I see we have reached the point where people are going to start saying “Okay, its time for everyone stop having fun” and writing about how the game isn’t that big of deal.
Point being: let’s not listen to the shrieking streamers and strange subsection of Japanese game defenders, and just calm down about some naked adult bodies standing around in a character creator, shall we? It’s time games got comfortable with the human form.
Let’s be frank: The real point is that the writer wants to feel superior to both of these demographics. Not that I support either, but this is just someone acting smug and superior and wanting a cookie for it. But I gotta say that the more blatant aspect is this ridiculous take that keeps popping up in modern criticism:
But there’s also plain old casual nudity—something that US cinema has historically shied away from (particularly with the male form), but that European cinema has been way more comfortable with for years. The whole gap between how the US and European ratings boards react to nudity is pretty well documented, and well summarised in this piece written at Quartz. Baldur’s Gate 3 is, of course, a European-made game, and we—yep, even us fusty old Brits—are historically a lot more relaxed about that kind of stuff.
Which is just absurd. I’m not North American, but let me tell you, if I see any plain dicks or pussy in a movie or TV series or game, it will be A Thing for me. I won’t just sit there and act like a robot thinking “That’s just a organic human body, much like mine, there’s nothing unusual about that”. There’s no homogenous understanding in Europe, or South America or in any other non-US country where full blown nudity is just a casual happening that anyone would not bat an eye at, adult or not.
Furthermore:
Streamers are “shocked” by the nudity? Well, that’s because they’re either a) sheltered people whose lives are largely based in their bedrooms and/or b) aware of the fact that looking aghast, being shocked, and squealing at the sight of a willy or tuft of pubes counts as entertainment. It’s a tale as old as PewDiePie: overreact on camera to things that happen in a game, and you’ll keep viewers, especially younger ones, engaged.
Whether it’s a performance or genuine shock, or a bit of both, video game streamers exist in a pretty particular bubble whose reactions aren’t exactly a gauge of society at large.
I won’t deny that streamers overact for views and content, but honestly? Fuck this guy. If I were playing by myself and saw a random cock dangling on my screen, I would have a reaction and feel flustered. If I were playing in front of hundreds, maybe thousands of strangers online? You can bet your ass that I would have a mini-anxiety attack. If the average streamer is a "sheltered people whose lives are largely based in their bedrooms " (again, fuck this writer) then that’s even more reason to not make light of a moment of panic. Having a hobby where you get to interact with people beyond your screen instead of face-to-face can be a mirror, but it also opens you to a lot of repercussions and a human, if overblown reaction like this being talked down is genuinely infuriating.
Frankly, this is just a plain asshole of a person, and the fact that every other writing of theirs on BG3 is “Its not that good, everyone” just solidifies my stance.
I won’t deny that streamers overact for views and content…
The reason why streamers freak out about bob’s and vagene is because Twitch has some pretty hardcore rules about what’s acceptable and what’s not. Nudity and sexual content are only allowed in unmodded games. Any nudity or sexual content is a bannable offense if the game has been modded or if the streamer brings too much attention to it. Streams that are rated “for mature audiences” don’t give streamers a free pass to in-game nudity, they just make the rules slightly more flexible.
Vinny Vinesauce got banned a few years ago for a few frames of Bladerunner 2049 titty because it was part of an overhaul mod that turned Serious Sam into a Bladerunner game. These were tit pics that were in the movie. Didn’t matter to twitch, he still got a temp ban. When a streamer stops the stream to delete the stream vod, that’s not “playing it up” or prudishness, that’s them trying to keep their ass in one piece.
Hell. I watch a number of furry streamers, some of whom openly joke about fetishes and kinks,and they freak out about nudity on stream.
Right. I was adding onto the statement the person I replied to was making. The original article talks about how streamers pretend to be all shocked and appalled by Japanese nudity but are unfazed by baldurs gate. My point is that streamers have to be serious about nudity because twitch can and will ban them for it.
