When pop culture meets culture war

Dragon Quest III HD-2D and the pitfalls of producing content in a polarized world

On the left, the original. On the right, the “censored” version. Spot the difference?

It was an otherwise unremarkable podcast, streamed live from the Tokyo Game Show on YouTube last week. At one point, two veterans of the Japanese fantasy-industrial complex groused about changes made to a famed role-playing game that was getting an updated re-release for modern audiences. It seems the choice of selecting between a male or female player-character had become “Type 1” or “Type 2,” while some layers had been added to the scanty clothing of a female warrior character (seen above). “I don’t really understand it,” said one. “There’s a kind of religious puritanism in America,” replied the other. “That gives them an extremely narrow view when it comes to [ratings] compliance.”

The live stream disappeared as soon as it ended, but someone had recorded it, and a self-described citizen journalist uploaded a subtitled excerpt to Twitter. There he declared the changes “forced ridiculous UN driven Globalist agenda compliance” and “Communism in a different package.” This spicy conspiratorial hot-take would likely have faded into oblivion, as things tend to when posted on Twitter these days. But then Elon Musk retweeted the rant, adding the comment “This is insane.”

Musk’s amplification emboldened culture warriors who rail against “woke” culture, which is to say progressive attitudes towards gender and race. They unburdened themselves in large numbers. “DEI-ESG is stifling creativity,” remarked one poster, using acronyms for corporate diversity and environmental ethics initiatives. “This is forced evil,” railed another, whose comment was liked over two thousand times. “Americans pushing their beliefs to the rest of the world,” declared yet another.

So on the one hand you have a Japanese creator complaining about conservative religious influences impacting their work. On the other, you have American gamer(gater)s claiming liberal secular values are ruining their leisure lives. In this particular case, it turns out everyone is wrong. But before we get into the details of why, a little history about the game at the heart of this tempest in a Tweetstorm.

Dragon Quest III HD-2D is a souped-up modernized version of the game Dragon Quest III, which was released for Nintendo’s Famicom console in February of 1988. It’s hard to overstate just how much of an impact the original game had on Japanese society. The day before its release, ten thousand queued overnight for the chance to purchase a copy in Ikebukuro, a scene that played out in front of computer and electronics stores in cities across the country.

Over the course of the day, police collared hundreds of kids, who skipped class to line up, for truancy. The game sold a million copies by nightfall, then three million by the end of the first week. Kids played all night; when they glumly trudged off to school in the mornings, their mothers took up the controllers to launch their own games in a phenomenon the mass media dubbed “kitchen gamers.” For time it seemed as if every member of society was consumed by the Quest. Newscasts ran exposes about this new pastime turned lifestyle. Americans may have invented video games, but Japan was the first to mainstream them into society to such an extent. This sea change, from pastime to lifestyle and even identity, was largely due to the Dragon Quest series, and Dragon Quest III in particular.

Dragon Quest III is thirty-six years old, which might as well be thirty-six hundred in video game years. So those hoary old pixels are getting a polish, upgraded from the blocky, flat overhead view of the original into a bright, sharp “HD-2D” format that will better appeal to modern gamers. At least one critic has called the effort “stunning.” It does look good! For those old – uh, I mean, eternally young enough –  to remember the original, it’s like everything you imagined the game looked like as a kid. And everyone in Japan imagined that look in exactly the same way, thanks to a really smooth trick.

Akira Toriyama’s art crossed the streams of manga, anime, and gaming.

While the Famicom hardware lacked the horsepower to display complex graphics onscreen, the director of the game hired Japan’s hottest manga artist, Akira Toriyama, to prepare glorious illustrations of what those polygons on screen actually represented. Toriyama was already selling millions of copies of smash-hit manga like Dr. Slump and Dragon Ball. This was an incredibly canny cultural crossover, laser-focusing what had been disparate streams of manga, anime, and games into a hyper-pop singularity. Toriyama’s instantly recognizable art, which adorned both the package and a lavishly illustrated instruction manual, did as much or more to sell Dragon Quest as the gameplay. (This also helps explain why the series never did anywhere nearly as well in the West, where the products were released with far less thrilling artwork.)

