I don’t disagree with you at all, but there are a few counterpoints that I think need to be made:

The thing is, you can have localization without censorship. You brought up Akiba’s Trip — I was the lead translator on Akiba’s Trip, and we absolutely localized the crap out of it (and I greatly appreciate the compliment of even bringing it up in this context, BTW!), but we censored nothing. In fact, we added EXTRA…

The backdrop seems a little dark.

Ikue Ohtani also plays Sachiko and Yoshie in the Corpse Party games, and is DAMNED CREEPY in those roles. She’s a really, really good actress with an incredible range of voices and emotions alike.

Return to PopoloCrois isn’t coming out in North America until March 1st. And even in Europe, its digital release is slated for February 18th.

Why not a graphic novel? It’s just as viable a format as a regular novel, and requires just as much creative process to create. In fact, the author(s) need(s) art and design skills in addition to writing skills, so one could argue that it’s a more complex and expressive medium to use for a story like this... unless…

Loom should be way higher up on this list! But at least it’s on the list at all.

I already addressed what I wish Valve to do:

Nice hand-wave.

Importing a Japanese game in Japanese isn’t going to help someone who can’t read Japanese, though. Imagine if this were a book we were talking about — “We’re going to translate this book from another country, but we don’t like this one part, so we’re going to edit it out. But it’s OK, because if you want to read that…

The difference is, you can rent/buy the original, uncensored Scarface if you want to. With a lot of these games, the original is simply unavailable in English — the choice to play the adult version of the game, even as an adult, is not on offer at all.

Yandere Simulator is a work of obvious satire, though. It’s not perversion for perversion’s sake, but perversion for humor and social commentary’s sake. That’s a pretty big difference, which people often tend to ignore — they look at conTENT, but not conTEXT. And context is really the single most important thing there…

Holy crap, LORD! That takes me back. LORD is what convinced me to run my own BBS back in the day, and ultimately inspired me to make a BBS door game of my own in MicroSoft QuickBasic 4.5... which then failed to compile because it was too big (QB45 had a 64k limit on .bas files it could compile, and my source code was…

Yeah, I don’t really see Shadow of the Colossus in this. There doesn’t seem to be any climbing around on bosses, nor do bosses seem to be the only things that can kill you — and those are pretty much the two defining features of SotC.

Hey Patrick, this is Tom. Do you know if the rest of my interview answers are going to be posted in any future articles? And if not, would it be all right if I posted them on our forums? I mentioned to a few people that I answered additional questions, beyond the ones listed in this article, and they’ve expressed some…

That’s correct, they could. And IMHO should. But it would fly in the face of Japanese business practices to do so. And moreover, once again, I feel as though the localizers are taking advantage of these Japanese business practices by making such changes, knowing full well that the original developer won’t mind.

See, and again... I disagree. It sounds ludicrous when you spell it out, sure, but I must again reiterate that the content of the censorship is irrelevant to me — it’s solely a matter of principle. It’s not WHAT was censored, but the fact that ANYTHING was censored.

I don’t entirely disagree. I just feel that the proper thing to do, in that case, would’ve been to not release the game at all.

Yes, I do. Because I work for a localization company myself — I’m the Tom Lipschultz from XSEED that was quoted in the article.

And in cases like this, I do play the unedited version — I don’t purchase games that have been censored, and I advocate others do the same. Ultimately, the only reason censorship continues to occur is because we continue to support the companies responsible for it, so I for one have chosen to stop supporting them and…