Stop the censorship of Japanese Nintendo games in western regions.

 In gaming, there are 2 kinds of censorship.

The first one is censorship in order to abide the law of a certain country.
To give an example, the portrayal of swastikas in Germany is strictly prohibited
and therefore, games set during WWII have all the swastikas removed in the German release. While I do not support this censorship (as it damages the authenticity of a game), there is nothing one can do to change this at the moment.

The second one, however, is of a far more disrespectul and redundant nature:
Censorship in the name of "cultural differences". This kind of censorship is applied when video game publishers fear that leaving a game in its original state (in our case, leaving it as it was released in Japan) could lead to serious financial losses, when compared to releasing "adjusted" games.
Calling censorship "adjustments" in a euphemistic manner is something that Nintendo has been very prone to in recent years.

This petition addresses anyone who is of the opinion that the recent censorship in Japanese Nintendo games that are released in the west is something that should not be supported as well as those who reject censorship in entertainment media in general.
In the following, I will present you three reasons that point out the redudancy and impudence of this kind of censorship. Naturally, I intend to offer examples in recent and future gaming history afterwards.


Video games are

1. the intellectual property of their respective developers. This one should be clear to everyone. Games are a form of creative work and therefore, they can and should be considered a piece of art. "Adjustments" of any kind, no matter how small or big, destroy the artistic integrity of video games and should not be supported. In some games, entire characters are (partially) rewritten and dialoges, terms and character names are changed to "create a better experience (for the culturally inexperienced western gamer)".
   While I do acknowledge that a direct translation from Japanese to English or other languages would sound awkward, this is no justification to alter the ingame text with the intention to censor certain aspects of it.
   
   
2. a means of cultural exchange and therefore of utmost importance.
   Cultural differences exist - and that is a good thing. Expanding one's horizon by learning about different cultures and societies is, in my opinion, very important and video games are a medium that offer a chance to, in this case, learn about Japanese culture, society and the fact that there is a difference in the acceptance of certain notions and circumstances.
   But how can one call this a cultural exchange if gamers do only get to experience the aspects of a foreign culture that the west perceives as "good" and "acceptable"? If questions like "Oh, I don't mind this but other people might be a bit offended... Why are Japanese consumers okay with this? Let's try to look it up" come up (although this one is really idealized, the intention behind it should be clear), then this is the one thing western publishers should support.
3. a product whose financial success is heavily dependent on the respective target audience.
   Most Nintendo games that are censored in the West can be considered niche titles that, although it is unfortunate, will never (or at least not in the near future) be as popular as franchises like Super Mario, Pokemon or Zelda. As of now, they are created for a specific target audience that does not consist of children anymore. Nintendo's localization teams are censoring certain aspects of these niche titles with the intention of lowering the age ratings and gaining more profit. Sometimes, they even censor aspects of the very few R18 games they publish without the intention of lowering age ratings.
   It is unclear how lowered age ratings would greatly increase the sales of these niche titles. The increase in profit would be negligible compared to the harmed reputation and the loss of longtime fans who cannot support this censorship anymore. I would even go so far and assume that there are more people that do not purchase censored games than new customers that are "attracted" by the changes made in the censorship process.

By censoring a game, one does create more backlash than releasing the game in its original state. Nowadays, people tend to get offended very easily.
They are offended by the most minor and trivial things possible. Although "minor" and "trivial" are rather relative (depending on one's personal point of view), those who are offended by the following examples are not likely expected to be a part of the games' intended target audiences.


Examples of (expected) censorship in past, present and future games that could have been avoided when keeping the reasons mentioned above in mind, no matter how insignificant the censorship appears to be:

Fire Emblem Awakening

• Altered dialogues, for example Henry's "darker" dialogues
  or personality changes, for example Nowi, who was changed from a 1000 year old dragon that looked like and had the mindset of a child, to someone who only acted like a child. This was possibly due the marriage function in the game, but keep in mind that leaving her with her original mindset would have been acceptable since the game portrays a medieval world that is not even remotely close to modern society. Furthermore, all the marriage options are completely optional.
  
  
  
• Removal of voice options for the the avatar character that can be created by the player. Again, only the childish sounding voices were removed. Again, these voices were fully optional and there was no reason to remove them.
  Also, the option to create a silent protagonist was removed. If this was due to the laziness of the localization team (the script had to be rewritten accordingly) or to the "suggestions" of the localization team that such an option would throw off western gamers, is unclear.
• Name changes. When transcribing names from a Japanese game set in a fictional world, it is acceptable to change names like クロム (Kuromu) to Krom or Chrom, since it is basically the same, the only difference is that it sounds better in our ears. However, changing names into something completely different is not acceptable.
  ノノ (Nono) to Nowi, ティアモ (Tiamo) to Cordelia and the list goes on.
• Sariya's / Tharja's censorship. This kind of censorship has the most obvious and stupid reason at the same time. I bet the localization teams did not think that the censored version actually looks more suggestive than the original.

Bravely Default

• Optional costume censorship. See above. No words are needed to describe the redundancy of this one.
  
  

Xenoblade Chronicles X

• Removal of the bust slider in the western relase of the game. This was probably to lower the age rating, but I highly doubt leaving this integral feature of the character editor in the game would have harmed the sales of the game. See reason 3, especially age ratings and target audience.
  