I was watching a streamer who had nudity off and bare breasts still flashed on stream while the game loaded in. So, she no longer switches the stream to show the game before loading a save for the first time that day. And she deleted the clip and the VOD to cover her own ass from Twitch. Not sure if the game was, or can be, fixed for this, but the checkbox isn't the panacea most think it is.
I think you hit the nail on the head with how surprised someone might be when they are streaming to a large crowd. I can account for the 10 or so people that watch my buddy stream being adults because I have played with most of them. A big streamer can’t know their audience and if that provided their income surprise nudity could have a real impact
If I were playing by myself and saw a random cock dangling on my screen, I would have a reaction and feel flustered.
You’re missing something big: it’s NOT a surprise. Literally the first thing that happens when you open the game for the first time is it asks you if you want to enable nudity. You have to answer that question before you even get to the main menu.
“Show Nudity” is still very vague. For any other videogame, it’d mean at best some nipples. The instance of full frontal in any media is extremely rare, hence the reactions are still justified. It would be a surprise, yes.
If you’re bothered by any kind of nudity, just say no when you’re asked if you want nudity. It’s really not complicated. It sounds like the only way to satisfy you is for the game to offer the exact amount of nudity you’re comfortable with and not a bit more.
I mean, that's sort of how it's acceptable at all, right? It's almost entirely about the fact that it's like accepted to lust after them or hit on them and the rest that would actually get them busted is not explicitly shown, but there's enough there for you to understand that it's gross.
And I love Japanese games, but even still, currently I'm playing Apollo Justice Ace Attorney, and there are scenes where characters comment on the beauty and attractiveness of Trucy (with no reprimanding from any other character), a 15 year old girl explicitly mentioned to not even be in high school yet.
That's not explicit, her character design isn't sexy, but the behavior of much older men lusting after a pre-high schooler is totally normalized. I think that's more of what you'll see commonly.
There aren’t even correct anymore. Japan changed their national age of consent to 16, and it was functionally never as low as 13 because each prefecture had it set at 16 before that. The old, national age of consent was so no prefecture could ever go below that age.
Not 13 any more. It’s officially 16 now, and that old age of 13 never applied to anyone because every prefecture had a prefectural age of consent set at 16, and the old, national age of consent WAS 13 so no prefecture could go below that. There was NO WHERE in Japan where it was actually legal to have sex with a 13 year old because no prefecture allowed it.
AoC is not the same as morally appropriate. I am willing to bet that most of Japan would not be ok with a 65 year old man pursuing a 15 year old.
Also prefectures have different ages of consent just like US states do so in much of Japan you really can’t have sex with a 13 year old even if that is the age of consent.
I can read Japanese, so I can check the Japanese version and see what age they used there. Just one example is fine.
I know that there is lolicon in Japan, but this doesn’t get released in the west, nor is it intended for a western audience.
I’m talking about a game published with western audience in mind, that has a scene involving a minor that you consider to be worse than an implicit sex scene with a bear.
The games that tend to get criticism are games like the dead or alive xtreme volleyball series. Do you think those games deserve the criticism they get while bg3 doesn’t?
I also can speak and read Japanese because I’ve lived here for over 20 years. There are many games that aren’t visual novels that have had characters specially aged up for their western releases.
And stop moving the goalposts. The article was clearly talking about games that have been released in the west, originally intended to be or no.
Rapelay is just straight up porn and wasnt even intended to reach the west, and any western equivalent would get the same treatment because rape porn and lolicon altogether is illegal in the west. I don’t think anyone is upset about that game being banned or censored. It is not even being distributed in Japan anymore.
But westerners aren’t complaining about this game. They are complaining that the female characters wear too skimpy outfits or that anime characters look too young in Japanese games like resident evil.
Was it a bear sex scene in that a player character has sex with a non sophont bear, or was it a bear sex scene where a player character has sex with a sophont druid in the shape of a bear. These are so incredibly different things that it needs to be stated before I can form an opinion.
Well if you want to manufacture outrage and put zero further thought into your philosophies and convictions that is certainly one of the first takes you might stumble across.
