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+--- Thread: Xenoblade Chronicles X has/had a problem (/showthread.php?tid=6927)
Xenoblade Chronicles X has/had a problem - Dark Jaguar - 9th December 2015
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.
Xenoblade Chronicles X has/had a problem - A Black Falcon - 10th December 2015
Xenoblade X isn't the only recent Nintendo game with censored-out creepy fanservice, actually -- Nintendo also removed bikini outfits for the female characters (they were not available for the male ones, naturally) from the new Wii U Fatal Frame game, as well, in the Western release. The female characters in that game aren't quite as young as the one in Xenoblade X with the censored outfit, but it was still questionable stuff and removing it was probably the right move. They put in Zelda and Samus outfits instead, I believe. I don't like or agree with censorship most of the time, but in this case, they never should have had these outfits in the games in the first place.
So yeah, I agree with your basic assessment here -- that Nintendo should not have had this stuff in their game in the first place. It is kind of sad that Japan is so sexist, and that this kind of stuff has become more mainstream in Japanese videogames and anime; it's always existed, but creepy fanservice used to be much less popular and common than it now is. However, calling people who like that pedophiles really is inaccurate. First, the proper definition of 'pedophile' is someone interested in pre-pubescent children, and these characters, while young, are not pre-pubescent, and second, they are drawings/CG models, and not people -- that is a big difference. People can like something in media but not in the real world -- think of violence as an obvious example. Still, it is sad that Nintendo has decided to let their teams put super-fanservicey stuff in the games. This isn't entirely new -- Fire Emblem games have had "really a thousand years old but look twelve" dragon girl characters in more than a few games in the series -- but it does seem to be getting more prominent, with two major titles this holiday both having some pretty sketchy stuff censored out. It's not a good trend.
Basically, this kind of thing is an example of why Japan is in 100-somethingth place in the world in gender equality, while the major Western nations are much higher on the list. (But Japan does beat out South Korea, which is even lower down...)
Quote:The sad thing is, modern RPGs from Japan have developed some sort of list of "necessary archetypes",A lot of anime seems to be written by going down a list of stereotypes and making a minutely different story that uses a lot of the expected usual tropes and character types, and videogames are not different, unfortunately.
Xenoblade Chronicles X has/had a problem - Dark Jaguar - 11th December 2015
The only thing I can say in Nintendo's defense is that Nintendo themselves didn't actually make either of those two games.
However, your hair splitting over it all is... a little unsettling. Yeah, no, I really don't care if they count as "prepubescent" (they certainly look that way to me) or skirt the edge of that definition (it really REALLY doesn't matter when we're talking about 13 year olds, and I don't really care about sparing feelings on that by using some other word), and frankly, saying "at least it isn't literally child pornography" isn't much of a defense either. Comparing it to video game violence isn't exactly fair either. In the real world, we don't have any problems with ninjas ripping out someone's spine, but we DO have a problem with child sex trafficking, so one isn't the other. Though, you could make that argument when it comes to military shooters, of which there are a dime a dozen.
As a side note, Nintendo themselves don't seem to fall for those gaming tropes so hard, they're perfectly content with their own set of tropes. It's taken years to get them to break away from their core characters even just a little. I've been wanting them to make Zelda games that star characters other than Link for a good long while. I'm not even asking for a character creator, just original leads for each game (which, as a happy side effect, means female leads in some new Zelda games). Mario has been dipping a toe into switching up lead characters, what with the Wario Land series, the Luigi's Mansion games, Super Princess Peach (sadly, just one game there, and some have noted thematic issues), the Yoshi's Island games, and the Donkey Kong Country series. However, they've basically stuck with JUST those characters. They won't put in a lead that doesn't have a long history as a secondary character. They aren't willing to take that risk on an unknown, and that's not a good thing. Pikmin is the one exception to this rule. Miyamoto has been perfectly content changing the lead or leads from one game to the next, and I love that. (I also love Brittany's design. Not just as a female lead, but her "look" steers clear from anything like traditional "good looking" female characters and she fits in with the rest of the cast much better than, say, Peach does with the rest of the Mushroom Kingdom, Mario included.)
