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Sure, it sounds like the combat breaks down a little in crowds

I don't know if this is accurate regarding FF XVI's combat system:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBWfjRn6N48

You have enough tools to get things away from other things, even though you can only seem to enemy step in the air twice.

I have spent more time in training mode than actually playing the game though, so I don't know what other people's gameplay looks like.

As for Darker Skin characters being FFXVI, they were always there since the reveal trailer as a stand in for Middle eastern territories, so I'm not sure where you're getting the whole game was always gonna be completely white people from?

Having bought and played I think every single release of Skullgirls (despite still sucking at it), most of those changes were to parts of the game I'd forgotten even existed until I read the list and checked them.

The armbands thing seems fair enough, as does the Big Band edit.
Removing the whole "Soviet announcer" option seems like a big cut, but that joke was beyond played out when they added it, so I find it hard to see that as a loss. It's not like there aren't still better joke announcers.
Almost all the adjusted tentacle placements look more suggestive, not less, so I feel like they failed in their stated goals there.

Seeing the Steam review bombing come from accounts with near zero playtime was funny, though.

Blue Reflection: Second Light is amazing and underappreciated, it has excellent characters and atmosphere, not to mention one of my all time favorite spoiler[canon yuri romances].

AsuraTheDestructor wrote:

As for Darker Skin characters being FFXVI, they were always there since the reveal trailer as a stand in for Middle eastern territories, so I'm not sure where you're getting the whole game was always gonna be completely white people from?

The (I assume pre-prepared) statement Yoshida gave about there only being as much diversity as they could manage within the setting was, unfortunately, given in response to an incredibly loaded question that assumed the premise that there weren't and wouldn't be any at all. (Definition.) Consequently, as the bird app is wont to do, people took his response as an excuse for not having POC at all, rather than recognizing his attempt to distance his statement from a question that he simply couldn't answer as presented. The discourse hit that point where the fact that he answered that question at all took precedence over how he answered it.

As far as the specific lack of black people specifically, I think that has to do with not wanting race to factor into certain details of the setting. FF16 needed to redeem the series' brand image after the fiasco of 15, and it wouldn't have been able to do that as a font of meme pics of black people with slaves (black, white, or otherwise). I was viewing the problem from the angle of "what's something you absolutely can't depict black people doing in modern media" and they went even bleaker than that. Maybe CBU3 erred too far on the side of caution, but it's easy to imagine the ethics department leaving a post-it on a working draft that said, "Don't even think about it." Stranger of Paradise came out just last year, and 14 gets more colorful every expansion (inventing new colors, even), so there's no reason to expect this to become a larger trend.

There was probably a similar sensitivity at work with Annabella not slinging homophobic slurs around when taunting spoiler[Dion about him getting passed up in the line of succession], even though that's a pretty big elephant in the room at that point. I would have been on board with it, too, because I know Michael-Christopher Koji Fox could have come up with something way more fun than Game of Thrones, given the chance, but it would definitely get taken out of context as "Final Fantasy is homophobic." (But at least "spoiler[Greagor's gash!]" has joined the ranks of "Matron's teats!" and "Thall's balls!" as another really good fantasy blasphemy from his localization team.)

At the only GDC I was fortunate enough to be able to attend, I wandered into a Skullgirls panel hosted by z0ne and some other top Skullgirls devs, despite knowing nothing about the game. I vividly recall one of the Q&A questions basically amounted to “does the overtly sexual depiction of the characters worry you at all given fighting games’ overall demographic?” And it was very clear that the team was approaching their game from a queer, inclusive, sex-positive perspective, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that it felt kind of naive given that we had just walked out of that sexist Bakhtanians streaming scandal a few months ago.

AQuin1904 wrote:

Having bought and played I think every single release of Skullgirls (despite still sucking at it), most of those changes were to parts of the game I'd forgotten even existed until I read the list and checked them.

The armbands thing seems fair enough, as does the Big Band edit.
Removing the whole "Soviet announcer" option seems like a big cut, but that joke was beyond played out when they added it, so I find it hard to see that as a loss. It's not like there aren't still better joke announcers.
Almost all the adjusted tentacle placements look more suggestive, not less, so I feel like they failed in their stated goals there.