I mean, you’re complaining about bestiality in a game and then don’t care about consent? A strange take to be sure.
Oh alright. So completely fine then, from the sounds of it. That being the case im realizing a lot of people don’t actually understand consent or why bestiality is bad.
I am going to just leave this here. It’s a rough link just as a warning as it discusses a Japanese game where raping a 12 year old is part of the game.
There are a lot of reasons to love the Mass Effect games, but even after reading the article, my answer to the question it poses is, "Yeah, tons." The things this article cites as novel are pretty much universal to video game enemy design, and I can't think of anything that any Mass Effect game invented here.
Are people really mad about nudity, or are they just mad that it’s not all het nudity?
Edit: ok so after some research, looks like full nudity is an optional setting, and all body models (male or female) can have dicks or vulvas. Which makes me think there’s an anti trans component to complaints as well.
They’re mad that Japanese games get criticism for sexual themes, but not western ones. Examples being Dead or Alive and Street fighter characters where panties and bikinis are shown. No one is mad at the nudity itself of BG3.
Do these people get mad about the nudity in those games in general, or do they get mad about those games almost exclusively reserving that nudity for women? Because there is a difference. I haven’t played those games so I’m genuinely curious.
The type celebrating nudity in baldurs gate are usually prudes who argue for censorship, oppose nudity and sexual content, etc when it comes to Japanese games. Sane people are pointing out this obvious hypocrisy.
It’s not hypocrisy because a lot of that “censorship” is over things like characters that are underage or consent issues.
You really wanna talk about “censorship,” well, in Japan, in Cyperpunk 2077, the entire section that lets you pick your genitals is cut out of the console releases and you can’t get the dildo weapon because you’re not allowed to show genitalia on consoles because consoles are seen as being “for children.”
Or in pretty much anything. I saw The Shape of Water in the theater when it came out, and there’s a sex scene in it. They literally blurred the few seconds of the man’s naked butt. It was very surreal.
In Street Fighter at least, there’s at least as much male skin shown as female… more, really, due to the fact that males are allowed to go bare chested. From Ryu’s chest bush popping out of his gi, to Balrog wearing nothing but a pair of shorts, there’s no shortage of male skin in those games.
For me, it’s definitely option 2. I really like the way Dark Souls handles it, where the armor sets looks the same on both genders, and everyone can be as tart or as modest as they like.
Maybe there’s a case to be made for a setting in BG3 that pixelates the naughty bits, but looking through youtube comments on BG3 romance scenes (for science!), most people seem to think the nudity is funny more than anything else. The few complaints about nudity really seem to be about the fact that they have to look at a dick/gay couple, which i don’t have too much sympathy for.
“Sexual themes” in those games seem to exist just for the gratification of the (het male) player, as evidenced by the people getting mad when a game desexualises its characters after release. I haven’t played baldurs Gate but as far as I can tell nudity in the game isn’t there just for the eyes of the player, it serves a purpose in-game and in-story. edit: and at times (like in the character creator) it’s not sexual at all
I imagine some are genuinely mad about the nudity, I imagine. Remember “video games are for children” and “if a child sees a nipple (let alone a penis!) the apocalypse will begin”. Just because gamers are gamers doesn’t mean they’re not still part of the larger culture.
It all reminds me of the controversy among older TES fans over the lack of nudity in TES3: Morrowind. There was a lot of European vs. American in those threads (and we had a genuinely cross-pond fandom back in those days). Arena and Daggerfall had nudity, and a few of our European posters expressed indignation over the change.
For some people, talking about this is fun. Let them have it. For some people who are interested in this it’s not annoying at all.
I don’t click on articles I don’t care about and find pointless. I let the people who care about [insert interest I find boring here] talk about it without telling them they’re showcasing the most annoying parts of autistic people, or conversely showcasing the worst shallow impulses of humanity instead of caring about something really important. People are allowed to have interests that aren’t historymaking and activism, and interests that many others do not share.
