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We've gone too far into the abyss. There is no turning back from the hell that has been unleashed. http://imgur.com/a/UWMs3 http://amagicrobot.tumblr.com/post/139520237623/in-case-you-didnt-believe-me-earlier WE WILL FERMENT IN LOVE'S PICKLE BARREL ALL OF OUR DAYS In all seriousness though, I've grown increasingly disillusioned with Nintendo of America these past few months and my opinion of them keeps lowering lower and lower the more information I find out about their localization decisions. Several years ago, there were minor things going on. In Fire Emblem Awakening, bonus DLC for Tharja's outfit was edited to cover up her butt, as she was in a bikini and the camera view showed it. A relatively simple change, and perhaps slightly bothersome, but no biggie, right? Something similar happened with Bravely Default. Several characters had skimpy outfits replaced with less skimpy outfits since the characters look childlike. Okay, a simple change and potentially bothersome, but understandable right? Fast forward to 2015. Fatal Frame 5 is being localized. Sweet, people were worried this wouldn't come over. But before I explain that one, there needs to be a bit of context given. Currently, Wii U's either have 8 gigabytes of space or 32 gigabytes of space. The trick is that games don't need to be installed on a Wii U, so this is great news. But NoA decided to bring it over digital only. The game's file size is in the teens, so now only people with certain Wii Us can play it. But that's not all. Several bonus outfits that were rather skimpy in nature were removed and replaced with Nintendo character outfits. Fatal Frame is a horror game, and the new outfits in question don't really fit the game's story. And these edits extend to the story, as several cutscenes showing the main character posing in front of a camera in skimpy outfits were edited to make them less skimpy. This might make a bit of sense, but the thing is, is that the game is already rated M for mature, and to add to that, Fatal Frame's story is about an idol who's uncomfortable with how she's treated and feels like she's being used. By changing this content in the cutscenes, it weakens the uncomfortableness of the scenes in question and thus weakens the story. But that's not all. Shortly after Fatal Frame 5's release, Xenoblade Chronicles X came out. But a few things were edited and changed from that. Several skimpy outfits were removed for both male and female characters, with special focus on Lin, the youngest character of the group to ensure she isn't sexualized. To add to this, a breast slider in character creation screen when you start the game was removed, thus removing some level of character customization. Fairly small changes, but still potentially annoying, if understandable. And finally, the mother of all localizations is about to come out. Fire Emblem Fates. Oh boy, where do I start.... The first and most quickly discovered changes for Fire Emblem Fates were first that a scene where a character slips a magic powder that makes women appear to be men into a lesbian girl's drink in order to help her overcome her fear and discomfort around other girls. This could be seen as drugging someone which is a HUGE nono so that's been edited to not work out that way. http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/news/41814/fire-emblem-fates-changes-controversial-support-conversation-in-western-regions And the second most quickly discovered change being that minigames or "skinships" as they're called, that allowed the player to use the touch screen to rub other characters' faces/heads for periods of time and get a whole bunch of related dialogue were cut down in size tremendously and now disallow the player from actually "petting" said characters so to speak. http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-02-16-fire-emblem-fates-face-petting-mini-game-removed But that's not all. A little while later on, it was discovered that in Fire Emblem Fates' English release, there will not be dual audio, despite the fact that Fire Emblem Awakening featured dual audio. http://www.polygon.com/2016/2/5/10925232/fire-emblem-fates-japanese-language-dual-audio-western-release Then recently a bunch of weird dialogue changes were discovered that significantly change character personalities from their original versions to more jokey, memey dialogue. And example of such can be seen above, although its hardly the only example of it. Another: And then someone managed to dig into the in-game files and discovered something alarming: The original Japanese version of the game had a total of 3196 audio files. The NoA version has 1208 audio files in it, meaning a total of 1988 audio clips are totally cut from the game as can be seen in the imgur link up at the top of this post. That's a HUGE amount of content. And it doesn't just stop with Fire Emblem Fates. People are starting to find out information of the upcoming release for Bravely Second. For example, an outfit that was supposed to be an "Indian outfit" was replaced with a cowboy one, and one of the characters who had this class was given a southern accent to seem more cowboy like. I don't know if this is censorship of fear of cultural appropriation, or just done because NoA thought it fit better (the character uses a gun), but at the very least its a strange change. Long story short, NoA has been making a lot of edits, content cutting, and changes to video games that I don't like on almost exclusively video games that I was previously excited for and interested in, and they're doing so with no sign of stopping and many people even encouraging such practices. I really, REALLY hate Nintendo of America and can't bring myself to buy any of these games I was previously excited for (at least not new anyways) since I can't support this kind of localization. But it just keeps happening!