Yeah, I pretty much agree with this entire bit. Sharing your kid's lives online before they are old enough to even know what the internet IS is a very selfish and cruel thing to do. Parents, you aren't that important, I mean, you are but.... not on a worldwide stage? Go back to your tiny lives and live in complete obscurity like every previous generation's parents! It builds character.
Frankly, this isn't the logic I use to defend it (I say it's 2000 because that's what everyone calls it, and if they wanted the new millennium to start a year later, they should have called it 1999), but if you're going from a historical perspective, there's still good reason to consider 1 BC to be 0 AD (and vice versa if you wish).
Among other things, I got this lamp that looks like a leg, and a movie called "Army of Frankensteins". I got both from my mom. She's an extra in the movie.
Pretty good. I mean, I'm not a huge War Star fan, but it certainly held my attention, and I actually cared about what was happening. I've got a few minor nitpicks, but it held together pretty well.
Very interesting discovery. The only thing that terrifies me about this is what it'll do in the hands of torturers. On the one hand, taking a dose of the pain eliminator hidden in a false tooth will let spies withstand torture. On the other hand, now we've got to worry about a special breed of psychopath specifically hunting down people born pain-free JUST so they can torture them.
That problem is creepsters complaining about US "censorship". What was censored? Something that should never have been in the game in the first place! This is one of those rare situations where content cut from the game makes it BETTER, but, well, take a look for yourself.
As they explain, they only really censored two things. Now, the "bust slider", while in most games with it has a really odd focus (how about a "fat slider", something to acknowledge the reality behind what bust is and the body types that tend to have the larger ones), is not what I'd have removed. It's just one of those customization things that most open world games have SOME form of. It's a minor thing in the grand scheme of things though.
The real problem is the "bikini options". Not mentioned in the video? The "beach wear" is only available for the female characters, period. A similar thing happened in Peace Walker on the PSP. It's about as obvious and creepy as one would expect, especially when one looks at the designs of these so-called bikinis. Still, even THAT is something I'd have resolved with more swimsuits (for the men) rather than less. No, the biggest issue with the swimsuits is that all of those really creepy designs (the swimsuits with holes in them) can be put on the 13 year old. So, they obviously had to change that. Great, problem solved, except why was this option in the game to begin with? Now, the optimist in me would like to think it was an oversight, something they didn't catch, but unfortunately thanks to things I've seen on the Daily Show, I know the truth. Japan's got a really bad problem with marketing directly to pedophiles. It's disgusting, but it's there. Worse, there's way too many American fans that have complained about this particular bit of "CENSORSHIP!", and their reasons range from naive to oblivious to horrifyingly creepy defenses that just prove the change was the right one after all.
The sad thing is, modern RPGs from Japan have developed some sort of list of "necessary archetypes", like a bullet list of exactly what characters a JRPG needs, and ONE of those is "sexualized little girl". I didn't notice it for years, because early on it wasn't yet a fixed archetype. I remember that FF4 had Rydia, Palom and Porom, 3 children characters. Of those, Rydia had a well-made storyline befitting a child, where the rest of the party only took her along out of necessity, and it was clear she was in extreme danger. At the first opportunity, she is given over to a place to take care of her, and later she comes back (due to time dilation) as a grown woman and capable fighter. At no point is she creepily sexualized, it was actually a very natural, if heartbreaking story for a child. Palom and Porom were also children, but treated a bit differently. They were a brother and sister duo of mages sent along with your party and treated as capable fighters in their own right, right up to their tragic end, but while it clashes with how they treated Rydia's character, at no point did their characterization get creepy. One acted like a little brat, and the other acted like a goody-two-shoes type.
FF6 had Relm, and again, she felt like a natural addition to the party. At every step, the party refused to let her join them because that's the responsible thing to do with kids, keep them out of harm. Eventually, she forces her way in and proves herself, but she still acts like a kid. A kid with a sharp tongue, but still a kid.
In later games, they'd stop adding kids for a while until Eiko in FF9, but even there she's just a lost orphan. Xenogears again had a child who was also a robot, but even WITH the parts where she's naked in a test tube, at no point did anything seem creepy. It was nude in the same way baby Superman was nude at the beginning of the first Superman movie.
