Ubisoft is being criticized in Japan after a disastrous release of Assassin's Creed Valhalla left Japanese players fuming over what they claimed was excessive censorship. Assassin's Creed Valhalla, the latest installment in Ubisoft's popular series, is notable for its violence, much like its predecessors, and contains plenty of blood and gore.
The violent imagery is appropriate for a title involving Vikings, and in fact, was one of the major draws to the game in the Japanese market. But censorship laws in Japan vary somewhat to those found in the West, which necessitated removing particularly gory or lascivious content in order to meet rating requirements. This meant that severed heads, bare breasts, and exposed entrails were removed from the game before it was launched in Japan, which concerned players begrudgingly accepted ahead of launch.
But when those players began Assassin's Creed Valhalla, they soon discovered that all blood effects had been removed as well, with the option to turn them back on not functioning properly, igniting an almost immediate furor. Ubisoft quickly responded with allegations that the removal of blood effects was deliberate and made at the request of Japan's Computer Entertainment Rating Organization, or CERO. CERO, however, countered in an official statement that Ubisoft never consulted or even contacted them about blood effects, which were still present in the test version of the game CERO consulted when it issued its rating. Ubisoft was forced to make an official apology, and attributed the blood effects removal to human error. YouTube channel Censored Gaming covers the controversy in greater detail below:
Japanese players quickly condemned Ubisoft and Assassin's Creed Valhalla as a "scam," especially after CERO made its public statement denying any responsibility for Ubisoft's decision to remove the effects. Ubisoft has yet to announce when or if it will fix the issue, or why the game was overly censored past CERO's requirements in the first place, but the fact that there was an option integrated into the game to turn blood effects back on that didn't work indicates that it was simply an error that wasn't caught. Ubisoft doesn't have the best record in the games industry, so it's hardly surprising that it would choose to lie to cover its own errors.
What's most baffling about the entire situation, however, isn't that Ubisoft lied. It's that it chose to lie about something so easily refuted, when the community would be more willing to understand if the situation were presented as what it ultimately most likely was - a simple mistake. It will be interesting to see how this affects perception of the franchise and of other Ubisoft titles in the Japanese market moving forward, but for now, something that was easily explained has boiled over into another Ubisoft controversy.
Source: Censored Gaming/YouTube