Unsurprisingly, the clown “journalists” at Edge Online and Gamasutra immediately reprinted this unsubstantiated rumor without waiting for confirmation. Apparently nobody even blinked at the strangeness of how something can have been “banned” that has not even been published.
The Japan ban definitely has something to do with the ability to dismember fingers. It’s a huge faux paus in their culture to show dismemberment of fingers. Something to do with the yakuza.
Back when the Xbox came out, we were working on a launch title. It involved cartoon characters with four fingers. Japanese localization forced us to remodel every single character in the game with five fingers (four fingers plus thumb) or we couldn’t release the game in their region.
This resulted in a huge effort on our part to re-model every character when we were already done with the game. It also presented an even bigger problem because we had several pre-rendered cutscenes showing the characters with four fingers. We couldn’t re-render these scenes, and we actually had to put a blur filter over the hands of the characters in the cutscenes to get it to pass Japanese certification.
It was by far the most bizarre localization I’ve ever dealt with.
It’s also odd because all Disney characters only have four fingers, and they seem to market just fine in Japan. Do they make Disney put five fingers on all product being sold in Japan? I never really looked into that.
Cutting off a finger is a traditional Yakuza punishment, but I’ve never before heard of a four-fingered cartoon character being a problem in Japan. That’s truly odd.
Disney characters have three fingers in Japan, same as everywhere else. (example)
I completely disbelieve in dismemberment of fingers in a horror game being taboo. Japan has no problem with graphic violence, and plenty of manga and movies that contain yakuza, finger dismemberment and all.
Well, I didn’t dream the whole three month post submission nightmare we went through.
Japan also censored the hell out of all dismemberments in Dead Rising as well:
http://www.qj.net/Dead-Rising-Censored-In-Japan-/pg/49/aid/61103
The Japanese ratings board has a pretty low tolerance for graphic violence – dismemberment and decapitation is almost completely disallowed, especially on humans, and even a significant amount of blood can push you into adults-only territory. Even stuff that seems relatively tame here (like Resistance, which was bloody but not really “gory”) gets cut for violence in Japan.
The Japanese ratings board has a pretty low tolerance for graphic violence – dismemberment and decapitation is almost completely disallowed, especially on humans, and even a significant amount of blood can push you into adults-only territory. Stuff that seems relatively tame here (like Resistance, which was bloody but not especially gory) gets cut for violence in Japan.
I wonder if Kill Bill was G-rated in their theaters after they got done cutting out all the dismemberment. Also, 10 minutes long.
Huh. I had no idea the Japanese games ratings board was so strict on graphic violence. (Although a blanket ban on dismemberment makes more sense to me than a finger-specific one.)
I’ve seen plenty of dismemberment in manga that you can buy at any 7-11 in Japan, so it’s definitely not a restriction that applies outside of games.
And China has a ban on skeletons. Not sure what the deal is (probably something to do with ancestor worship), but even games like WOW have all their skeletons in WOW fully fleshed out.