I haven't been suggesting different leads for Metroid games though. For one, that series takes place over a very small slice of time, and the games themselves are pretty rarely released, the spat of Prime games being the one exception in it's history. For second, I was afraid that if they went the "different lead for every game" route, we might not see a female lead for years. That second fear seems pretty valid what with the new Metroid multiplayer game. To be fair, at least those soldiers look pretty ambiguous, and I do like that, but in exchange they've got no personality. Actually, the introduction of "Zero Suit Samus" is, in retrospect, one of the bigger mistakes in the series. I'm one of those people defending her being in a swimsuit looking outfit at the end of the older Metroid games as the only way to really get across the "this is a girl you've been playing as" message back in the 8-bit era. Nothing particularly scandalous there, she was just standing straight and looking at ya. By Fusion, though, the ending scenes were these fully drawn pictures of Samus with some odd focus, and Smash Bros has made that "zero suit" into a community-wide joke. Not that I'd say she needs to be removed, but that suit defies physics more than her jump boots and laser whip do, and something a bit closer to the design of a character like Chell from Portal would be more appropriate I think.
Xenoblade Chronicles X has/had a problem - A Black Falcon - 13th December 2015
Dark Jaguar Wrote:The only thing I can say in Nintendo's defense is that Nintendo themselves didn't actually make either of those two games.Isn't Monolithsoft first-party, though? And Nintendo and Koei-Tecmo actually co-own the Fatal Frame IP, though yes, Tecmo-Koei did develop the game.
Quote:However, your hair splitting over it all is... a little unsettling. Yeah, no, I really don't care if they count as "prepubescent" (they certainly look that way to me) or skirt the edge of that definition (it really REALLY doesn't matter when we're talking about 13 year olds, and I don't really care about sparing feelings on that by using some other word), and frankly, saying "at least it isn't literally child pornography" isn't much of a defense either.Definitions matter, though. I know that it is common in this country to use "pedophile" for anything with an underage person involved, but it's not the correct meaning of the term -- it means someone with a sexual attraction to prepubescent children. Going by the common "anything underage is pedophilia" definition, it'd be that for an adult and a 16 year old in California because there the age of consent is 18, but wouldn't be here in New England where it's 16. That makes little sense, definitions should be the same anywhere. The key thing is that puberty happens years before the age of consent because human bodies become sexually mature years before they are emotionally mature enough to reasonably have a (non-abusive) relationship. This is a real problem which people in power have often exploited in the past, but fortunately today we're closer than ever to keeping that from happening as much as we can. So, "underage" includes both prepubescent children and also pubescent teenagers, and it should; any decent age of consent must consider the mental as well as the physical.
As for whether those characters are prepubescent though, some of the thousand year old dragon girls in Fire Emblem games do look prepubescent; Nowi in Fire Emblem Awakening... what were you thinking Nintendo, that is NOT okay. "She's actually over a thousand years old" is not a good excuse! I like the game, but I'm not using Nowi in my party, no way. The Xenoblade Chronicles X character doesn't look as young as that, though I haven't played it myself so I can't say as much as I could about FE games. She looks quite young and shouldn't be sexualized as much as she is. I care about definitions of terms so the difference matters, though not too much; both are wrong. As is often said about depictions of female characters in games, one key is that a game character has no agency -- they just do what they were programmed to, nothing more. You can't say "well the character chose to be like that; they didn't, they were written and drawn that way. This clearly differentiates sexualized videogame characters from actual people. Dealing with actual people brings up even harder questions -- teenagers sexting, for example. At least in videogames it's not real, so the question is "just" about how that kind of image may affect people and whether that kind of depiction should be accepted, and not about actual people actually doing questionable or wrong things.
