There's not a lot of games like Yakuza in Japan though, apart from all its sequels and spin-offs ofcourse. Very few games from Japan show middle-aged people playing prominent hero roles. Even when they do they're told to be much younger than they actually look, like Auron from FF10 who's 35 eventhough he looks 50. And few games that really deal with the underbelly of society. Even Yakuza itself, or the spin-off Judge Eyes felt forced to remove an actor who in real life was caught with drugs from their crime game. By the way, where was the gamer outcry over that? Weird.Which is fucking weird considering this is one of the main playable characters in Yakuza 4:
And he's one of the most popular characters and appears in 4 games.
It's warped when something not traditionally beautiful is seen as less worthy. That's not a healthy appriciation.There's nothing warped about beauty being desirable. There's nothing warped about middle age gruff dudes being harder to market. That's why when you have a race there's hot chicks in tight leather waving the flag and not middle aged office workers. The only warped thing here is pretending it's abnormal to have a healthy appreciation for beauty and to prefer things which contain some measure of it. The Yakuza guy's point basically is that the game is good enough to not even need any marketing to do well, which is just a normal observation and only ignorance as to the workings of marketing (especially in Japan where you get varying degrees of lewd shop-based preorder fanart for a bunch of games) would see it as something noteworthy.
Nagoshi also said "At your typical (Japanese) company, if you showed concept art for a character like him, I don't think it would be approved." Which is probably in reference to his quote "To be honest, we (Japan) were beaten". Which means beauty standards dictate what games get made, which is warped.
Then why aren't Aerith's bangs ridiculously large and sharp enough to stab a boar? That's not authentic to the original design.But yeah either way, a thing existing, and it being the core thing a group does, are vastly different things. Nothing of what you mention is censorship either, so that's irrelevant to what I was responding to. It's more like authenticity and wanting the characters to remain original. I completely understand where the people who complained about Tifa are coming from (no idea about the Aeris bit) since her theme has always been having a huge chest, and that actually has nothing to do with my preferences, as I tend to be a flat is justice connoisseur myself. You can understand and agree with something even if it isn't your personal taste, simply because it's right or what it's supposed to be. The people complaining about Tifa aren't the caricature you are making them out to be, they just want final fantasy to be final fantasy as much as possible. There's no shortage of big chested girls in other games and shows and what have you. Clearly we won't have a shortage if Tifa is shrunk some.