Mediaboss Marketing

(Last Updated On: March 29, 2017)

In order to appease the growing trend of third-wave feminist requests to censor the sexuality of fictional female characters, many developers have opted to cover up cleavage, make sure that the women in fantasy games are fully clothed with realistic designs, and remove things like jiggle or boob physics to placate SJWs, similar to Mortal Kombat X. Well, the developer of the action-RPG Kings Raid, Vespa Inc, received a lot of backlash after they attempted to censor and cover up their female characters.

Censored Gaming covered the incident, showcasing how many of the female characters in the game were covered up from head to toe to either hide cleavage, or add extra articles of clothing to lessen the sex appeal of the character illustrations and in-game models.

A large enough segment of their fans rebuffed this decision, complaining about Vespa censoring the characters in Kings Raid, the mobile hack-and-slash RPG.

The complaints were made in such abundance that just a day after the update was released, Vespa made a post on Facebook on March 24th, 2017 stating

We are aware that the update on March 23 has upset many of our Raiders, especially regarding the change brought to the Heroes appearances. As it is our ultimate goal to support and enhance the players experience, we have decided to take your voices to revoke some of the changes to the Heroes appearances.

They showed an image of the characters that were censored in the previous update, and how they were going to uncensor them in the following update, following the fan complaints.

As you can see, not only did they alter the games anime-style illustrations but they also modified the characters 3D meshes, covering them up and attempting to make them more conservatively dressed.

The backlash over the censorship rippled through the reviews of the game as well, with people complaining about the change.

While a lot of fans thanked Vespa for uncensoring the characters, others complained that the game should be censored and that they also need to remove one of the staple features in Kings Raid: the boob physics.

One of the people on the Google Play store going by the handle of Narendra MC wrote

Well, in overall its good. I just saw some comments about censorship and i really think that it doesnt really matter to people who arent a bunch of horndogs. I support censhorship as it reduces the possibility of people becoming more attracted in to sexual stuff.

The Facebook page where the announcement was originally made is now a full sociopolitical argument over censorship, female sexuality and identity politics.

Many male Asian gamers like the boob physics and cleavage. Many European and North American gamers are complaining about the sexualization of the characters and saying that the original art caters toward perverted gamers. Awais from Ontario, Canada wrote

They didnt even do anything wrong. Cant believe how ridiculous most of you adults were over a little censoring. Absolutely ridiculous how no one appreciates a company for finally focusing less on satisfying the perverted gamers Nope, but its alright because as long as you get to drool over pixel tits, theres nothing wrong right? Shameless community cant think outside theyre horny little bubbles.

As evidenced on the Facebook page, Awais was clearly in the minority with his beliefs and was shouted down by a lot of other gamers.

Additionally, Censored Gaming pointed out that Vespa never actually stated the reasons as to why they made the change in the first place.

The Western release of Kings Raid is rather recent, though. It launched back in the middle of February, 2017. The Asian version of the game was available since the middle of last year in 2016. The game was quite popular for bringing hardcore hack-and-slash action to mobile devices with PS2-quality graphics and a lot of fan-service.

As showcased in the video below from Android Gameplay, the in-game characters, illustrations and dialogue sequences were filled with plenty of fan-service, lots of cleavage and jiggle physics.

Vespa may have weighed the complaints of Western gamers versus Eastern gamers and attempted to make the change. However, if the gamers who actually bought microtransactions are the ones who enjoyed the fan-service, then Vespa may have decided to revert back to the uncensored version of the game to appease the people who actually put money in their coffers.

However, all of the above is just speculation when it comes to the reasons behind Vespa uncensoring Kings Raid. Unless the company decides to share their reasons such as the Dragon Heroes developers who were forced by Google and Apple to censor their game we dont actually know why they censored and then uncensored the game, but it was pretty obvious a significant portion of the community was not happy with the censorship.

Read the original:
King's Raid Devs Remove Censorship Following Fan Complaints - One Angry Gamer (blog)