Quote: Comparing it to video game violence isn't exactly fair either. In the real world, we don't have any problems with ninjas ripping out someone's spine, but we DO have a problem with child sex trafficking, so one isn't the other. Though, you could make that argument when it comes to military shooters, of which there are a dime a dozen.You partially answer your own question here -- violence is a huge problem in American society. You are right that the two things are not directly comparable, but they do have some things in common. Yeah, we don't have ninjas ripping out spines, but we do have a lot of gun violence in this country, more than there is in many countries, and also military shooters are very popular. Media generally reflects culture, so in that way the extreme violence in American media is reflective of American society in general. I strongly believe in free speech, so things which are not real like videogames should not be actually illegal unless there is a very good reason, but it is reasonable to continue to study things such as, for example, if there are links between games and violence. Studies are on both sides of that I believe, as usual with studies... :p It's very hard to say how much media influences people's views, and how much people influence what media gets made; both elements work together to keep the circle going.
Each culture has their own views on violence and sexuality. America allows virtually any amount of violence, but sexuality often must be censored, or it doesn't appear at all; our Puritan heritage lingers. In Europe and Japan though, violence is often censored, while more sexuality is allowed. The European view here makes a lot more sense on a lot of levels, allowing more sexuality but less violence. Europe is strict against anything involving children, though, in a way Japan isn't really. Japanese media has a long history of creepy depictions of highly sexualized underage people. Sure the otaku culture that creates the character trope that led to this Xenoblade controversy is a definite niche, but it is messed up regardless.
Personally though, I believe in freedom of speech, so as long as something is clearly not real (drawings, videogames, etc), it shouldn't be illegal... but on consoles, console manufacturers set the rules. Sony, MS, and Nintendo all ban AO-rated games from releasing on consoles for example and always have. They could crack down a bit more on oversexualized children, and that might be a good thing, but the market for that stuff in Japan is lucrative enough that they don't do so. Otaku are often big video game buyers after all, as well as stuff like anime. T here are limits to what is allowed on consoles, but those limits still allow for games with pretty creepy themes like Nowi in Fire Emblem Awakening, this girl in Xenoblade Chronicles X, or Marie Rose in Dead or Alive 5 Last Round to name some who have caused controversies recently. And there should be controversies about that stuff; though I do defend their legality, the morality is different. As I said earlier it is possible to justify violence in a videogame, after all -- the enemies are badguys trying to destroy the world, or what have you. But exploitative sexuality towards children? There is no legitimate way to justify that beyond "we want to sell more copies to the creepy otakus who like that stuff", and that's not a good reason.
Overall, I hope that over time Japan gets less sexist. Japan's serious gender bias against women is a core cause of these problems (not the only one, but one cause), and if Japan can gradually become a less sexist place, people will eventually realize that those kinds of depictions are wrong and should not be as accepted in their media like they currently are. Decades ago sexism was widely accepted in American media, but now it isn't; change is possible. Japan is well behind us on that. Pressure does work, though -- consider how Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 won't be releasing in the West, probably in part because of Marie Rose being in the game. I am quite fine with us not getting a terrible game loaded with super-creepy imagery of that "oh she's totally 18 really" character, and even if I had a PS4 I certainly would not be importing the game. Criticizing media can have a positive impact. In the videogame industry, as horrendous as the horrible torrent of sexist hate people like Anita Sarkeesian are still being subjected to is, this industry is probably better off with those issues actually being something discussed, versus before when the underlying issues existed but they just weren't talked about much.
Oh, and maybe something will lessen America's violence obsession as well... here's hoping.
