Now Shipping with More Gore: No More Heroes Modified for U.S. Release

Junaid Alam

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Apr 10, 2007
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Now Shipping with More Gore: No More Heroes Modified for U.S. Release

Sometimes games considered too violent are toned down for a regional market, but Rising Star Games head Martin Defries says Japanese-made No More Heroes is shipping to the U.S. with more gore added in.

Defries was responding to criticism of his company based on speculation that the title would reach Europe censored compared to the American version.

He said, however, that what was in fact happening is that Rising Star Games is simply reproducing the Japanese version.

"We've always drawn down our games from Japan. We tailor them in language, in text and audio, and nothing else," he said.

Defries also noted:

Ours, which will be drawn down from our parent company, Marvelous Interactive, which is directly from the Japanese iteration of the game, and there will be a version in the US that is a full-on gore, beheadings, dismemberment...and it seems some confusion has come to the fore in the past few days as to which version Rising Star Games will publish.

Defries said he had no idea why the U.S. version was modified.

"Why the decision [to add in additional gory detail to the U.S. release] has been made is a difficult one for me to comment on - that's a Ubisoft decision for the North American market."

Source: Gamesindustry.biz [http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=31508]



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BobisOnlyBob

is Only Bob
Nov 29, 2007
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Utterly bizarre. I'd rather like to play both, to be honest. A toggle would be nice. "Coins" vs. "Blood". Abstract expression versus physical reality.
I think it's not so much a matter of gore and Ubisoft believing that the US market won't be happy without it; I think it's more a case of Ubisoft looking at the coin-spouting enemies and seeing an impasse with the demand for "realism" prominent in the US. They can't exactly just turn off the coins, it'd feel like a feature was removed for no benefit. So in order to sate that (actual or perceived) demand for realism, they've replaced it with blood. Besides, Killer7 was all about the blood... maybe they're going after fans of that, perhaps pigeonholing Suda51's style. "His last game had cel-shading and lots of blood. This one is kinda similar and has cel-shading... where's the blood? Add some blood."

I could be miles off though, I'm very tired and very confused.