Video Game Odds & Ends

Crossed Out

I wrote about this little censorship blunder before in a Tumblr post. There's also a newer one that I posted here.

Nintendo censored crosses and other overtly religious iconography and references from western versions of many games. Now I've never been entirely sure what the issue was. Who was it supposed to be offensive to? Christians or other religions in the west? People who weren't religious maybe? Was it because crosses may appear in non-Christian settings such as games like this one where pagan gods were being worshiped? Either way, most of the time these references were censored. But there were also incidents where they were accidentally left in.

While the churches in Lufia 2 have their altar and steeple crosses removed and the altar cross replaced with an obelisk, they forgot to edit the ruined town tile set. So the ruined churches had their altars left untouched.

This is Aguro. I believe it's the town where Maxim and Iris pray at the church for the souls of the dead townspeople. So the cross being there makes it the most religiously charged moment in the game. All because someone forgot to edit the ruined town tile set.	Here we have Gordovan, where the survivors are trying to rebuild. There's actual people here. So it's not like you'd just waltz on in then leave because there's no one to talk to. Another case of the censorship booboo being really noticeable.

Here's what the inside of a typical censored church looks like. I can't remember what town I took this screenshot in. But they are all more or less the same anyway give or take. As you can see, the cross is replaced with an obelisk with some sort of writing on it. The symbol isn't overtly religious. So it's generic enough to not raise eyebrows.	And here we can see a place where they once again forgot to remove some crosses. The 6th floor of Gordovan West Tower has a large cross on either side of the floor. These crosses are just too big and obvious to be a coincidence. I wonder how such big crosses got missed? Maybe it was too much trouble to replace the floor tiles?