Quote:Os a side note, Nintendo themselves don't seem to fall for those gaming tropes so hard, they're perfectly content with their own set of tropes. It's taken years to get them to break away from their core characters even just a little. I've been wanting them to make Zelda games that star characters other than Link for a good long while. I'm not even asking for a character creator, just original leads for each game (which, as a happy side effect, means female leads in some new Zelda games). Mario has been dipping a toe into switching up lead characters, what with the Wario Land series, the Luigi's Mansion games, Super Princess Peach (sadly, just one game there, and some have noted thematic issues), the Yoshi's Island games, and the Donkey Kong Country series. However, they've basically stuck with JUST those characters. They won't put in a lead that doesn't have a long history as a secondary character. They aren't willing to take that risk on an unknown, and that's not a good thing. Pikmin is the one exception to this rule. Miyamoto has been perfectly content changing the lead or leads from one game to the next, and I love that. (I also love Brittany's design. Not just as a female lead, but her "look" steers clear from anything like traditional "good looking" female characters and she fits in with the rest of the cast much better than, say, Peach does with the rest of the Mushroom Kingdom, Mario included.)Here, I agree entirely with everything you say. Yes, Nintendo definitely needs better representation in their games. It's notable that a game like Mario Kart 8 has no non-light-skinned human characters you can play as, for example; these things do matter. Nintendo's reluctance to allow female playable characters in their major titles in far too many cases is frustrating and sexist, of course, and the ones they do have are too often sexist stereotypes -- Princess Peach, Metroid Other M, etc. And the less said about how much Nintendo adores the sexist trope "the plot is rescue the kidnapped girl", the better!
I haven't been suggesting different leads for Metroid games though. For one, that series takes place over a very small slice of time, and the games themselves are pretty rarely released, the spat of Prime games being the one exception in it's history. For second, I was afraid that if they went the "different lead for every game" route, we might not see a female lead for years. That second fear seems pretty valid what with the new Metroid multiplayer game. To be fair, at least those soldiers look pretty ambiguous, and I do like that, but in exchange they've got no personality. Actually, the introduction of "Zero Suit Samus" is, in retrospect, one of the bigger mistakes in the series. I'm one of those people defending her being in a swimsuit looking outfit at the end of the older Metroid games as the only way to really get across the "this is a girl you've been playing as" message back in the 8-bit era. Nothing particularly scandalous there, she was just standing straight and looking at ya. By Fusion, though, the ending scenes were these fully drawn pictures of Samus with some odd focus, and Smash Bros has made that "zero suit" into a community-wide joke. Not that I'd say she needs to be removed, but that suit defies physics more than her jump boots and laser whip do, and something a bit closer to the design of a character like Chell from Portal would be more appropriate I think.
As for Zero Suit Samus, I agree that it was a bad idea from the start, but it's gotten worse over time -- at first, at least the Zero Suit had flat shoes, for example... but now she's got crazy heels, a seriously sexed-up figure, and more. Nintendo doesn't have much in the way of non-sexist female characters who are actually playable in their games. Lots of other publishers are also lacking in this respect of course, but Nintendo does stand out in prominence and in how long they have been failing to improve as much as they should. The disconnect between more-sexist Japan and the less sexist West is certainly a key part of this of course, but Nintendo's largest market is outside of Japan, so they need to care more about these things.
Xenoblade Chronicles X has/had a problem - Dark Jaguar - 13th December 2015
The lack of dark skinned Nintendo characters does factor into things. A lot of people ask "why doesn't Nintendo make Japanese characters?" but that's really a matter of artistic style. Japanese people, from what I understand, see Link and Zelda as Japanese. Now take a look at a game like Jade Empire, where the art style is borderline racist in their depiction of Chinese people, exaggerating everything traditionally "different" between Europeans and Asians. They just stop short of the buck teeth of WW2 propaganda, but it gets uncomfortably close, and that's par for the course with that "D&D van art" style (mind you, I generally have never liked that art style anyway). I say this because basically Nintendo has never even bothered with nationalities outside their own country.
This lends itself to the singular fact that Japan is actually more culturally xenophobic than even us Americans. The world of FF7 is home to exactly one black man, for example (with a white kid, but genetics would allow for that if there's exactly one black man). Now, while that character (Barret) LOOKS like Mr. T, it took US translators to make him SOUND like Mr. T (part of the reason I wish they'd retranslate that game at some point). FF13 gives us another black character, but he's basically emulating a Hollywood black character in an action movie (and that one can't be blamed on the translation). To that end, I dunno, maybe Nintendo is actually afraid to put someone who isn't either "Japanese" or a literal race-free cartoon character like Mario, out of fear of "doing it wrong". That's not really the way to handle that though.
