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Hey Taburisu, I appreciate your candor to my responses and your opinions, really do. All I can tell you is what I know to be the truth, being so closely involved with the project. While there were certain people that complained about Vepar's breasts because "omg boobs offensive etc etc." I can personally guarantee you that being offended has absolutely zero weight in any decision we make for the game. (within reason ofc)

Let me point out that Vepar is still bare chested, several leading ladies in the game are extremely attractive and well endowed, and there are several elements in the game that revolve around sexuality or being provocative, whether we're talking about monsters, situations, characters etc. (The vast majority of the game hasn't been revealed so I know that's hard to quantify right now). If we were really making changes to appease any sort of external agenda or people being offended at content that included elements of sexuality, then you'd be seeing much more drastic visible changes to the game than just a slight reduction of Vepar's breasts from super huge to "only" huge.  (I think it's technically DD down from F or something IIRC)

Now the changes to Vepar were definitely partly inspired by the feedback gathered from fans, but just like with anything, Iga decides if to take action on feedback, and if so, what the change will be, no one else. And to give you even further insight, when the changes were made there was the discussion internally whether we were crossing a line and people may be offended because the breasts now look more perky and detailed, while still remaining huge, and to that concern I was immediately like "lol no I don't care, if this what you believe / want the most, then you do what you want and I will be the 200 foot tall titanium wall that blocks anyone demanding changes because of external/personal agendas".

I also understand your request for a "censorship toggle" option, and to be totally honest making such an option would be a huge pain and bad use of resources for a LOT of reasons, but above all else it wouldn't make any sense, let me tell you why: Iga says ok and asks me what differences are going to be toggled when selecting this option, so then I include the following:

- Vepar original breasts
- .....
- uhm
-......

Haha you see what I mean? There would be nothing to put into such an option because there's nothing in the game being censored. Technically the only other thing is how much skin is initially revealed by Bloodless when she's getting out of the tub, but that's only for Chinese versions of the game because China has different standards for certain ratings.

Anyway, hopefully this all makes sense, and you can trust what I'm saying, hopefully you know my mantra by now ("I won't always be able to talk about something, but whatever I do say will be the truth")

And last but not least, I'm going to try and walk the tightrope here (speak personally while remaining professional) and say that as a fan of countless other games, some where sexuality was a prominent pillar of the fandom, I've suffered first hand when games I love get manipulated by external agendas and personal social / political / religious opinions of staff involved with the game/project who feel it's ok to use the project they work on as their own personal megaphone for activism.

Every time I've seen it happen, in the far past and very recently, it made me vow that if I ever was in that position I would never do that, and lo and behold fate has been kind to me and now I have the power to make sure that's the case.  

Hope that helps clear up some of your concerns, but please always feel free to be honest and bring critiques and complaints to me/us, I want to hear it all, because I want to face it openly and head on, treating you and everyone else like adults with a brain instead of like wallets with switches I need to flip. (whether we end up making you happy or not) 

taburisu

I completely understand your concern and i wanted to share two cents of my view on all of this.
I am like you, i also hate when a game suffers censorship due to some form of political agenda. I know both of us saw this happening before and it is still happening nowadays. Some examples include:

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1) A overly controversal game from Illusion, a company based on eroge games (not gonna say the name here, nor show a picture, because the forum is NSFW free) that was released on 2006, was, somehow found out at 2009 by the media and causes a huge ruckus to the point Illusion had to step in and say that their games "aren't intended to the western market".

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2) Dead or Alive Xtreme 3, that simply will not have any kind of release outside Japan because the company realized that the western world would reject the game due to it's theme.  They recently said that there are no plans for it, and no plans for Dead or Alive in the western world, outside fightning games.

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3) Capcom changing Street Fighter V camera angles during some moves of Rainbow Mika and Cammy, to hide their bodies and make them the cam "less male gaze".

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4) Recently, steam greenlit a game called "The Key to Home" and then gave up on publishing it, saying the game was trying to "cater paedophiles". The game has no sexual content whatsoever. It's a visual novel with children and "eye candy" pictures that can't even be considered "ecchi".

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Tera Online censorship.

5) Tera Online, a MMORPG, had one of it's races, that looks like a child, censored on ALL her clothes and armos, with shorts and tops added to all of them, to conceal her body.

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6) A (now dead) MMORPG called Scarlet Online, a ecchi/sexy focused MMORPG, had one of it's classes censored because she was deemed too "childish".

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7) Fatal Frame 5 banned two alternative costumes (that are basically bikinis) from the western release of the game. They were changed by cosplays of Samus and Zelda.

