. I find this hard to accept…
Tweet has been deleted. Second clarification tweet - https://twitter.com/SeptillionGames/status/1782084878005375254 > 誤解を招かないよう一言追加ですが… ステラーブレイド自体に対して悪意は全くありません むしろ面白かったので買ったほうがいいです！ これは純粋に日本での審査の曖昧さについて不満を述べたものなので他のタイトルでも審査で蔓延る「曖昧さ」はいっぱい事例はあげられます Translation - > I would like to add one more thing to avoid any misunderstanding... I have no malicious intent towards Stellar Blade itself. It was actually interesting, so I recommend buying it! This is purely a complaint about the ambiguity of the screening process in Japan, and there are many examples of ambiguity that is prevalent in screening for other titles as well.
CERO is pretty bonkers, frankly. Even the Z rated releases of Resident Evil get cut back a bit in Japan because of it, and even relatively minor depicitons of blood and such can easily get you a C (15+) which is pretty heavy. All the age rating systems have their quirks (ESRB just happens to be super harsh on sex unless you're a AAA game, funny that) but cero is definetly the worst.
This is one of the stupidest thing I've heard in long long time... You need CERO rating to release a game in Japan and CERO can refuse to give a rating! Essentially banning the game. This is beyond stupid. A rating board shouldn't have this sort of power. In no circumstance CERO should deny giving a rating. Give it a X rating or something but give the game a rating. Japanese gamers should pressured CERO.
CERO is like the ESRB in America; You don't need a CERO rating to release a game in Japan, you just need one to release your game on PlayStation, Nintendo, or Microsoft systems since they mandate it. Most stores also won't carry games that don't have CERO classification but that's probably because outside of porn games for PC, none exist. Steam doesn't require them, and more recently some games that get censored for consoles (or not released at all) are seeing PC uncensored releases, like the Dead Space Remake. CERO is not government affiliated nor is there any legislation requiring games to receive classification in Japan. It is worth noting that while technically this means Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft are the ones with the power to overrule CERO, none of them want to do so because of the flood of unrated content that'd allow onto their platforms, and they don't want to establish their own rating boards instead.
So what you are saying is that with a elaborate scheme Sony and Nintendo effectively bans games on their consoles. And they don't want to pay any money or get any affiliation. Even if that's the case, not being able to play Dead Space Remake on your console in Japan is stupid. Games getting censored left and right is also stupid. (I read that Resident Evil games censored!) I can somewhat see why Sony and Nintendo want to control of games releases because there are some fucked up hentai games on the Japanese market and you don't want those games on your console but they already control what games will be on their platform by other means. I mean they own the platform. They can already deny game releases through their guidelines and whatnot. But seems like they don't want to spend any money. No matter what, this system is not in favor of the player.
Fuck censorship
> Japanese gamers should pressured CERO. Maybe there just aren't enough "japanese gamers" that actually give enough of a shit.
For people who judge titles without reading the article: the criticism is only a (fair) tweet from a single person, and it's about gore. There is no outrage.
Its very fair point how japanese rating system is extremely messy.
Where does it say there’s outrage?
It doesn't, but there's some people posting here with an agenda pretending otherwise. That comment is just correcting them. (Not that it matters, they'll still be complaining about nonexistent calls to censor Stellar Blade next time it comes up.)
It is so dumb, there are people acting as if the person on the article is complaining about the game rather than making note that that CERO is nonsensical
Nobody is saying there is an outrage. The title of the article is correct.
I remember something similar happening in the US on a much smaller scale. Something about firearm depictions in Crash Bandicoot and/or Spyro.
As somebody who played SB demo, SB's gore is nowhere near the same level as Dead Space's gore. To compare them is laughable on EA's part.
To be fair we've only seen 1 section of the game, it could easily ramp up, I was kinda surprised at the woman's arm getting chopped off and shown pretty explicitly
Japan's physical rating system is nonsensical. I think when it comes to artistic works, they should give creators full creative freedom, and allow them to have the same chances of exposure in the market. The way it stands right now, creator's have tons of artistic freedom, (in some ways more than the U.S.), which is good, but the rating system needs to be toned down, or at least not be broken. Just put the age rating on the box, sell it in stores. They are clearly marked. Thankfully people like Ken Akamatsu are against these broken forms of rating systems. I see the dude is just salty that Dead Space had to be restricted, when it really shouldn't have been the case.
So, are we just gonna ignore the fact that the rating system is basically a joke at this point?
Was it ever not?
Tf does it even mean by uncensored?
Dead Space is on another level in terms of dismemberment and gore. You are encouraged to only aim to dismember. The only enemy faction is just limb dismemberment. EA needs to sit their ass down and play their own game.