I have autism and admittedly feel kind of on the defense because of your comment. I don’t go around talking about the most annoying aspects of neurotypicals or any other demographic, I thought that was kind of a jerkish and (sometimes low-key) discriminatory thing to do. Also, one social rule I learned is to live and let live and I tend not to handle the whole “it’s basically nothing, can’t believe someone cares about this” kind of comment well. Kind of disappointed your comment has this many upvotes.
I somewhat agree with the sentiment behind the article, but…
And when you actually pick up the controller and play one of them, you begin to feel like you’ve been through the same gameplay loop as many other games this generation: Tales Of Arise, Scarlet Nexus, Nier Automata, Valkyrie Elysium, YS 8 and 9; they’re all essentially the same action game with different spices and aesthetic fluff.
Games like Tales and NieR (both long-running franchises) have never tried to be anything but action RPGs—not to mention NieR, which I’d honestly just call a straight up Platinum action game. I’d actually call NieR closer to Elden Ring than it is to Tales, and yet the author isn’t out here calling Elden Ring a JRPG. What more does NieR have in common with Tales or Ys than it does with Elden Ring besides country of origin? Does JRPG mean “game with anime-ish art style”? Maybe it’s the art style, but even that’s a bit of a stretch to me.
Which I think strikes at the heart of the matter: what defines a JRPG? Is it the country it came from? Obviously not. There’s a very specific style of game that “JRPG” refers to, and it’s a style that was very popular in the 90s and 00s. Obviously games are still made in that style: I could just as easily show a JRPG renaissance by namedropping Dragon Quest XI, Xenoblade, Yakuza: Like A Dragon, Persona 5, all the Trails games, etc. But the author is basing his notions of what a JRPG is solely on trends from 20+ years ago. Trends change. People change. Maybe in 20 years, people will be whining about whatever Japan is putting out then and saying “WHY CAN’T JAPAN GO BACK TO WHAT THEY DID RIGHT AND MAKE ANOTHER TALES GAME LIKE TALES OF ARISE?”.
Yes, I think developers, studios, and even industries should take pride in where they’ve been creatively, and that’s where I agree with the author. That said, why can’t we let new games be new games? People are still making plenty of traditional JRPGs whether they’re made in Japan or not (hi chained echoes and edge of eternity), so why bother the developers who don’t wanna make those games and essentially tell them “you need to get over your internalized xenophobia”? It’s possible they don’t have internalized xenophobia like this article is suggesting, maybe they’re just tired of people putting them in a box.
And when you actually pick up the controller and play one of them, you begin to feel like you’ve been through the same gameplay loop as many other games this generation: Tales Of Arise, Scarlet Nexus, Nier Automata, Valkyrie Elysium, YS 8 and 9; they’re all essentially the same action game with different spices and aesthetic fluff.
I'd quote the same fragment as you, and I'll add:
It's the same for western RPGs
All action RPG games feel "samey" (think Gothic, The Elder Scrolls, Elex, Two Worlds...) they’re all essentially the same game with different spices and aesthetic fluff.
All dungeon crawlers (Diablo, Torchlight, Path of Exile, Titan Quest, Sacred) they’re all essentially the same game with different spices and aesthetic fluff.
All DnD games are exactly the same (Baldurgs Gate, Neverwinter Night, Icewind Dale, PlaneEscape, Pillars of Eternity, Tyranny, Dragon Age...) they’re all essentially the same game with different spices and aesthetic fluff.
Anyways, the article is about JRPGs, but the author for some reason only focuses on action games that are not JRPGs (Scarlet Nexus, Nier, Valkyrie Elisum, Ys 8, etc...)
It's like writing an article about chess, but complain about checkers
FFs 1-5 were fairly generic DnD style worlds. It wasn’t until 6 that the cyberpunk/fantasy mix came in then I’d argue 8 was the first one where some of the designs in the world looked very Japanese.
Seeing Nier Automata on this list makes me think the author hasn’t finished it. I’m not sure how you finish a full playthrough and come away with “2B’s combat was kind of basic” while ignoring everything else it was doing.
