May contain suggestive themes; Censorship in Japan

Censorship and the video games have always shared an uneasy relationship but, by and large, the industry has been successful with its policy of self-regulation. With a few notable exceptions, Manhunt being perhaps the most obvious example, any controversy related to graphic violence or sexually explicit content has been generated by fabricated moral outrage from the media. Japan on the other hand still suffers from a more stringent policy of censorship relating to games, something that might surprise those who are familiar with the graphic depictions of sex and violence that can be found in adult manga and anime.



In 2006 there was an overhaul of the rating system which led to the current CERO rating system of A, B, C, D and Z. An A rating means that the game is acceptable to any age, B is roughly equivalent to 12 and up, C to 15 and up, D to 17 and up and the Z rating, the only rating regulated by law, is only for those over the age of 18. While the ratings system itself seems quite similar to that of other countries, the differences between the ratings of individual games between different countries can be surprising. Persona 3 and 4 both received only B ratings, making them suitable for ages 12 and up whilst in Europe and America the rating was for 16 and 17 years old respectively. This is likely due to cultural sensitivities over the use of firearms and the perceived image of suicide, especially in America, but this is a rare case. Japan’s rating certification organization is more often than not more stringent than its Western counterparts. Infamous is a particularly curious example of a Z rating, putting it alongside games such as MadWorld and Gears of War.



It isn’t so much the rating system which is curious but rather the censorship of certain titles. In an effort to keep away from a Z rating, games often either have the blood removed or altered in some manner. Uncharted and No More Heroes are two examples of games that are oddly bloodless in their Japanese iterations. And for those who savored the rather macabre sight of Chris or Sheva being decapitated by a chainsaw wielding maniac in Resident Evil 5, be grateful that you didn’t pick up a Japanese copy of the game. Just before the deed is about to be done the camera tastefully pans down to focus on the lower back and legs of the character as their body goes limp. Because of cuts and censorship, all three games avoided the dreaded Z rating.



As did Heavy Rain which had its already tasteful and tame sex scene rendered ridiculously tasteful and incredibly tame. Due to the amount it was cut it was very much a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it scene which left me slightly confused as to whether it had actually occurred, or whether the two characters had simply brushed their bare shoulders together as they lay on the bed. In Japan suggestion rather than depiction of sex seems to be the key. This is often reflected in the games which are misleading labeled as ‘erotic’ by Western audiences. Three such examples were evident at the Tokyo Game Show this year, and if you had kept yourself informed about the games on display, you may have heard of The Idolm@ster 2, Dream Club Zero and GalGun. They differ greatly in the extent of the suggestive content in the game, but none feature anything more graphic than a flash of exposed underwear.



That isn’t to say that there isn’t content that many would baulk at. Of the three, The Idolm@aster 2 is certainly the most famous. The game revolves around managing a Japanese all girls pop group, although it will also feature a male group, and is essentially a rhythm action game with a strong emphasis on choosing costumes, venues and camera angles in order to create your own concerts. Your character, an unnamed rookie producer, chats to the group members and members of the production company. What will make some pause for thought is that your dialogue options range from very sweet and caring to openly perverted. As the girls are as young as 12, this suggestive dialogue is rather inappropriate. The Idolm@aster is rated C.



Dream Club Zero, the sequel to Dream Club, is a love simulation game in which the protagonist is a patron of a maid themed hostess club. Money can be earned through part time jobs and can be spent at titular hostess club to buy drinks, food, and presents for the maids. By answering and asking questions, giving gifts, completing mini games and ordering food, you attempt to win favor with the staff and eventually to form a romantic relationship. This relationship is never depicted in a graphic manner and the game is surprisingly tame in that respect, but there are still enough suggestive elements to ensure that it would likely get a higher rating than the C which it is classified as in Japan. Even leaving aside the already infamous first person perspective of feeding the girl a banana scene, the fact that an important way to curry favor is by consuming alcohol and getting the girl drunk would likely boost the age rating to something closer to the legal age of the country.



Galgun is the game which really garnered the most foreign interest at the show. A new intellectual property, the game is essentially an on-rails shooter. As you go around a school, dozens of female students run at you trying to give you love letters. By shooting them you seem to make them fall more deeply in love with you and their reaction is, to put it rather indelicately, clearly orgasmic. There was also a mini game sequence in which you had to rotate the camera around a girl and shoot her in erogenous areas in order to progress. The demo finished with a boss battle against a tentacle monster that had captured a girl. The game is obviously very tongue-in-cheek about its subject matter and is an effective parody of the erotic anime genre, but that doesn’t really stop it from being slightly disturbing to those unaware of this particular subculture. Though it has yet to be released I would suspect that, barring the inclusion of anything significantly more explicit than was in the demo I played, it will be classified as a C or D.



