Remember when Shift Up, developers of the recently released Stellar Blade, promised there'd be no censorship in any region for the highly-anticipated action RPG? And then an EA exec wondered out loud why that was released in Japan when the Dead Space remake wasn't? Well, things have changed slightly since then. You may have seen the discourse already, but I wanted to get all the facts before reporting it. 

Firstly, the initial release of the game contained a wall that had a sign labelled "Shop R".  Next to that wall was the word "HARD" spraypainted in huge letters. Unfortunately, this seemed to spell the phrase "HARD R", which has racial connotations the devs may not have been aware about.

Once word of the Hard R wall started to spread, Sony and Shift Up noticed and released a patch to replace the grafitti with the word "CRIME."

Of course, because it's 2024 people were already crying censorship at this point. But another patch that was released seemed to alter one of the outfits so that Eve's cleavage was slightly covered up.

Now this was inexcusable. Gamers who thought the game was based and would epically trigger those woke blue-haired SJWs on Twitter were now accusing Shift Up of pandering to the radical left by adhering to Sony's supposed censorship. People were refusing to update the game to keep the original outfit intact, which also mean the Hard R wall was still present, but still, freeze peach and all that.

Eventually, the game's director and Shift Up's founder Kim Hyeong-tae commented on the so-called controversy, admitting it wasn't any kind of "censorship" of their original vision but an internal decision to modify the outfit. He said:

"I don't think that just because the costumes are vulgar doesn't necessarily mean they're good, so this is something that was modified for quality. As a result, there are parts where eroticism is lessened or emphasized. This is the final product that we want to show as the intended result."

This means the ver. 1.00 outfit everyone was crying over wasn't the developer's original vision like some people were claiming. Changes happen all the time in the games industry for all kinds of reasons, and a designer replacing a design with a new design they prefer personally is one such reason. 

Stellar Blade deserves to have a legacy outside of cringe-ass culture war bullshit, and now that this has been clarified hopefully people will move on with their lives. Internet gamer hiveminds have already found a new mad thing to get mad about, as always, and the cycle is sure to continue. What did you guys make of this bullshit "controversy"? Does it affect your experience of the game at all? Let us know below!