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It baffles me and it is actually funny to watch such discussions, from a political point of view. People against what they call as "Sexism" in games, usually claims to be liberals, without even realizing that such actions are absurdly conservative and puritan, getting closer to their political enemies than they think. 
Such censorship really pisses me off and i couldn't agree with you more on that.

Now, i do have my reasons to believe in Angel-Corlux when he says they aren't censorshiping themselves. And that is due to some points i remember in the first discussions of the game:

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1) When Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night started to show it's first pictures and rendering, the first thing many people complained was that Miriam's breasts was bigger than her artwork. That is true and if you take a look at the first set of arts and her graphics, her breasts are really bigger. At the time, the dev team said her proportions were "adjusted" to make her seen easier on screen and to better show the crystal motiff at her breast. They ddidn't changed that yet.

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2) When Dominique was revealed, some people complained she was a "sexy nun" and a "blatant sexist character" to appeal to some people. She is tall, has big breasts (bigger than Miriam), pantyhose, legs for show, etc. She wasn't changed at all. 

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3) Bloodless was revealed completely naked inside a blood bathtub. When she gets up, you can see most of her naked backside. By fightning against her, she loses her dress and gets "almost-half-naked" during the fight. It seems she wasn't changed (except for China, that is a dictactorship and thus, works completely different from democracies).

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Now, Vepar was a huge cause of discussion at the time. The colors was indeed changed to look better, but yes, her breast reduction did bothered me. Since they didn't change everything else i mentioned, i am, for now, "believing" in Angel-Corlux words, because i do think some of the elements i mentioned above are indeed "worse" than that for some people (such as Miriam's looks herself) and wasn't changed. So i think we can trust, for now, that they aren't censoring themselves.

I don't agree to you, taburisu on adding some kind of "censorship" option to the game, because considering what they are doing, wouldn't had a reason for it. But I DO AGREE with you on how awful it is when an artistic vision are censored and, most laughable of all, by people claiming to be "progressive" being as much conservative as they can be. 
I don't know if you agree to me, but i think my examples above do speak to myself, when i say i have the same worries as you, but i still think they aren't doing such censorship for Bloodstained.
Not yet, at least.

Angel-Corlux Thank you for this very personal and warm response. By your words it seems that we are both in the same boat against censorship and your explanations should be enough to calm worries about that issue, but at the end of the day when I go back to see the Vepar cutscene ... I can't help but feel that something is wrong.

I'd like to make it clear that my complaints are not really about a pair of big breasts, what worries me is that this is the first evidence that they've lowered the tone in the game. Perhaps it's true that the final decision on this has been made by IGA, but I'm afraid it's too naive to think that there are no conditioning factors. I believe the desire to please the Western public is the main reason, the infamous "cultural differences" in matters of sexual content. After all, the nature of Kickstarter projects means that people's feedback is taken too much into account. Although in this case the western feedback clashes with the philosophy of a Japanese game. Even if the team has only lowered the tone of a design (as far as we know), that marks a dangerous precedent and opens the door to more adjustments in content that may be controversial.

As I said at the beginning, I don't question your sincerity and good intentions, and I would like to say that I feel relieved, but circumstances make it very difficult for me.

P.S. Pure Miriam I found your message very appropriate, and those examples of controversial content are really interesting. Although personally I believe there is a deliberate tone down in the new Vepar design, regardless of other "sensitive" factors of the game.

Dude, let it go. This was a decision taken by Iga and his team. Things change in game development all the freaking time! Just like PureMiriam's example posts reminded us yes, there was some outcry about the size of Miriam's breast from the Kickstarter artwork vs her character model but I didn't see anyone crying "censorship!" because of the change. It seems to me that, for some sector of fandom, it's only censorship when it comes to lowering the sex appeal directed to male gamers.

Case in point the change to a male character from Mobius Final Fantasy. He was too sexy for many and they changed it and I never saw the same sectors that bent over backwards with rage over DoAX3 not coming to the west complaining that Square censored this male character.






I believe Angel-Corlux in what he's saying. Its not like the game is without any sex appeal at all. It was an artistic change and people can do that and will do that all the time. 

And your "censorship toggle switch" is never going to happen because it was never even needed in the first place, as Angel very eloquently put it.

The succubus is topless, in Sotn, for example and mounting the Saturn Disc on Daemon Tools, speaks volumes (Omake 8/24)! Whatever happened to guilty pleasures? Damn.

I don't really care about the breast size, but Vepar looked awful in the original demo. The colors were garish and out of place and it just looked amateurish. The new design is far more fitting.

dareka . . . I read that as "Golden sexy"

As for the costumes: Neko Miriam is best Miriam ♥