English language eroge publishers JAST have recently released the classic Kazoku Keikaku / Family Project, which is said to be fully uncensored as with all such international releases.
However, some doubts have been raised as to just how straightforward a claim this is…
A group involved with an earlier unauthorised translation project holds forth on the matter:
So JAST USA made the claim that the game is “fully uncensored [18+].” Wrong! While most of the game is indeed uncensored, they photoshopped several images of Matsuri, the youngest girl. The following pics have nudity. See the before and after right here!
1. Before and after!
2. Before and after!
3. Before and after!
(This one really doesn’t make sense. She’s wearing two bras! Also, you eventually do see her breasts here, so there’s no excuse for this one!)
It’s the principle that matters. We wouldn’t have complained if there was full disclosure, and we would have still plunked down $50 CAD for the game.
Now we simply feel burned and ripped off. JAST USA already announced that all girls were 18 or over. Why did they have to censor these images? Whatever the case, there is no evidence of anyone being informed of this, so what we have here is a flat-out lie.
Boo, JAST USA! Boo! Makes you wonder how they’ll handle the Nitro+ titles. Send them your complaints, and maybe they’ll include the uncensored images in their upcoming patch!
Just whether this is really “uncensored” or not is likely a niggling question of semantics – if no mosaics appear in the game, but scenes are “localised”, technically all scenes in the game would be uncensored even if this is not really what would be expected.
Since all JAST’s localisations sidestep any age related issues by insisting that all participants are over 18, a solution also used to good effect in the English language ero-anime, it is indeed curious they would feel the need to make these kinds of modifications.
Perhaps next we will see any character with less than a B-cup quietly dropped? There is after all typically no way of telling the age of fictional characters drawn in anime style accurately…
JAST CEO Peter Payne responded thus when we asked him to comment:
Yes, we did have to make some changes for the American market, which is something we always potentially do for every game.
In the Japanese original, there was some vagueness about the age of one of the characters during parts of the game, and since they contained nudity we made the necessary decision to make some small changes.
We hope that fans will take into consideration that these games are licensed for the Western markets which means a different set of potential problem areas for us, and as fans love to play eroge in English, we hope they’ll be understanding when we have to clarify parts of a certain game.
We didn’t mislead anyone and we strove to make we avoided referring to this game as “100% uncensored” since we knew some changes were going to be made.
The story is actually preserved this way, if you play the game, as it’s part of the game that the main character waits for Matsuri to be old enough for a relationship, which we didn’t want to derail by saying she was 18 from the start of the story.
The game is available for download now.
Other observers have complained about the game being tainted by incongruous 4chan references, ruining the atmosphere and hardly seeming to be authentic translations:
Whatever the legal niceties of the eroge market might be, this sort of thing seems much less excusable… Peter Payne promises a patch, saying it was an unfortunate error:
The over 9000 was actually a joke that was supposed to be commented out and we missed it. We’re preparing a 1.1 version of the game and will release it, however we won’t be fixing any of the stuff we tweaked with cause.
An official response is visible here, and in the comments below.
“We didn’t mislead anyone and we strove to make we avoided referring to this game as “100% uncensored” since we knew some changes were going to be made.”
f♥♥k off, it’s either censored or isn’t.
You know what, f♥♥k the ages bump to 18 crap, this is downright censorship on its own right, no excuses. I will never buy an eroge game that’s been translated by the translators where they feel the need to change the ages just so either no one gets arrested (which is bullshit own its own to be arrested about) and justify the ero-scenes in the game. f♥♥k that man, keep the ages as they are in the original and stop bumping their ages, oh and f♥♥k you JAST for what you did, now I have to be extremely cautious because of you with other vendors that sell eroge. GOOD FUCKING JOB
LOL is this all that was ‘altcensored’?
Hacko. 15 minutes (with Photoshoop/GIMP and .packagetype? file editor/s) can save you 15 months or more of waiting for a satisfactory patchfix.\
CG editing…oh wait..
Simply had to agree that the censorship are definitely not needed , what for censor her breasts with the ‘ Ooh I need to get heatstroke in order to let the story progress so I have to wear 2 bras ‘ thing when you have a sex scene with her in the near future ? They might as well cut out the whole Matsuri ‘s sex scene . And please , if you really played the game , Matsuri ain’t anywhere near 18 during the sex scene [ at most 16 / 17 ] .
So why don't we simply not preorder any of their future titles until we can confirm that they haven't been censored and have been given the assurance that they won't do anything like this again? There's the Downhill Night games coming up and is available for preorder right now–Why not cancel our preorders games and choose not to order them until they've been released and confirmed uncensored?
It seems to me that the customers who are most likely to get screwed over from this are the ones that preorder these titles and receive them after they realize that it's been censored. So if we not preorder any games they make in the future, we can tell them that we don't trust them with regards to how they handle this sort of content.