Dead Space was denied a rating entirely, which meant a console release in Japan was impossible.
Basically, Dead Space was rated “unreleaseble” on the CERO scale, while Stellar Blade, which is arguably gorier and sexier, is now getting the greenlight.
Idk about stellar blade’s content, but CERO is notoriously really touchy with more “macabre” gore (e.g severed body parts, especially heads, bones sticking out, that kind of thing). I suppose stellar blade just has more “acceptable” gore by CERO standards.
Source: I have worked on the Japanese internationalization for 2 Warhammer 40k games. We didn’t have to remove that much gore, but there’s some specific stuff they will just not budge on.
The offenders were mostly some of our “generic chaos stuff” (containing, amongst other things, “clean” skulls, “not that clean” skulls, and a sprinkle of gore) and guardsmen or other humans models in various states of dismember and/or decay iirc.
Kinda surprised, Nurgle can be pretty fucken grim. Guess thats why some consider it kinda arbitrary, probably a cultural barrier in there meaning a lot of westerners see it as arbitrary. Probably makes some sense on an internal level.
The guidelines we had were mostly about bones iirc, especially if they still had some “meat” on them. I don’t remember anything about organs specifically
Actually I remember that one of our unofficial internal guidelines was basically “if resident evil or DMC does it, we should be good”. And both of these feature some gore but are usually very light on stuff like bones, (humanoid) decapitations, etc. Again, I assume stellar blade follows similar guidelines as these games regarding this stuff, because Sony (their publisher) obviously knows CERO pretty well
Are you saying Dead Space does have a sexy lady? Or that CERO is more lenient on gore for games that do?
Japanese media does get weird with the lewd stuff, but the rules and regulations are just as harsh and unbending on the sexual stuff as they are on violence.
I don’t have a horse in this race, I was making a joke that the difference in the games appears to come down to one having a sexy Lady and one generally doesn’t AFAIK.
I believe Japanese gamers should have just as much access to Dead Space and any other American titles and vise-versa. I imagine the reasoning is along the lines of “video games make people violent” or something, but I think that should be a family or parental decision, not the government.
While I’m at it, I don’t think pornographic or pornographic adjacent content should be available to minors, and I cringe at some of the stuff I see on the Nintendo or Playstation stores, that’s probabaly my most conservative view.
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