When I bough Bayonetta 1+2 for the Wii U I was expecting something close to Devil May Cry (They share the same director and almost the same developing team, after all) but it was a huge disappointment everything is so dumbed down and simple that is not even fun. People only likes it because they are satisfied with the over-the-top action and Bayonetta one-liners and that's all.
My main complains with Bayonetta are the following:
All the weapons feel the same, where the only change is the attack speed, their cosmetic appearance and in some cases some minor and useless changes, like if you hold the attack buttons and the weapons you have equiped are fireweapons, they shoot (with this I mean combos, like PPPK, KKKPK, etc... do the same with every weapon, except maybe the Kulshedra, the extremely basic whip, the weapons do not feel unique in any meaningful way, they all have the same moveset and combos. In Devil May Cry each weapon is unique, with their own moveset and combos, and their moveset changes depending on the style you have active, for extra depth)
Finding the secret stuff is too easy (except for some verses and Alfheim, that require some backtrack at specific points, but finding the vinyls to get new weapons is too easy)
Speaking of the Alfheims, they are not even chanllenging (compared to the Secret Missions in Devil May Cry)
Bayonetta 2 is even worse, everything is way more simplistic and easy than the first one, I haven't bothered with Bayonetta 3
Karlach’s chest glowing from the Infernal Engine she uses as a heart
And that’s it. They’re not particularly good looking or anything. Other than Karlach, the nudity is quite generic and unsexy.
I feel like having full nudity is just a cheap gimmick that doesn’t add anything of value. The only mainstream game I’ve played that even uses nudity as a mechanic to do something special is Elden Ring and you’re not even totally nude in that game.
I'm not sure I'd trust modern CA to do Med3 justice. The new style of Total War is just a different beast from the sublime RTW/Med2 era.
Lots of little things changed, and it just 'hits different'. Probably the biggest difference is just that every single fight after the first 20 turns will be a 20 stack vs a 20 stack, and every single battle is life or death for that army. It makes the campaign much faster paced - declare war, wipe stack, capture cities for 3 turns until the AI magics up another 20 stack.
In the original Med2, since there wasn't automatic replenishment, there were often battles between smaller stacks, even in late game, as they were sent from the backline to reinforce the large armies on the front. Led to some of my greatest memories trying to keep some random crossbowmen and cavalry alive against some ambushing enemy infantry they wandered into. The need for manual reinforcement led to natural pauses in wars and gave the losing side a chance to regroup without relying on the insane AI bonuses of the modern TW games - and I do mean insane; they'll have multiple full stacks supplied from a single settlement.
The change that I always notice whenever I jump between earlier and later TW is the addition of hit points and how it really feels line it blunts a lot of impacts.
I mean, compare a heavy cavalry charge in Medieval 2 to one in Total Warhammer. A properly formed unit of Teutonic Knights is a devastating hammer blow that can shatter an enemy army since the charge bonus massively increases the chance to kill. Meanwhile, Empire Knights can get a proper rear charge against basic infantry and despite how far those rats get flung, they’ll all get back up because all the charge does is make the line go down faster.
The other big impact I find with this change is it makes the rout really annoying to deal with. In early total war, you always want some cavalry to pursue fleeing enemies since once they’re broken it won’t take much to capture or kill them and preventing those armies from regrouping really matters. Meanwhile, in modern total war, pursuing fleeing enemies never seems to result in significant damage because instead of capturing fleeing enemies you’re just making the line go down again.
I am not sure how one gets that far into an analysis of RPGs, J or otherwise, without even once mentioning characters, stories or themes.
Those games have never really been about mechanics to me. Sure, since they’re usually so long, they’d better try to keep things entertaining enough, but there’s a lot more to them (good ones, anyway).
I honestly don’t care much about the J, and even “RPG” seems so broad to me, because many, many games have blurred the line. Starting around end of the 90s when “RPG elements” became a thing. I don’t think it matters much.
The author sounds like they just dislike action games and are judging the games solely based on that. The fact that they call an attack timing minigame in a turn based rpg “one of the most unique gameplay systems in the market” says enough.
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