My point isn’t to make fun of Japanese culture at all, but instead to highlight some of the cultural differences Japanese and Western games and how the perceptions of what is appropriate differ. It isn’t simply that Western games aren’t suggestive rather than explicit in their content. Leisure Suit Larry is a classic example of a game which is suggestive rather than explicitly erotic, but even in that game whilst the content isn’t explicit, the suggestiveness is. It is about a character who wants to have sex. None of the three games mentioned above fall into the same category and, barring games made specifically as erotic games, this is true of most Japanese games.

The rating system in every country stems from the culture of the country itself. Through either censorship or design, games in Japan tend to suggest rather than depict, whether it be a decapitation or oral sex.

Ni No Kuni will finally bring JRPGs to PS3

One of the glaring problems of this generation of consoles has been its failure to produce truly great traditional Japanese RPGs. Certainly there have been plenty of solid efforts, and the likes of Lost Odyssey, Eternal Sonata, Resonance of Fate, and Final Fantasy XIII all have their charms. We have even had excellent deviations from the standard style of Japanese RPGs with the strategy focused Valkyria Chronicles. But looking back at the 128, 32 and 16 bit eras it is hard not to get the impression that when it comes to memorable, high quality traditional Japanese RPGs, we have been left wanting by the HD consoles. Ni No Kuni could be the game that finally overturns that preconception.



The cell-shaded look of the game is simple yet undeniably beautiful. Much of this owes to the excellent art direction which in turns owes to the influence of Studio Ghibli. Ni No Kuni replicates the distinctive character designs of Japan’s most celebrated animation studio and transitions them smoothly from 2D into 3D. The effect is breathtaking. There have been many benchmarks set in the utilization of cell-shaded graphics such as Jet Grind Radio and Viewtiful Joe, and Ni No Kuni seems set to join them as examples of the style executed in a way which truly enhances the experience. What sets it apart from its peers is that whilst cell-shaded games tend to be a little stiff, the animation in Ni No Kuni has some wonderfully smooth touches. The sight of protagonist Oliver’s cape fluttering as he nimbly hops across gaps is impressive. Even the manner in which his walking animation subtly changes as he walks up or trots down steps is mesmerizing. It is these smaller touches that help to breathe life into the world.



This attention to detail has seemingly extended to other parts of the game. In the town sequence for example, Oliver is tasked with talking to some inhabitants and to get a fish in order to bribe the feline guards and gain access to the castle. Rather than having an obtrusive arrow to follow, or a map displayed in the corner to determine where you have to go, you can simply look at your fairy guide Shizuku. He trots out into front of you to indicate the direction you should be going in order to reach your next objective. Shizuku behaves as if he and Oliver are magnets of the same polarity, so when you follow him he pushes on at pretty much the same distance. You are free to ignore him if you please, in which case he tags along behind you still showing the way to progress. This way of traversing towns without the need to clutter the screen is just another small touch, but is indicative of the importance of the immersive nature of the world to developer Level 5.



Unlike its DS counterpart the combat in the PS3 version isn’t turn based. Rather it is a curious combination of direct control and issued commands. The player has direct control of Oliver and can control his movement and melee attacks via button presses, and as the primary spell caster of the party you are able to select magical attacks and support spells through a rotating selection wheel in the bottom left of the screen. This wheel is also used as the method for issuing commands to the monsters in your party and you can order them to attack certain targets, cast spells themselves, and make combined attacks, though they still operate independently without prompting. The battle system seems promising, but the brief time imposed by the demo means that I can’t say more than it has the potential to be interesting.



That is what is really the crux of the matter when it comes to Ni No Kuni; the potential. The demo at the Tokyo Game Show merely showed the audience what it had already expected, that it was going to be a very beautiful game with the quality of animation, music, and storytelling that Studio Ghibli and Level 5 are famous for. But it revealed little about the full scope of the game. The DS demo displayed far more of the scale of the game and the impressive variety of styles of gameplay, and their depth, that were going to be a part of Ni No Kuni. It does seem that, like the DS version, there will be an element of collecting and training monsters to fight alongside you, but whether the console version will include the Nintendogs style of maintenance which the DS version contains is as yet unclear. There are already so many differences between the two versions that there is no reason to consider the PS3 game as a prettier form of the same game. And even though the two games share similar story elements, the narratives are going to be quite different, but just how Level 5 plan to take advantage of a console as opposed to a handheld format is intriguing. The DS version is full of elements which suit the nature of the medium, such as using the touch screen to write out runes, as well as the unique spell book required to play the game. Whether as much effort is made to cater the experience to the console could go some way to determining just how good the game is. As its development started far later than the DS version there could even be concerns as to whether the PS3 game has the same aspiration to have such a full experience, beyond the scope of a traditional Japanese RPG, that is evident in the portable game. But if it has the depth, ambition, and variety of Level 5’s PS2 classic Dark Cloud 2 we could be in for a real treat.



