Stellar Blade developer SHIFT UP has confirmed the game will be “uncensored” in all regions including Japan.
The news comes from the official Stellar Blade X (formerly Twitter) account, which made the announcement yesterday. “Stellar Blade offers the same uncensored version in all countries, including the Japanese version,” the post reads. Accompanying this announcement is a pixellated image with a red X across it, which reads “uncensored all countries.”
The announcement might seem like a strange thing to note. However it comes after a number of PlayStation titles have been released in various iterations depending on region. Many players have suggested that these regional tweaks are akin to censorship (though your mileage may vary on that particular claim). Regardless, it seems like the team behind Stellar Blade is keen to make it clear their game won’t be getting changed up regardless of where players pick up a copy in the world.
It’s not exactly clear just yet what would even need to be censored in Stellar Blade to begin with. Based on store listings for the PlayStation exclusive title at retailers like JB Hi-Fi, it’s been given an MA 15+ rating for “strong fantasy violence,” although this is pretty par for the course in plenty of other games released globally with minimal issue.
Given the raging discourse online around the game’s character models, it’s possible that the developer felt the need to clarify that everyone would get to see the game in full flight without any regional tweaks.
Stellar Blade is set to launch on April 26, but the recent release of the demo has seen fan hype build dramatically in the lead-up. Players got so into the game’s demo that the developers told them to “go easy” on it after some put in over 50 hours into the relatively short vertical slice available ahead of launch. Just to really put it into perspective, Ampere Analysis has suggested that on its biggest day, the game demo had a peak of 690,000 daily active users – this is in comparison to Final Fantasy VII Rebirth’s demo, which reportedly peaked at 380,000 daily active users.
Are you going to play Stellar Blade when it launches later this week? Let us know in the comments.
Image: Shift Up
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