Almost a full three years after its western release, there’s no doubt that Atlus’ Persona 5 has gained a legacy status and a level of success that other games with they could emulate. Featuring a blend of turn based combat and life simulation, Persona 5 guides players through a massive narrative with twists and turns. You start up the game for the first time and lose themselves in the sprawling world and the positively enchanting jazz-heavy soundtrack. The next thing you know, you’re already at the end of the 120-hour long adventure and watching the credits roll. Persona 5 is truly a master work of art for managing to constantly reinvent itself and stay engaging for the entirety of that 120-hour playtime. It should come as no surprise, then, that when Atlus announced Persona 5 Royal, a new version of Persona 5 with hours of extra bonus content, the general public couldn’t wait to get their hands on it. In the past week, however, optimism has begun to sour into something…. much less positive, to say the least. What exactly could turn everyone’s excitement on its head, you ask? The answer: censorship.

            Censorship has, and will likely always be, a hot button topic in the gaming community. Games developed in Japan, unsurprisingly, typically release in Japan first, the region of the game development’s origin. Different teams of localization specialists then take that game and appropriately translate it into corresponding languages depending on the planned region of release. The translation process takes time, of course, and for this reason, it can be months until the United States have the opportunity to get their hands on a game that’s already released in Japan. This is the case with Persona 5 Royal, a game that’s been released in Japan for several months. Eager buyers have gone as far as to import the game from Japan, even though it’s in a language they can’t understand, just to get their hands on the game as early as possible. Therein lies the problem: many western players are already familiar with the final product of Persona 5 Royal because of this importing, and anything less than the final product won’t do.

            This is why Atlus’ localization team and their decision to remove scenes from the game that feature homophobic jokes is being met with disdain from many die-hard fans. Japan is a culture that is much more tolerant of homophobia and homophobic remarks while the United States is increasingly growing away from that culture. This is likely why Atlus’ localization team made the executive decision to remove these lines of dialogue from the western release, to appropriate the game for a new audience of people. This level of censorship, while only affecting an incredibly small portion of the game and not changing anything crucial to the game’s gameplay and narrative, is referred to as “policing” by many, and some see it as a blatant middle finger to the original developers of the game, who clearly intended for those lines to be in the game, regardless of how controversial they are. Ironically, Persona 5’s narrative tells the story of a group of teens breaking through the shackles of censorship and oppression, so admittedly it does seem very unfortunate that Persona 5 Royal of all games would be the one to be at the center of censorship drama.