The upcoming Bandai Namco game Blue Protocol released last month in Japan, things are taking a bit longer for an international release and part of that appears to be localization changes being made.

In a recent interview with the Blue Protocol Database, the site spoke with “Franchise Lead” Mike Zadorojny about the game’s upcoming English release through publisher Amazon Games.

When confronted about censorship in the English release, Zadorojny admitted to content changes in pursuit of a Teen rating such as removing the “Jiggle Physics” button from character creation.

BPDB: Let’s start with the first question. Censorship is a huge topic in the west. Can you confirm if elements of the game will be changed in Blue Protocol to fit the western scene? If yes, may you please expand on this subject?

 

Mike Zadorojny: So, I’ll talk at a high level in terms of the goals of what we are trying to accomplish in this and then we’ll go back down into the specifics. I think censorship comes in different ways and the level of censorship is usually where we find disagreements within the community.

Generally speaking, when we are talking about censorship for Blue Protocol, we want to bring Shimooka-san’s vision for the game and for the western players. However, there are layers we have to think about from a cultural, legal, and a regulatory perspective. We want the content and the events to be the same one-to-one. When we talk about changes, we are looking at a perspective from bringing the game to as many people as possible. We are targeting a T-Rating since it as an Anime game, and generally speaking, Anime is much more approachable for the Teen market unless you start going towards certain extremes. This game does not really play to those extremes.

The general changes that we are looking at is: “how do we make that approach to this game?”. A change for us in the west, specifically in the character creation menu, the female characters will no longer have the physic shake button available. These are the types of changes that are culturally accepted in Japan and which they do in their titles. However, in the west it can be uncomfortable for our players and that’s where we will step in to say hey, can we make a slight change for this?

One of the other changes that we have talked about, which players have already seen, is about making some changes to the outfits of the children characters to make some outfits less revealing. These things are not necessarily going to detract from the gameplay experience or from the story that is going on. But generally speaking we’ll make it so when parents or friends are playing with other Teens, that they’re not necessarily going to be pulled out of the environment or the game’s perspective.

So from a censorship point of view, again we’re looking at what do we need to hit from the requirements of all the entities, the country legal requirements and the regulatory ones. We’re trying to stay away from particularly censoring what the game is or the story is because we want the vision to be the same from the Japanese version to the west.

Blue Protocol Database went on to confirm that the “S” body type had been removed from the Amazon Games version of Blue Protocol. Twitter (sorry, I mean X) user Zakogdo has gone through a list of changes discovered (so far).

Amazon Games is no stranger to heavy-handed localization of games left in their care. The Korean Action RPG Lost Ark had a multitude of changes made during its launch and more recently fans have pointed out the “Artist” class has had its armor covered up for international audiences.

For those wanting to play Blue Protocol without censorship, there’s an active English-speaking playerbase who uses fan-patches and VPNs to play on Japanese servers. But be warned, Bandai Namco is known to IP ban players found to be from outside of Japan.

Taiwanese and Korean servers are set to open later this year, and may not be as ban-happy regarding international players.

Blue Protocol is set to release in the West at some point in 2024, for the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and Microsoft Windows (through Steam). We’ll have a final review of the game once it actually comes out in English.