Back when Mugen Souls was first announced for English distribution, it was known that NIS America will make slight edits to the game given some scenes which may have pushed the ESRB past the desired rating due to sexualized content. This has resulted in the removal of a (In my opinion rather bland) mini-game which you had the opportunity to wash CG depictations of the games female characters – alongside audio and visual elements which didn’t leave much to the imagination. Given the designs of some characters in the game (For a list of characters, see my character profile posts HERE), they have decided to omit the mini-game entirely instead of heavily modify it or risk potentially receiving an AO-rating by the ESRB which would limit sales and even halting the release the game which might take up further time and money.
The following are a few other Q&A’s released through the NIS America Forums
Why didn’t you submit it to the ESRB unedited first to see what they had to say?
Submitting a game to the ESRB takes substantial time and resources, and the potential of multiple submissions to the ESRB simply isn’t feasible for a company working within the budgets and schedules that we face.Why didn’t you just edit some of the pictures out, or change the art, or do XYZ thing differently?
After considering all our options and working closely with the developer, we came to the conclusion that this was the best approach if we wanted to keep things on schedule and within budget (which we did). Other options were considered, but the time/resource costs for those options were unfeasible.I hear Europe has really strict sexuality laws. Can we blame them for this? Can we have two different versions of the game?
Our decision wasn’t based on the reception in any one particular region. It was a sum-total decision based on a variety of factors. Time and resources has made it unfeasible to release multiple versions of the game across different regions.Can you release the edited content as DLC, or release an “uncensored” version in the future?
No. If you release DLC that has material that is potentially “more pertinent” to the ESRB (i.e. objectionable) then that DLC has to be submitted for rating, and it can potentially change the rating of the game itself. In this case, we would be facing the same issue as we faced in the beginning. So this isn’t an option. For the same reasons, we are also unable to release another version with all the content.Other than this mini-game, I hear one of the characters, Sadie, was censored to get a better rating. Is this true?
Not at all. For every character in every game we release, we choose dialogue that we feel best reflects their overall personality for the English version. Every game presents characters and situations that have to be modified to some degree to work in the English language version. This is the heart and soul of localization, and happens any time a creative work is translated from one language/culture to another. For this specific character, at times she was fairly blunt and crude in the Japanese version. When adapting her for the English version, we felt that for those few instances, it wasn’t the best approach based on the overall tone of the game and her interaction with other characters. So we decided to tweak a few lines here and there to bring her more in line with what we felt her core personality was -this personality and the meaningful ways in which she expresses herself hasn’t changed at all.
While the thread is now locked, you can read the full post and additional comments through the NIS America forums HERE.
