Examples of Damage Control in Gaming: A Fairer Catherine: Full Body
Warning: There are spoilers involving one character from Catherine in this post.
There was little chance that Atlus and Studio Zero (formed from several Persona team veterans) would get Erica Anderson right for the release of Catherine: Full Body. The writing and direction team flubbed the reveal of her being a transgender woman in the original Catherine, and treated it as a joke to dunk on Toby, the guy who was interested in her. To make matters worse, the credits for the original game and the artbook used her “Eric Anderson” deadname, though it was tough to tell whether the latter was intentional considering other misspellings like “Orland” instead of “Orlando” and “Steeve” instead of “Steve.” It was a startling blight in an otherwise well-presented game.
It was tough to think Atlus would learn anything in between the original release and Full Body thanks to Persona 5, which featured two camp gay men as gags to chase around some of the main male characters. Atlus was sufficiently criticized for scenes involving them, but there was no indication that Japanese players were complaining about it, or that the Japanese arm would pay much attention to anything western players think.
To no surprise, Full Body isn’t any better. In fact, it’s worse considering the spotlight being shined on trans rights these days. The Japanese version still contains the same subtly insulting dialogue towards Erica, with characters acknowledging how she isn’t a real woman and the aforementioned “trap” jokes. She’s also still deadnamed in the credits, and in the artbook that comes with the game a whopping three times within two pages. Some watchers also felt there were disturbing implications within one of the five new endings, although the original reporting exaggerated some of it. Still, it’s bad, and it led to several LGBTQ individuals and those concerned about their rights and collective well-being cancelling their preorders, with plans to boycott not only this game, but all future Atlus games.
But some criticism was lightened when Erica’s English voice actress, Erin Fitzgerald, mentioned in her Discord that Atlus USA would be cleaning up some dialogue and altering the troubling aspects for the localization. IGN confirmed this will indeed be the case in their lengthy preview this week, where they vaguely noted that “Certain characters are properly named in the credits” and “Some lines may have been changed about this character as well.” It’s pretty obvious to see who they’re referring to, though they weren’t willing to go into spoilers.
It’s good that Atlus USA realizes how badly this would go if they left the original lines in and didn’t alter parts of the new scenes, since a lot has changed in the eight years since the original game’s release. But it’s still a shame the Japanese arm couldn’t realize this when they fixed up the game for current-generation platforms, and actually exacerbated the issue in certain cases. There won’t be any getting through to them until societal changes are made, and current indications suggest that they have a long, long way to go. In fairness, things are far from rosy in western territories, particularly when the American federal government is escalating their war on trans people on at least a weekly basis.
Right on cue, gamers crying that this is a form of censorship are out on full force in nearly any place this is being discussed, despite how they have no case. It’s common for games to receive changes during the localization phase, thanks to different countries and cultures having different values. Not to mention how these aren’t large changes, and only affect one character in a handful of scenes and text. Many of these people are open transphobes and consider the very existence of trans people “political,” which is inane.
Hopefully the changes are as good as they sound, because Erica was close to being a good character before this twist was sprung upon players in some endings — though the hints about it weren’t good either. Again, it would have been nice if the Japanese arm could have fixed this in all versions before Atlus USA had to step in, considering their games are played outside Japan, and they’re fully aware of the existence of their western arm. It’s tough to see any changes happening unless Sega cracks their figurative whip, since even Sonic says that homophobia and transphobia are no good these days.
Catherine: Full Body released in Japan on February 14th — yes, Valentine’s Day — and will arrive in western territories on September 3rd. I’m willing to bet Atlus USA won’t demonstrate the changes made to Erica themselves, and will leave that for players to discover shortly before or on the day of its release. There’s a good chance they’ll have to provide the same kind of clean-up job for Persona 5 Royal, when Atlus Japan likely doesn’t fix the camp gay content and might even make things worse. It’s a messy situation, but kudos to Atlus USA’s localization team for their willingness to provide fixes.
About The Author
Geoff
News Editor | Geoff is some nerd who writes for a blog and thinks he's knowledgeable. He write a lot about video games, but is capable of writing about other subjects, too. Twitter