Look at Disney. They only JUST started putting black characters in their main line fairy tale movies, and The Princess and the Frog ended up doing bad by Disney standards. Unfortunately, executives learned a lot of terrible lessons. Executives tend to assume EVERY unique part of a badly received product is responsible for the failure (rather than actually asking people what they didn't like), so now they're convinced that no one wants a black lead ("I told you!" says the racist hollywood exec) and that fairy tale movies need "edgy" one-word titles from now on (the upcoming Jack and the Beanstalk movie is going to just be called "Gigantic", continuing the annoying trend of otherwise good movies like Tangled (Rapunzel) and Frozen (The Snow Queen)). In fact, when they added the non-traditional looking princesses to their "Disney Princess" merch, they completely changed their body types to look like all the other disney princess styled princesses.
So, we've got troubles as well.
Xenoblade Chronicles X has/had a problem - A Black Falcon - 16th December 2015
http://kotaku.com/from-japan-with-changes-the-endless-debate-over-video-1747960323
This is a pretty good, and good-length, article on this subject. It's definitely worth reading the whole thing!
Quote:The lack of dark skinned Nintendo characters does factor into things. A lot of people ask "why doesn't Nintendo make Japanese characters?" but that's really a matter of artistic style. Japanese people, from what I understand, see Link and Zelda as Japanese.Well, they probably are supposed to be European, but yeah, it is a bit vague there -- ever since OoT the series has put lots of Japanese cultural elements into the games, after all. And also, in anime-0style art Asian and Caucasian people usually have the same exact skin colors, something you see in almost all anime. The white people are the same color as the Japanese ones, just with ubiquitous blond hair, because all Caucasians are blonde, right? :) So yeah, I can see seeing Link and Zelda as Japanese. Mario & co. certainly aren't, though. All Mario characters are white Caucasians or fantasy creatures, and Nintendo's one major black character is Ganondorf. A villain, of course.
Quote:This lends itself to the singular fact that Japan is actually more culturally xenophobic than even us Americans.Japan is 99-point-something one race, so it's not too hard to see why they would be xenophobic... the less diverse a culture is, the more likely it is to be xenophobic, I think. But yes, this is quite true, they are. It's bad in America, but even worse in Japan or South Korea. As a white person in a ~95% white state, though, I can kind of understand it... it's easy to dislike things you do not know. Racism in this state is usually less overt than other ones, but that's probably mostly just because of how few nonwhite people there are... and even with white people, the stereotype is that you can never really become a Mainer even if you've lived here for decades, if you were originally "from away" (ie born somewhere else)...
As for Disney, I don't mind them changing the names of the stories, but if they really think that black characters won't sell because of The Princess and the Frog, then that is an unfortunate and surely inaccurate lesson.
Xenoblade Chronicles X has/had a problem - A Black Falcon - 26th January 2016
http://kotaku.com/the-english-version-of-fire-emblem-fates-wont-have-the-1755121353?utm_campaign=Socialflow_Kotaku_Twitter&utm_source=Kotaku_Twitter&utm_medium=Socialflow
Nintendo's done this yet again -- the creepy 'face-touching' minigame in Fire Emblem Fates has been removed from the Western release. And again, it's something which sounds like it never should have been in the game in the first place, now thankfully gone. Stop putting this creepy stuff in in the beginning, Nintendo!
Xenoblade Chronicles X has/had a problem - Dark Jaguar - 27th January 2016
For some reason, the characters and dialog in the newer Fire Emblem games comes off very unnatural compared to past entries. It's like they are all stereotypes of Fire Emblem characters rather than actually BEING characters. The gameplay is still solid, but I just can't bring myself to actually care about any of these new characters in the same way that I did on the GBA games.
For the record, Final Fantasy's newer entries suffer from the same problem, as do most Japanese RPGs these days.
