An interview published on December 8th, 2015 on the gaming section of a Brazilian website called Uol.com has a few snippets from Street Fighter V producer Yoshinori Ono regarding the topic of self-censorship and making changes to the game to avoid offending certain groups.

The Portuguese interview was translated by a NeoGaf member named Moraizen, and a few members from Kotaku in Action confirmed that the translation was legitimate, where Ono states…

“Our objective with ‘Street Fighter V’ is to start over from zero”[…] “We want the professional players and the casual fans of the series to return, but we also want to reach those who have never even touched a fighting game. So we can’t have something in the game that makes people think, ‘This is not acceptable’”. “We didn’t make any change because of external influences” […] “Those changes came up internally. We decided to remove that because we want the biggest possible number of people to play, and we don’t want to have something in the game that might make someone uncomfortable”.

This was in response to being asked about the much talked about butt-slap from Rainbow Mika being removed in the latest version of the beta for Street Fighter V. It was one of the only things people could talk about.

According to Ono, the changes were done to widen the appeal of the game and avoid offending anyone. He goes on to say…

“Probably we won’t be able to remove everything that could offend someone. But our goal is, at least, to reduce that number as much as possible so that they think ‘Ok, there is this issue here, but it is within the limits’.”

He explains it in a way that makes it known that they didn’t want anyone becoming “discomforted” by the content in the game and they didn’t want content in the game that could widely be deemed as offensive. This is despite the fact that they received quite a bit of push-back from the reveal of Rashid on 9/11.

Interestingly enough, Epic Games also ran into a similar problem along with other notable companies who make violent and mature video games such as NetherRealm Studios who were formerly known as Midway Games. In the case of the aforementioned companies, they implemented “Mature” filters. You can easily go into the options menu and turn on or off the mature filter that will limit the blood, gore and language in a game. Epic has also been rather vigilant in giving consumers options to play and experience the titles in a way that best suit their sensibilities as opposed to just removing the content altogether.

Reddit user ghebert001 also suggested the same thing, writing in the thread on Kotaku in Action….

“There’s an option to turn off blood and gore in games like Mortal Kombat (I assume that’s still an option, haven’t played the latest ones)…they could just make an SJW mode that removes anything that might be remotely offensive like not allowing the players to pit male and female fighters against each other in the same match or replacing fighter’s costumes that might be “culturally appropriating” even if it’s that character’s own culture. They could just call it “FUN – ON or OFF”.”

Street Fighter V is another victim of the current outrage culture climate, joining the likes of Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 and some titles withheld by Idea Factory International, all in hopes of avoiding rubbing the Western media the wrong way with the depiction of their characters that don’t align with America’s gender politics.

Street Fighter V is due for release on PC and PS4 on February 16th, 2016. The third beta test takes place on December 18th.