Seeing the Steam review bombing come from accounts with near zero playtime was funny, though.

As if the badly dated stereotyped voice pack wasn’t already in poor taste at this point it’s also worth noting that it was voiced by Mike Z. It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone to have content featuring him removed from the game.

I like how the author is like "Yeah, those Sonic live actions movies were awesome!", despite it having some "shoehorned needledrop" music, when same author said the Mario movie had the same supposed issue. Rolling Eyes

But anway, yeah look if the Skullgirls staff want to change their game that's their business, I mean, I don't think they need to, but they made the game so whatever. I don't see why it needs to be such a huge issue.

My thoughts initially were "Skullgirls is still around?" I haven't heard that name in years. The situation overall is pretty bad and odd. The only reason Skullgirls had any notoriety in the first place back in the day was it was openly sexual and fanservice. It only even got any attention because of the Zone flash that the original devs liked so much that they hired him to work on the game. But then Zaimont and Ahad were fired, Ahad sued the company and won a nice settlement for it, and a ton of employees resigned and were laid off as well. I view it like all the World of Warcraft censorship they made in the past few years. You could point out maybe a handful of original people are still there, but the key people are not. If Zaimont and Ahad aren't involved in this then I don't think you can really say it's the 'original creators' doing this. But I suppose that's the fate of all western franchises in the end. Creator rights don't mean much and will eventually be passed on to other people. A few days later I saw they announced Skullgirls was going back to EVO again and all the censorship made sense. Core Values strikes again.

But aside from that, it is pretty bad that some of the removed stuff were Kickstarter backer rewards. Not sure if there's a legal precedent there (probably not since Kickstarter scams are already a dime a dozen) but I'd at least try to ask for a refund and put the pressure on them. The fact they censored a digital artbook and concept art really just shows you should always go physical at the end of the day. You don't own your digital stuff.

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Z0ne, one of the former animators, certainly thinks the team has the right to change their minds about in-game content. So what happens when your artistic vision changes throughout your own life, and you're not the person you used to be when you started working on something?

To be fair that's the only safe answer one can give give if you want to still work in the industry. Talking bad about your employers or former employers is a faux paus and good way to not find work again. There's no way he could voice his displeasure without getting the Alex Ahad treatment of being known as "hard to work with". Although Zone in general is pretty Industry now. Don't recall the last time he even did a porn flash. I remember he did an art request for me on /co/ back in the day so that was cool of him. But I suppose he is more into being a vTuber or whatever these days than porn artist, which make sense since it limits your career opportunities in America compared to Japan.. I saw people in the replies still called him a pedo when they found out he did do the Filia stuff so, ah well, I guess that's how these people will always treat you.

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But hey, DLC is still better than the GBA port for Sonic the Hedgehog 1.

Which isn’t even the worst Sonic game in existence. Debatably worse port of an existing game maybe.

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While Skullgirls has made its reputation off of its sexy characters and animations, helped in no small part due to artist Alex Ahad's character designs and the after-the-fact hiring of famed Internet erotica animator Z0ne, the art team has had a few moments of going back and covering up underwear; back in 2015, they had changed about 36 frames of animation to cover up shots where characters were flashing their panties, apropos of nothing.

My question is did Alex Ahad ever actually agreed with the initial round of censorship back then or not. He could have internally complained and then later got punished for it when he was let go sometime during 2016-2019 during the development of Indivisible and sued the company for wrongful termination. Unless he says something we'll probably never know the actual story or his feelings about all this. Given Alex was the lead creative design and made the characters and world back in high school he should be considered the creator, even if he has since walked away from the IP professionally. In my eyes any decision made since his departure is in no way reflective of the original creator.

But my personal feelings are even if he does agree with all the censorship - genuinely, and not just paying lip service for the sake of saving industry contacts - fans still have a right to complain and not like it. Just to set the stage, this was the general media reaction to Skullgirls back in 2011 where Alex was called sexist and vile for his designs. Even if he declares he has grown as a person and no longer wishes to objectify women through his artwork fans who initially backed the game and concept have a right to complain when the creator decides to change everything they initially liked about it. Although in this recent round it's not Alex doing it.

