And yet they still expected me to know the ingredients necessary to cook daigaku imo...
Haha, oh yeah. I was definitely stumped a few times too. (My point is more that gamers are mad about changes and censorship, but they don't realize that the game has already been changed a lot in the process of localization. It's a huge blind spot that's only there because of homophobia/racism/transphobia/whatever anti-SJW idea du jour, not out of any actual concern for accuracy.)
I see people bitching about this on the SMT Subreddit (Not surprising, the place always did remind me of /v/)
I feel like "Resetera" has become the new "Ess Jay Dubyas", as people complaining about censoring have a habit of mentioning Era.
Nobody's talking about it in the P5 Sub.
ughhhh that sub is freaking awful. I subscribe to it to keep up with news and fan projects, but it really makes me not want to interact with SMT/Persona fandom. Oof.
On one hand, it's good that they're starting to be aware those homophobic scenes are not okay, but to change it just in localisation feels like they learned the wrong lesson here. Like it's us westerners that are "too sensitive" or whatever.
I mean, this is specifically Atlus West, not Atlus Japan. West can't exactly change the game themselves; they can only switch around the localization to be a closer match to social mores while attempting to stay true to the spirit of the work. I don't necessarily expect the source material to be up to our standards when it comes to representation and stereotypes, considering the difficulties LGBTQIA people face in Japan right now and the way the society differs so heavily from our own, but stuff that's as blatant as the gay guys in P5 (especially when they've also had sympathetic characters like Lala or Kanji in the original P4) is truly frustrating.
(Most of this is not a response to you, specifically, crimilde; it's more my thoughts after catching up on the thread. Just wanted to make that clear.)
I think it's particularly unrealistic to think that the devs would patch out the homophobic content, not just because Japanese society, queer activism, and social mores are so different from are own in many ways, but also because it's simply not a thing that's done. Hell, they didn't patch the game at all, iirc; expecting the removal of homophobia isn't exactly reasonable. Hell, from what I can tell, Atlus rarely ever patches their games; they'll do updated rereleases like P5R or P4G, but patches aren't particularly common. It isn't "you have to pay $60 to get rid of homophobia, fuck you," it's "hey, we at the localization team know this sucks, we're doing what we can and we're learning, we can't patch something on our own so this is what we *can* do."
I also think it's a bit cynical to see that Atlus West is going to do what they can to mitigate the homophobia and decide that it's not good enough: they're not the ones in charge of the game, they're being tugged in all directions by queer fans and by the anti-SJW fans, and changes likely have to be approved in general by Atlus Japan. What they're doing is an attempt to make things right, and I don't think it valuable to hate them (especially the localizers!) for being imperfect. We have to recognize there's a huge difference between Atlus West (the localizers) and Atlus Japan (the actual developers). West can only do so much, you know?
It's important to critique the media we consume, to hold content creators responsible. It's also a very personal decision to continue or cease consuming media that has problematic elements that impact you. What one person may let slide, even while criticizing it, another person won't want to continue with. That's completely fine, but I think we also have to understand that this road to progress is frustratingly slow. Atlus West going to bat for us is, by all means, a good thing: it shows that they hear us, that they want to help out, that they're pushing back on Atlus Japan. It doesn't excuse the homophobia (or in Catherine: Full Body's case, transphobia), and I'm not trying to excuse it. I was intensely frustrated, myself, with the stereotypes in P5, with how Kanji was treated after the original P4 release, and so on. Sadly, I think that the majority of changes will need to come from Japanese citizens discussing the game, as it's pretty rare for Japanese devs to keep a close eye on international gamer opinions. It's becoming more common, but it's still not quite as important, and I'd bet that goes even moreso for a game series that's so tied to Japanese daily life.
I'm not saying we need to praise Atlus West or extol their virtues or anything, but I think it's important to remember perspective: this is progress.
www.resetera.com