  
• The altering of optional costumes that can be worn by the character Lyn.
  Opinions will differ on this matter, but let me say this:
  Aside from the reasons 1 to 3 mentioned above, this makes no sense when looking at the consistency of the game. The character is only 13 years old, but is part of the same military organization that the other female character belong to. In this case, costumes should look the same on every character. From this point of view, there is no "sexualization of minors", as many people like to call it. For this to be an issue, Lyn would've needed to be a real person.
  Also, no footage indicates that these costumes are compulsory elements in the game. Like mentioned above, this is censorship of optional content.
  This censorship led to the removal of the bust slider, thus limiting the creativity and options of the consumer.
• The change of the BLADE acronym from one with religious references to a rather generic one. Xeno-games are known for religious references and motifs.
  Knowing Nintendo, it is possible that they changed it because of this reason, however, in this case, it is likely that they just wanted a name that sounded "more" English than the other one. See reason 1 above. Considering that many western gamers are not even native speakers of the English language, this is not acceptable. The controllable mechas in this game were also changed from "Dolls" to "Skells", for the same redundant reason.

Fatal Frame 5

• Once again, the alteration of costumes. During some parts of the game, the playable heroines only wear relatively skimpy bikinis as they wander through the dark environments. In this case, they are no optional feature, but exist to cause discomfort in the player. Less clothing is often associated with vulnerability. Considering that this is a horror game whose sole purpose is to create a frightening experience and cause discomfort in the player and that these bikinis only enhance this feeling, this removal and the addition of Nintendo costumes is outright insulting.
  
  

Future releases like Fire Emblem: Fates, Shin Megami Tensei x Fire Emblem and Bravely Second (note that these are mostly based on speculation):

• Name changes in Fire Emblem: Fates.  I cannot fathom the reasoning behind this one. Was this due to Karl Marx being one of the founders of communism? But then, why is this Marx acceptable?
  Because he is old and no one cares about him anymore? In my opinion, these inconsistiencies even within Nintendo's internal censorship policies make the whole issue so ridiculous.
  
  
• The possible removal of the so called "skinship" feature in Fire Emblem: Fates.
  This is an optional feature in the game which lets the player increase the affection points between the player's avatar and the character theye desire to marry by rubbing their faces with the Touchpen. Features like this are more common in Japanese games that never see a western release and some fans of the Fire Emblem franchise do not welcome it, but like so many things affected by censorship, this feature is fully optional and should not be removed, especially when looking at reasons 1 and 2.
• The possible changes made to the age of certain characters in Fire Emblem: Fates. Refer to the similar point above. Fire Emblem: Fates is set in a medieval world, does NOT intend to promote child marriage and again, marrying certain characters is completely optional.
  
  
  
• The possible censorship in Shin Megami Tensei x Fire Emblem, Bravely Second and other games from Japan:
  Little is known about SMT x FE, but the game is set in a modern-day Japan and art design, story and more seem, of course, very Japanese. Because of this, I fear that localization team will screw up in more than one way.
  Be it a goofy translation, censoring of costumes, changing of names, it does not matter. Bravely Second will most likely feature pointless costume censorship again.

If the current censorship rampages continue, I fear for the worst. What has become of the western gaming scene? Publishers try to appease a crowd that is not a target audience of their respective games and believe that their censorship methods actually increase the sales in western regions.
Backlash from diehard fans is casually accepted and games get butchered continuously. I am not trying to blame it all on the current trend called SJWs and "Femnazis", the video game publishers and localization teams who are stuck in their baseless and outdated beliefs are even more responsible for this situation.

Therefore,  this petition demands the following solutions:

1. Nintendo has to put the removed content back into Xenoblade Chronicles X as well as remove all censorship in it.

2. Nintendo has to ensure that none of the upcoming releases get censored because of "adjustments due to cultural differences". Also, the translated text needs substantial quality control.

3. We want to establish a continuous dialogue between localization teams and the consumers. We think that publishers and localization teams alone cannot know what makes us or prevents us from buying a game without exchanging a few words. Their estimated financial losses are all based on assumptions and while this is common for a profit-orientated company, we think Nintendo should be ahead of their competition for once and talk to us directly. Maybe a new website or platform could be created, specifically for this dialogue.

or alternatively
3. Nintendo has to rename their localization teams into "translation teams" and these new translation teams should not localize, but only translate games.

If you think the same, please support this petition! I realize that none of these demands will be taken into consideration by NoA or NoE, but the most important thing is to never stop talking about this issue.

Attention is what we need!
Thank you for reading this petition until the end.

A few personal words from me:

I've been a Nintendo fan since the age of 4 and ever since then, gaming has been my favorite hobby to this day. I was fascinated by all the different worlds, settings, music, gameplay elements and so on. Naturally, I didn't realize or care about censorship back then. But as time went on, I gained access to the internet and suddenly realized that I was missing out on so many things that were lost in localization. I still didn't care much about it, though, I shrugged it off and was like "meh, I don't need this stuff anyway, the game is fun as it is". I didn't think about it too much.
Then, one day, I thought about the "why". Why is so much content removed when bringing a Japanese game to the western market? Why is so much stuff changed?
Cultural differences was the answer.
I was furious. Not the "throwing my controller against the wall and screaming like an ape"-kind of furious, but the silent "why? this makes no sense? are they stupid?"-kind of furious that stays inside you. I thought about how they wanted to tell us what's acceptable and what not. Like a parent lecturing a child with a wagging finger. When I realized that the real reason was to prevent non-existent financial losses, my hate for censorship became even stronger.
What ultimately drove me to write this petition was the fact that Xenoblade Chronicles X, a game that I've waited for ever since the first announcement, was affectet by this absolutely stupid, uneccessary, incomprehensible and greedy censorship that doesn't increase the sales in any way.
I've sent a complaint email to Nintendo a few weeks ago. They said that "...cultural adjustments exist and HAVE to exist. ..." How about no? I wasn't expecting a serious answer from them, but still...