When it is released next year we will find out just how much of the staggering potential this game has can be fulfilled. With many more years of this console generation left to run, we might be about to witness the first indisputably great Japanese RPG of the HD era. It has been a long wait.

Damn you Dead Rising 2

Replayability is a term that doesn’t often get thrown around when talking about the games of this console generation. Games that feature an online multiplayer mode have an implied longevity, but in reality for the majority of games it takes less than a month before consumers move onto the next big game leaving only the truly dedicated behind. Games not featuring multiplayer suffer from an even shorter shrift, and although story focused games such as Bioshock are critically and commercially well received, once they are completed there is little incentive to return to them besides grinding out trophies and achievements or as a nostalgic attempt to recapture the magic of the first experience.



Dead Rising 2, like its predecessor, is a very unconventional game, and rather than suffering through identical multiple playthroughs, each time has a different nuance to it. The first run is a beautiful exercise in futility. You are made aware very quickly that you cannot save everyone but that doesn’t stop you from trying. One of the keys to an addictive and engaging game, whatever the genre, is time and resource management and that is the essence of the first run. It’s about trying to impose order onto chaos. You have to make difficult decisions on a near constant basis with very little downtime to collect your shattered thoughts. It isn’t just about assessing the ability to rescue survivors or take on psychopaths, but it is the minor details that must be obsessed over that really suck you into the game. Is the guide arrow really giving me the fastest route to the destination? Which maintenance room has the gems and the flashlight? Should I try to brush past this zombie or smash him over the head with a Blanka mask? It is the thousands of instantaneous choices that hook the fastidious, and drive the neurotics to the point of madness. Depending on how well you did, completion of the first run either grants the feeling of pure satisfaction, or of mournful regret.



The first run though, isn’t enough. It is a game that practically demands to be played over and over again, feeding nerve impulses with the same addictive cravings as can be found in far less legal products. It always dangles the juicy carrot tantalizingly out of reach before mercilessly beating the player over the head with a hefty stick. Whilst the first run through is the stick, the second run is a much larger stick, but this time you are holding it. Restarting the game around level 35 is a wonderfully sadistic pleasure. The survivors that you failed to save have a second chance at life, the uncertainty over how best to manage your time is replaced by confidence and a greater sense of purpose, and, most satisfyingly, the psychopaths that gave you hell the first time round can be crushed underfoot with dizzying ease. It’s as though the second run is a reward for enduring the pain and stress you suffered to your damaged nerves during the first run. It’s cathartic. You suddenly have more time to fool around and do the things that you never had time to do before whether its gambling, testing out the massive variety of weapons and combo cards, or just torturing zombies in the most hilarious ways your twisted, revenge addled mind can imagine. You haven’t fully savored the game until you’ve chainsaw-paddled your way through a horde of the undead and seen zombies wearing servbot masks slip and fall on your vomit. The second run ends with you having rescued most if not all of the survivors who call for your aid, and you are likely to have dispatched all of the hated psychopaths.



Then the third run appears brandishing a stick so disproportionately large it makes Cloud’s sword look like a toothpick. By the third run through things you enter the serious completionists territory. It’s when you start to take a closer look at the list of trophies and achievements that you swore you wouldn’t even attempt due to the ridiculous level of dedication the majority require. You don’t want to do them, but you don’t want to stop playing Dead Rising. So you find yourself hammering the giant slot machine for a couple of hours in order to get the 6,000,000 dollars you need for the Big Spender trophy. You find yourself checklist and pencil in hand checking off every weapon you have used on a zombie in order to get a measly bronze trophy. You find yourself surrounded by survivor and psychopath timelines spreadsheets as you struggle with the suddenly once more punishing time management. Then, when your last shred of patience and dignity is precariously close to snapping, you start the fourth run.



I have not started it yet. Because to do so would be to subject myself to one of the most arduous, tedious, and soul crushing challenges ever laid before a gamer. Kill 72,000 zombies in one playthrough. Six hours of your life spent running over zombies in an exercise of masochism.



Dead Rising 2 is about a divisive game as you can get. It can entertain and amuse you in ways that other games just don’t do, but it takes pleasure in punishing you too. Will you enjoy it? It’s hard to say. You might only find out by playing the game through several times. Damn you Dead Rising.