Nigel Planter wrote:

Quote:

While Skullgirls has made its reputation off of its sexy characters and animations, helped in no small part due to artist Alex Ahad's character designs and the after-the-fact hiring of famed Internet erotica animator Z0ne, the art team has had a few moments of going back and covering up underwear; back in 2015, they had changed about 36 frames of animation to cover up shots where characters were flashing their panties, apropos of nothing.

My question is did Alex Ahad ever actually agreed with the initial round of censorship back then or not.

According to Z0ne, he did. And I'd believe him. I was lucky enough to meet Ahad at a local convention in 2019, and even then when I brought up how awkward Parasoul was because of The Circumstances™, he confirmed with me that if they were to ever make a Skullgirls 2 they would have seriously toned down the fascist parallels with the Black Egrets.

i got the shivers! wrote:

Quote:

Z0ne, one of the former animators, certainly thinks the team has the right to change their minds about in-game content. So what happens when your artistic vision changes throughout your own life, and you're not the person you used to be when you started working on something?

To be fair that's the only safe answer one can give give if you want to still work in the industry. Talking bad about your employers or former employers is a faux paus and good way to not find work again.

That's very unfair towards Z0ne since they haven't really done industry work since having worked on Indivisible and leaving Lab Zero.

Ten years is a long time in the industry, sometimes people's creative vision for a project changes.

This Week In Games wrote:

There are plenty of Abridged Series makers who've come to regret certain jokes in old episodes or comedians who have retired jokes in their repertoire; with Skullgirls continuing its development and sure to continue to add new content (I mean, there are still 26 characters they could make), I think it's fair to let an older and wiser art team do their thing.

I always saw an internet creator that do that it just comes off like pulling the ladder up behind them. "Yeah, I only got my current position because I did funny jokes everyone liked, but if you tell these same jokes yourself then I'm going to call you out and try to hinder your attempts at getting a career" But I guess a lot of internet creators have to do that given how fragile their job opportunities and internet platform ecosystems are and they can't rock the boat. You either get rich enough to not care or censor yourself to appease brands and social media. I think it also says a lot that the Abridged guys you're probably talking about don't really do Abridged anymore to begin with. They went 'legit' and do voice-acting or other content creation now. At least LittleKuriboh and Team FourStar are like that. I suppose it's a lot easier to give up your jokes when you don't have to actually tell any anymore for a living.

wolf10 wrote:

As far as the specific lack of black people specifically, I think that has to do with not wanting race to factor into certain details of the setting. FF16 needed to redeem the series' brand image after the fiasco of 15, and it wouldn't have been able to do that as a font of meme pics of black people with slaves (black, white, or otherwise). I was viewing the problem from the angle of "what's something you absolutely can't depict black people doing in modern media" and they went even bleaker than that. Maybe CBU3 erred too far on the side of caution, but it's easy to imagine the ethics department leaving a post-it on a working draft that said, "Don't even think about it." Stranger of Paradise came out just last year, and 14 gets more colorful every expansion (inventing new colors, even), so there's no reason to expect this to become a larger trend.

I really doubt they even took that into consideration at all. Aside from Barret and Sahz when has Final Fantasy been known for black characters? It's not like it's some common thing in the series that Yoshida did away with that warranted discussion in the first place like how people complained Spirits Within didn't have Chocobos or Moogles. It was just one interviewer who got upset with Yoshida's answer to their loaded question and the usual gaming websites ran with it trying to make it a controversy when no one actually cared.

I remember spending 70 bucks on Indivisible IndieGoGo just for the reason I even backed the game in the first place, that being oh8 working on it, to get fired from it years before it even came out. If I had known all that back then I would have just saved my money and stuck with the OneyPlays series for the game.

As far as I'm concerned Lab Zero are always the bad guys in every situation that seems to pop up surrounding them. And as a general rule of thumb people who advocate and promote censorship are never the good guys in history so that's two strikes against them in this case. I can at least rest easy knowing MikeZ got kicked to the curb as well since he was behind a lot of those boneheaded decisions even if his firing doesn't seem to have changed anything there.

Hopefully oh8's having a good time at Anime Expo this weekend at least

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