Early on in Blue Archive’s launch on global servers, controversary arose when one of the game’s CGs was cropped to censor one of the characters shown in a state of undressing.
The game instead only showed users on the global version of the game her face, instead of a wide body shot.
Due to this criticism, producer Kim Yong-Ha of the Nexon-published game released a statement revealing the reason for this change was due to “external requests”, though did not go into detail on who they were.
But now in a surprising twist, the game has now announced they will be creating a second app of Blue Archive which will be censored, while the original version will post all content uncensored.
This decision came about because the Korean Game Rating and Administration Committee asked them to either raise the game’s rating or to adjust art and resources to keep their current one.
According to Yong-Ha, it would’ve been easier to simply censor the game and change the artwork, but he said while he thought of “the Aris scene’s adjustment last time and as a PD,” he became “worried about negatively affecting our Senseis’ game experience with repeated changes if and when similar issues happen to arise in the future.”
So in wanting to avoid more controversary to cut out content as a result of censorship, the company has decided to raise the current game’s content rating while releasing a censored version which will maintain the rating the game has right now.
This decision is actually a change from their original stance when the controversary occurred, stating they would warn players ahead of time if artwork already shown in the Japanese release of Blue Archive needed to be altered. Now it appears that no changes will be made for most players, as the current app is considered the “uncensored” version while the censored one will be a new release.
This news update comes alongside the release of the latest event for Blue Archive, “The Clumsy Sister and the Magician of the Old Library.”
In case you missed it, you can check out our review for Blue Archive here! (as far as mobile games go, we still recommend it!)
