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The story
It’s become a hot topic on 5ch’s hardware/industry (Geha) board that the Japanese version of the action RPG ‘The Blood of Dawnwalker’ has had its blood and gore effects cut. The game had been drawing attention ahead of release as a new title from staff behind the ‘Witcher’ series, but the thread turned heated after it emerged that not just the console version but even the PC (Steam) version is censored for Japan. Alongside criticism that even overseas digital purchases only offer the Japanese version if the account region is set to Japan, posters also shared a workaround — editing the launch options to display the uncensored version in Japanese — while others voiced jaded takes on the genre itself, saying they’re ‘sick of these games where you just swing a sword around in a dark screen.’
What people said
Bandai Namco never changes, huh.
Watched a playthrough video — this is a crap game.
Crap game regardless of the blood.
the market's so saturated there's barely any demand left, yet people still buy them.
Future generations will probably remember this as the Reiwa-era Atari Shock (the infamous 1983 video game market crash).
And with Western games the pacing is clearly bad.
Chinese and Korean games rip off Japanese ones, but at least they keep a proper sense of speed, so they're fun.
Even Onimusha is apparently selling worse than that on Steam.
Sword-fighting games in general are getting old.
It's pure evil.
Account: Only usable with a PlayStation Network account whose country/region is set to 'Japan'
Store access: Only the Japanese PlayStation Store is accessible
Price: A discounted model, cheaper than the standard one
This is exactly the trap for anyone who bought the Japan-locked PS5 lol
Also the price is steep — even AA Western titles are routinely near 10,000 yen now.
Let us know if it works.
Checked the overseas Xbox store listing — it does show Japanese support, aside from voice dubbing.
I'm just playing the uncensored version with Japanese text normally — is something wrong with my setup?
And GOG has region-locked Japan out entirely.
Bandai Namco really are idiots.
Are they hitting each other with wooden swords or what lol
If anything, the protagonist is a half-vampire.
By the way, Capcom is one of the rare garbage companies that censors even the PC version too. Makes you wonder what the point of censoring PC even is.
Why the difference?
A developer launching a brand-new IP
doesn't have the resources to fine-tune content for a specific country's regulations (like Japan's),
so they tend to just take the easy route and cut everything.
It'd be pretty funny if the blood spraying everywhere that they showed off at the SIEJ-invited Japan early-access preview ends up getting cut lol
So you're saying the MS Store version, not Steam, might actually work?
It's not 'might work' — it does work.
Just download the overseas version and add culture=ja to the launch options.
Oh really.
No wonder it's boring.
Background and Key Points of This Topic
Under Japan’s CERO rating system, sexual and violent content that exceeds a certain threshold results in a ‘Z (18 and up)’ rating, and major publishers often respond by trimming content from the overseas version to pass review. ‘The Blood of Dawnwalker,’ the title at the center of this discussion, is a vampire-themed action game from Rebel Wolves, a studio founded by former CD Projekt Red staff. The thread zeroed in on the fact that the blood effects — an element tied directly to the game’s own title — have been almost entirely removed in the Japanese version. One common misconception is that censorship only applies to the console version; in reality, even the overseas release only offers the Japanese version through digital-only storefronts if the account is set to Japan, and the same restrictions extend to the PC (Steam) version as well, regardless of platform. At the same time, posters discussed workarounds such as changing the language setting via launch options or personally importing the overseas package, which raised further questions about how effective the censorship really is. It’s also worth noting that titles like Elden Ring have managed to release with blood effects intact, showing that whether censorship happens can come down to the developer’s resources and how negotiations with CERO play out.
*This article is compiled and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry (Geha)) thread ‘[Sad News] ‘The Blood of Dawnwalker’ Japanese Version Ends Up Absolutely Gutted by Censorship wwwwwwwwww‘.
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