BAYONETTA OUTFITS SKIN

Self-censorship keeps that in players’ hands and is something we’ve seen with game violence in titles like Call Of Duty which allow you to turn off blood and gore for younger or more sensitive players. This has become the norm with Sony’s localization efforts and has affected some Nintendo games as well, with localizers taking out bits that they assume some Americans might find offensive.

I vastly prefer a self-censorship option over Sony’s recent approach, which is basically to censor the crap out of anything headed to the West compared to its Japanese equivalent.

BAYONETTA OUTFITS SKIN

In the third Bayonetta game, Platinum Games has included a new self-censorship option that let’s you turn off the bits where Bayonetta shows skin whilst twirling her magical hair and adds more clothing to other characters with skimpier outfits as well. “What would a game with a female heroine who has actual sexual agency even look like? Would we know it if we saw it? Would we be able to recognize it, if we put it on a shelf between Dante’s Inferno and Killer Is Dead? Am I ever going to stop being annoyed when I see supposedly progressive male games critics arguing on Twitter about which sexually empowered women in games do or do not make them feel uncomfortable? FYI, men? I’m pretty sure Bayonetta doesn’t care if you like it. You can tell, given critics’ frequent usage of the phrase “male gaze,” that we’re still a little bit far behind when it comes to understanding feminist media criticism, and the concept of sex-positivity in general might be a little too advanced in level for game criticism. “Part of the bias against Bayonetta is due to our own anti-sex baggage as a society (at least, here in the States)-but an even bigger part, I think, is that videogame criticism just isn’t ready to talk about Bayonetta.

In one particularly salient passage, Myers points out that American culture itself is partly the culprit for the stuffy interpretations of Bayonetta as some kind of male-gaze-sex-object:

Bayonetta outfits