Street Fighter V is Capcom’s latest addition to its world-famous fighting video game franchise. The game will be making its way exclusively onto Microsoft Windows and the PS4 platforms at the start of the new year. Street Fighter V will allow cross-platform play between the two as it releases to the general public on 16 February 2016.
Known for its 1v1 style of play, Capcom diversifies the Street Fighter franchise by including combo shots and special abilities to produce a variety of attacks. What the franchise is not known for, however, is censorship, which apparently is becoming more and more common nowadays. Reports are coming in that Capcom has censored certain aspects of the game to make it look more welcoming to their Western audience. While the animations remain unchanged, the camera angles have been altered to make them look less risqué.
In an interview, UOL Jogos, producer Yoshinori Ono said:
Our objective with Street Fighter ’ is to start over from zero[…] We want the professional players and the casual fans of the series to return, but we also want to reach those who have never even touched a fighting game. So we can’t have something in the game that makes people think, “This is not acceptable.”
Probably we won’t be able to remove everything that could offend someone. But our goal is, at least, to reduce that number as much as possible so that they think ‘Ok, there is this issue here, but it is within the limits’. We want that everyone can play and enjoy without worrying about anything else.
He also added that the changes made were generic and uninfluenced by external factors. So basically, it was all the team’s idea to make the changes, and wasn’t influenced by recent controversies surrounding games with gratuitous jiggling body parts.
We didn’t make any change because of external influences[…]Those changes came up internally. We decided to remove that because we want the biggest possible number of people to play, and we don’t want to have something in the game that might make someone uncomfortable.
It’s a shame that given the fact that we’re living in the 21st century, we still witness area-specific censorship from such big names in the industry.