2198: Petting Waifus and Gay Conversion

It came to light today that Nintendo of America apparently hasn't stopped with the localisation edits to the upcoming Fire Emblem Fates that had already been revealed: it seems that the "petting" minigame, during which you can directly interact with the characters in your party — male and female — and improve your relationships with them has been excised completely. Kotaku described this as a "minor change in the name of localisation".

Perhaps it is "minor". Perhaps it is an unnecessary part of the game. Perhaps those who are unaware of the Japanese version won't even know it was there to be missed. But none of this changes the fact that a feature of the game — with this being the first Fire Emblem game where you could directly interact with party members in this way — has been removed entirely from the Western release, giving English speakers a version of the game which is comparitively gimped when placed alongside its original Japanese source material.

Before I go any further, I'd like to talk a little about my general views on localisation. In short: localisation can be helpful and sometimes necessary to ensure that the right audience can access a work. The Ace Attorney series, for example, benefited considerably from its rather drastic localisation, opening it up to a much broader audience than those who would have been comfortable with a protagonist called Naruhodo Ryuuichi rather than Phoenix Wright.

For me, the key thing when considering how drastic localisation changes should or could be is the question of cultural context. Sometimes the inherently Japanese context of a work is important — key examples include titles like the Persona series, which is set in and around Japanese high schools; the Shenmue series, whose entire first game was set in a few lovingly rendered regions of a Japanese town; the Yakuza series, which is about as accurate a simulation of Japanese nightlife as you're going to get, regular street brawls aside; the Senran Kagura series, which is steeped in both Japanese mythology and cultural peculiarities such as student rivalries and, you know, being a ninja; and any number of visual novels you'd care to mention, which often rely heavily on conventions of Japanese culture, particularly with regard to interpersonal relationships.

For other titles, though, it's less important to keep this authentically Japanese feel to it. Something like my perennial favourite the Hyperdimension Neptunia series, for example, works well with the breezy tone of its localisation, though more diehard fans remain dissatisfied with character traits introduced through NIS America's original translations of the PlayStation 3 games prior to Idea Factory International taking matters into their own hands. Likewise, the localisation of Final Fantasy XIV was excellently handled, featuring some well-done and deliberately flowery — almost Shakespearean at times — dialogue that many have noted added considerable depth to the original source's writing. Indeed, in Final Fantasy XIV's case, many of the things introduced through its localisation have found themselves "backported" to the Japanese version, so well-received were they — though I will admit if you know even a bit of Japanese, playing the game with Japanese voices and comparing to the English subtitles can be a little jarring.

Anyway: the point is, I'm not opposed to localisation where it's appropriate or necessary to broaden a work's appeal, and particularly if said work is aimed at mass market but is still riddled with Japanese cultural references no-one but 1) Japanese people and 2) weeaboos will recognise. Where a specifically Japanese tone and feel is necessary to an authentic translation of the work, though, I'd rather the translation be as literal (but readable) as possible where it can.

And so we come to Fire Emblem Fates. What we have here is a title that isn't particularly Japanese in feel or tone, since Fire Emblem has always erred on a stereotypically Western approach to fantasy at times. As such, I wouldn't be opposed to localisation changes that help a broad audience to access, understand and appreciate the work as a whole by toning down its "Japaneseness".

That's not what we're getting though. Fire Emblem Fates' most drastic localisation edits are nothing to do with helping people understand and access the work, but they are everything to do with minimising offense. Take the notorious "gay conversion" scene, for example: the original hoohah over this came about as a result of some Tumblrina spilling her spaghetti everywhere over what she perceived to be a male protagonist spiking the drink of a lesbian character and "converting" her to being straight enough to marry him. In actuality, the scene is about nothing of the sort: not only is the "magic powder" used to improve her battle effectiveness rather than get her into bed — fainting the moment you get close to a man isn't a good way to wage war — but the female character in question, Soleil, might not even be gay in the first place, if the Fire Emblem Wiki is to be believed: all Soleil's romantic interests are male, making the matter perhaps more one of something related to androphobia rather than homosexuality.

And as for the removal of the "petting" minigame, it just feels like a "mother knows best" moment; like we Westerners are somehow expected to be shocked and appalled enough at the prospect of physically interacting with a video game character and faint on the couch in protest.

I don't like this trend. It feels like a reversal of all the good work that was done in the late '90s and early '00s, where games were regularly praised for having the guts to include adult content other than the "usual" violence. I vividly recall Sierra's adventures Police Quest 4 and Gabriel Knight being highlighted as examples of the medium maturing because of their willingness to include the word "fuck" in their scripts, previously never heard in a game; and likewise I remember PC Zone magazine running a feature in one of its early issues about Megatech's hentai games, noting that their willingness to tackle adult themes — just like anime, which was starting to become popular and fashionable in the UK around the same time — was a sign that some game makers were finally starting to acknowledge that games weren't just for kids.

I'm no fan of Fire Emblem generally — largely due to a lack of experience with the series rather than an actual dislike of it — but these types of big changes made for the wrong reasons make me somewhat uncomfortable, because they're sanitising works of art in the name of appeasing small but loud groups of people, many of whom likely wouldn't have played the game in the first place. It's babying the Western audience, protecting them from things that might "offend" us, whereas one of the best things about art — any form of art, whatever the medium — is its ability to challenge us and get us to think about things in a different way. If you wipe out everything that might offend someone somewhere from art, you're left with a castrated culture that increasingly wants to retreat into its "safe spaces" rather than explore the strange, wonderful, terrible and fascinating things writers come up with.

Not to mention the inherent hypocrisy: Western games don't get butchered in this way in the name of "think of the children". Grand Theft Auto features strip club scenes where you can have a first-person view of a lap dance, which provides no gameplay benefits whatsoever. The recent Thief reboot featured a level where you could peek through a hole in a wall and witness an explicit BDSM sex scene — again, for no real reason other than for background decoration. One of the Far Cry games from a while back opened with a first-person sex scene. And there's the multitude of banging scenes in the Witcher series.

I don't object to any of the above — I'm of the opinion that it's nice for games to treat me like an adult who can handle seeing sexual material. But when Western games get away with stuff as explicit as this, whereas Fire Emblem Fates gets butchered for something far tamer than anything the aforementioned games included, I cry foul. It makes me particularly uncomfortable as a fan of Japanese games to feel that titles from certain publishers or localisation teams aren't providing me with an experience that's completely true to the source material. It may still be great, sure — and everything seems to indicate that Fire Emblem Fates is an ambitious, excellent game — but the experience is somewhat marred by the knowledge that I'm missing out on something that other regions are more than happy to include.

I hope this is a trend which fizzles out quickly; the sooner we get over this inane desire to "protect" people from content they might want to see, the better; in the meantime, I'm more than happy to continue supporting developers and publishers who bring titles over mostly if not completely unscathed: groups like Idea Factory International, Marvelous Europe, Koei Tecmo (with the exception of Dead or Alive Xtreme 3, of course), XSEED Games and latter-day NIS America.

"Gaming needs to grow up," the argument frequently runs. Well, for that to happen, you need to start acknowledging players like adults first.