No, I really started noticing an actual creepiness right around the time I played one of the newer Star Ocean games, The Last Hope. They included a "little girl bot" character, but she didn't seem to actually have a personality. She was basically about as stereotypically "little girl" as anything I've ever seen, but at every point they manage to make her say those things in the creepiest way possible. I don't even know how to describe it, but they made "I wanna take a nap with you" creepy, not in how she said it, but in how the MAIN CHARACTER reacted to it, and to every other line she said. I mean, what the hell Japan? I really felt bad for the English voice actors. Their delivery made it clear just how uncomfortable those various lines made them. This is to say nothing of the actual costumes of the characters. One of which is an innocent cat costume, like kids wear on halloween, except NOTHING like that because it's also some sort of weird leather straps and thongs madness. Gross! Also, "costume" is the right word, because again symptomatic of modern RPGs, none of the characters wear things even remotely resembling what the other NPCs are wearing.
From there on, every other JRPG I bought had this "token child" that had no actual personality but had a creepy vibe. In fact, it ruined one of the kid characters in Xenosaga (altogether a really disappointing spiritual successor to Xenogears, unlike Xenoblade), who upon reflection had some pretty creepy moments herself. Then there's Paz's "dating" missions in Peace Walker. She's actually an adult with a growth disorder who's pretending to be a student, but Snake doesn't know that, and Snake DATES her, and NEEDS to date her to get the real ending. Gah!
At this point, it's so bad that this 13 year old kid in Xenoblade Chronicles X may have scarred what could be an otherwise amazing game just by existing. Ugh.... Makes me want to just stick with Pokemon and Earthbound games. At least there the creepiness has nothing to do with the kids (and everything to do with psychic aliens and superpowered cock fighting). Suffice it to say it isn't a problem with ALL Japanese RPGs these days. Ni No Kuni and Zelda seem to have avoided this creepiness. However, it's bad enough that it's an issue, and anyone decrying "censorship" when an American company is forced to clean up Japan's mess needs to get their priorities straight.
Well, the article points it out. There's a long discussion as to why they went with "that art style". The answer is, it isn't an art style. They put a filter over the old artwork. They did actually redo the art for monsters and the character portraits, though I don't really like the art style on those character portraits at all, and that menu layout and font... ugh, no attention to box placement or nuttin'.
The GBA version is "definitive", aside from the poor music quality and some slowdown. If OB1 was here, he'd kill me for saying that ANY GBA port had "worse music and graphics" than the SNES original, but the fact is, it's absolutely true. The GBA just could not handle everything the SNES could do, not least because the SNES had a distinct sound processor and the GBA did not. I'd say the translation is "more accurate", and it is in some ways, but in others it's become clear over the years that Square's translators care more about appeasing the weird japanophile fans they have than making a "truly" accurate translation. That's why you get stupid fan opinions like "you HAVE to leave the spoony bard line in, we value that more than an emotional line delivery in an important scene!".
The sad thing is, this is a very recent development. Squeenix has been phoning it in ever since they started making mobile ports of their legacy titles. It started semi-promising, when Secret of Mana got some nice graphical updates that actually fit the original art style and weren't just a lazy filter put over everything (they even added reflections of the sky to the water!). The touch controls were simply unworkable for an action game, but at least they were trying. With FFV, even there they made the attempt to update large parts of the graphics (such as battle backgrounds) without just using a filter, but they still got lazy when it came to updated tiles, so that they had obvious seams.
Before that, the PSP 2D remake of FF1, 2, and 4 went out of their way to fully update all the art in the whole game in a way that made sense and an eye for making everything seamless. Well, for the most part. The FF1 character sprites were too brightly colored for the backgrounds and enemies they were set next to, but they had fixed that issue by the time the FF4 update came along. With mobile, they've abandoned any attempt at the updates making sense. The good news is they're starting to take some of their Dragon Quest games and put them on 3DS. With those, at least, we can hope for some amount of actual effort to be put in.
In summary, Square-Enix, do one thing for me. If you're going to port a game, either put in the time and money to do a good job, or just do a straight port without trying to "improve" anything. A straight port of the GBA game with SNES quality sound would have been a far superior Steam release.
