Devil May Cry is known for many things: great combat, cheesy one-liners, devils that rarely, if ever, actually cry. But it’s not known for nudity. That’s made the occasional flashes of forbidden flesh all the more noticeable in Devil May Cry 5, especially given that how much nudity you see is determined by the platform you’re playing on.
The latest game in the long-running series of instructional tapes on how to use a motorcycle as a sword features a scene in which Dante rescues his longtime partner Trish from inside an enemy. She falls from the belly of the beast, naked, and Dante catches her and lays her on the ground.
Camera angles largely obscure any actual nudity, but players have discovered that in the Western PlayStation 4 version of the game, this scene is mildly censored, with lens flare from Dante’s motorcycle blotting out Trish’s butt.
However, in the Xbox One, PC, and Japanese PS4 versions, this scene remains uncensored. Here’s a video demonstrating the two different versions of the scene from Naughty Gaming:
Even more strangely, there’s another scene in the game—again featuring a butt, the most obscene of crevices we all share—that’s censored in every version and territory. In this scene, another character, Lady, briefly appears naked, viewed from behind. Here, reports Eurogamer, lens flare censors her backside no matter what version you’re playing.
Some people are, of course, up in arms about this relatively minor change that happens to involve female nudity, but many are just bewildered. Why the consistently inconsistent handling of butts? Why one particular scene and not another? Why this game, when other recent PS4 games like Metro Exodus have featured more explicit nudity?
Kotaku reached out to both Sony and Capcom to find out more, but neither replied. For now, then, it’s impossible to say, though it could have something to do with an alleged new Sony policy that affected the more overtly sexually-charged Senran Kagura last year.
Until we know more, I feel that we should at least lament the fact that a) there’s no comparable male nudity on display in Devil May Cry 5, and b) unlike in DmC: Devil May Cry, no slices of pizza are used to cover up dicks. Not even one! Come on, Capcom. At least get creative with your censorship.
Comments
14 responses to “Devil May Cry 5 Slightly Censored, But Only On PS4”
Fun Fact: No one is wearing clothes in Devil Trigger form.
PS: Also all of the demons are naked.
The only sexual thing in this game that needs to be censored for my own good is Dante’s hair.
I demand to see boobs and ass!
I think saying mildy censored is pretty dismissive. It’s quite binary, either it’s censored or it’s not. In this case it is censorship.
Lightly obfuscated ~ Scene entirely removed.
There you go.
I live in this weird future where people *want* to be censored and told what is and isn’t good for them.
I mean if you want that, all the power to ya bud’.
Who is being told anything? What is getting “censored”? The people who produced and published the game in the West made an executive decision regarding their product before shipping it. No evil big brother, soccer mom or religious moralist third party had a hand in this. For all we know, those scenes were always intended to be tantalisingly half-seen, but some cheeky Japanese exec decided to make one of them explicit in their release.
Sony is censoring many games on their playstation platform. It’s not unique to devil may cry.
In some cases they are censoring against developers wishes.
If that’s the case, Sony is a private company with contractual stipulations that allow such executive decisions. As reproachable as going against a creator’s wishes may be, it cannot be called censorship when a company exercises powers willingly given to it (in exchange for money) in order to protect its interests.
If the game does well enough, perhaps the developers will have somewhat better leverage to have their demands for respect of authorial intent met in future games.
It’s literally censorship. They censored a woman’s body in an M rated game only for Sony players. I don’t know what you’re talking about.
What I’m trying to say is that Sony is not a social, moral or political entity but a private corporation beholden to shareholders. Game creators that become contractually associated with Sony to publish their games agree to a number of clauses and stipulations giving away a certain amount of control and power in exchange for a bunch of benefits and money. It’s literally the definition of “selling out”. You cannot claim “censorship” when you have given away some of your creative control to a company that has its own interests to protect.
Won’t someone please think of the children?
The funny thing with Lady’s censoring is that it wasn’t there in pre-release versions of the game. I was watching an LP of the game that was recorded with the review codes and Lady’s bum was very visible.