I read the article, and yes, there are some very creepy parts to that. I'm not going to claim that no one should use a touch interface for romance options, and "face touching" is innocent enough with someone who actually IS romantically involved with you, but the article goes on to say that you could creepily touch face with anyone and everyone, whether they're uninterested, subordinates, relatives, underaged, or different species! Intelligent Systems apparently is given free reign to do this stuff by Nintendo, and Nintendo needs to tell them to cut it out. You don't see this sort of stuff in Zelda.
And yes, spiking an unwilling person's drink to make them "straight" is entirely out of line. Heck, very little needs to change to take it back to respectibility. Just, I dunno, change the dialog to make that person WILLING to try a drug to alter their sexuality. However, even that is rife with problems if they don't work extra carefully to make it absolutely clear this is an individual's experimental choice and not a way to "fix" someone. As it is in the Japanese version, it comes off as males just seeing a female that they can't obtain, which is unacceptable, so they need to "fix" that.
All in all, the writing in these games has huge issues. When will they act like actual well-rounded PEOPLE? A QUIRK IS NOT A PERSONALITY!
Xenoblade Chronicles X has/had a problem - A Black Falcon - 27th January 2016
Well, I won't say that the new FE games are well written -- I know a lot of people agree that they aren't -- I just wonder how well-written the GBA ones actually were. I mean, the Fire Emblem series has always had anime influences. That's always been a part of the series, for good and bad. Those thousand-year-old-little-girl-dragon characters have been in the series since early on, for example. And as much as I love the GBA FE games, SS's story has some creepy-anime elements, with the ambiguously-incestuous relationship the twin main character has as one of the prime examples of that. So yeah, the writing has probably gotten even worse and more anime since, but some of those themes have always been there.
Quote: And yes, spiking an unwilling person's drink to make them "straight" is entirely out of line. Heck, very little needs to change to take it back to respectibility. Just, I dunno, change the dialog to make that person WILLING to try a drug to alter their sexuality. However, even that is rife with problems if they don't work extra carefully to make it absolutely clear this is an individual's experimental choice and not a way to "fix" someone. As it is in the Japanese version, it comes off as males just seeing a female that they can't obtain, which is unacceptable, so they need to "fix" that.
... Oh right, that. Should have remembered to mention that too... ah well. The people defending that plotline claim that she actually always was bi so she isn't really having her sexuality changed, but I think your last thought here is the right one -- regardless of the bad in-story explanation, the real reason for it is to keep her open as a remanceable option for a male protagonist, because it's anime so the lead has to be able to romance all people of the opposite sex, that's just how it works! A character NOT interested in the protagonist? That'd be crazy talk... how can the buyer imagine themselves in a relationship with an anime character who doesn't care about them?
Seriously, it's so dumb that people actually write based on trying to live up to stereotype such as that one, but they do. One of the side-effects of otakus being such big consumers; they may not be large in number in Japan, but they've got a lot of influence in the fields they support due to how much they spend. And Nintendo makes its games for Japan first. Hopefully after enough of these controversies Nintendo will realize that having creepily sexualized things in their games is a mistake, and gay and lesbian people actually exist.
Xenoblade Chronicles X has/had a problem - A Black Falcon - 5th February 2016
So, for the face-touching thing, apparently the fix is to leave in the scene but remove all interactivity, so the 3d face appears on screen for a moment but you can't touch it, then the scene ends. Better than before, anyway. I don't know what they did about that character, though... we'll see.
Xenoblade Chronicles X has/had a problem - Dark Jaguar - 6th February 2016
Was it really just touching their faces? That honestly doesn't seem so bad, so long as it's only with your romantic interest... AND NOT YOUR RELATIVES!
Xenoblade Chronicles X has/had a problem - A Black Falcon - 6th February 2016
No, that's the thing, you could touch any other character, I'm pretty sure, no restrictions.
Xenoblade Chronicles X has/had a problem - Dark Jaguar - 7th February 2016
Yeah, I know, I'm saying put in that "strict" limitation of only being able to touch people who CONSENT to it and the problem would basically be fixed.
As it stands, the system was basically lifted directly from Nintendogs, only for people.