XSEED explains why they shy away from censorship with their localized titles

A portion of an OperationRainfall interview with Vice President of XSEED Ken Berry...

OR: With games like Oneechanbara and Senran Kagura there seem to be this issue where companies like Atlus and NISA are forced to censor their video games for Western audiences. XSEED doesn’t seem to ever be included in this conversation, but it ever in the discussion that you might have to censor a title due to cultural differences.

KB: Yes, all the time. The good and bad thing is are localization team is made up of the vocal audiences online against censorship. Tom Lipschultz is the most vocal of them, he will on his own speak publicly online saying, “Nothing should ever be censored”. Knowing that there’s someone like that on our internal team there is always a very outspoken voice against censorship. We do always try to keep the original creators vision in mind when we localize stuff as long as it can be excepted in the US. The ESRB is probably more lenient then what people think because they’ve been clear to us that it isn’t their job to censor anything it’s their job to just rate the content. So most of the time we present the content as is and they come back with an M rating, which we understand, but if they come back with an AO than we have to have some discussions about what to censor in order to get that to an M rating. Otherwise, none of the platform holders allow an AO product on their platform.

OR: So if XSEED was faced with the decision to censor a game would you continue to localize it or would it change your mind about the whole thing?

KB: That would be placing us in a very very difficult position because censoring it would alienate the very audience that we are trying to bring the game for while not really appeasing any of the critics that had no purchase intent in the first place. So we’d be doing a lot of extra work and going through a lot of extra trouble and pleasing nobody. So hopefully we’re never in that position.