The two gents having the YouTube conversation were Yuji Horii, the creator/director of the Dragon Quest games, and Kazuhiko Torishima, the former editor in chief of Weekly Shonen Jump magazine, who discovered Akira Toriyama and managed his early artistic career. These two had been there at the beginning, and here they were now at TGS, opining on just how much had changed in the three-plus decades since the launch of the Dragon Quest series. So their comments carried real weight, and were widely reported online. The idea that “woke” Americans were censoring Japan, a land where artists were free to work without creative restrictions of any kind, absolutely unhinged a number of observers.

The problem is, nearly every hot take on this issue is wrong – even those of the editor and director. Japan is most certainly not a land of unfettered expression. The changes made to this game had nothing to do with either religion or political correctness. More to the point, there isn’t any censorship of any kind happening at all. This isn’t some kind of gaslighting or “alternative facts.” It’s simple reality.

Let me explain. I’m uniquely qualified to opine on this myself. I worked on two of the games in the series: my company provided translations for parts of Dragon Quest VII and VIII. For the latter we worked in-house at Square-Enix for several months, where I met Yuji Horii on at least one occasion. And I’ve been engaged in the business of game localization for more than twenty years, so I have professional understanding of why changes are sometimes made to games in both America and – surprise – Japan.

Japan is, if anything, more restrictive than America when it comes to portrayals of sex and violence in video games. Bear in mind that this is a nation where full-frontal nudity is against the law, even in products intended purely for adults – nether regions tastefully (?) covered by that digital equivalent of the fig leaf, the pixelated mosaic. CERO, Japan’s ratings board, is even stricter when it comes to games. The threat of an adult rating, which keeps products out of the hands of younger gamers, often compels publishers to modify or outright censor parts of foreign games. The Japanese edition of Baldur’s Gate 3 featured literal fig-leaves superimposed over nude characters. A sex scene was excised entirely from The Last of Us 2. And the changes made to the Japanese edition of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas were so profound that they made it nearly impossible to finish. Nor is this censorship limited to foreign titles. Famously, a kidnapping scene was cut from the Japanese version of Final Fantasy 12 , but not overseas editions. Many Japanese game creators complain about the heavy hand of the Japanese ratings board.

The reason that Japanese directors twist themselves into knots over CERO’s recommendations is because their employers, the companies they work for, who pay their salaries and invest the millions it costs to make big-budget games, want to make their money back and then some. Part of this means ensuring games are rated for purchase by the broadest possible audience. This doesn’t have anything to do with “wokeness” or “DEI” or “Communism.” It is pure capitalism. Square-Enix could have released Dragon Quest III HD-2D with the original, ever so slightly racy-looking characters. All that might have changed was the rating. So why are they making the changes? Because they want as many people to buy the game as possible.

So, undoubtedly, do Horii and Torishima. It’s obvious, even from the excerpted segment posted online, that neither of them angry – they’re just two old dudes griping at how standards have changed in comparison to decades ago, when they were in their primes. And you can’t blame them -- standards really have changed in Japan! For example, it wasn’t long ago that nudity, cruelty, prejudiced language, even blackface were common on Japanese television. In manga and anime, stripping women of their clothing was common even in kids fare. That isn’t the case anymore, and it doesn’t have anything to do with American evangelizing. It has to do with locals protesting and lobbying for change.

For the companies that make them, games (and comics, and anime, etc.) are not a canvas for unfettered expression. They are a canvas for expressions that sell. And their makers would rather sell more product than less – even if it means changing things to appeal to different customers in different regions of different cultures. I know this from experience, because in my work as a localizer, I was often asked to suggest such changes — by the creators themselves. So the Japanese pop-content industry is not a wonderland of freeform artistic expression being compromised by foreign invaders, of the conservative or liberal varieties. It’s a capitalist enterprise dedicated to making money by appealing to as many customers as possible.

None of this, will of course, do anything to dissuade those determined to fit Dragon Quest III HD-2D’s changes into their personal narratives. There are conversations to be had about the agency of creators over the legacy of their products; about the murky criteria and draconian rulings of ratings boards; or the ethics of modifying the designs of an artist after their passing (Akira Toiriyama died earlier this year, alas.) Perhaps the conversation unfolding online may lead to that kind of nuanced discussion. One can dream.

In the meantime, the organizers of the talk show have released a statement on the behalf of the participants. It firmly distances themselves from the debates playing out online, citing mistranslations in the subtitles of the excerpted segment, and decrying “the deliberate cutting out of context and quoting of the speakers...for reinforcing the legitimacy of your own opinion.” Let me translate that for you: it means leave us out of your culture wars, because we don’t want any part of them.