Street Fighter V ‘butt slap’ removed to avoid risk of offence

Capcom has said that some recent tweaks to Street Fighter V were born of its want for the game to appeal to as wide an audience as possible.

The developer yesterday said that it had made several gameplay changes to try and ensure the game is accessible for as many people as possible. It seems that the same thought process has been applied to its presentation.

It was revealed last month that some changes had been made to the animations of female characters R. Mika and Cammy to remove a ‘butt slap’ and gratuitous crotch close-up respectively.

Now a Neogaf translation of an interview with Yoshinori Ono on UOL Jogos has revealed that, while Capcom didn’t feel pressured into the move, it was designed to risk offending audiences.

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’,” Ono said.

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.

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’. We want that everyone can play and enjoy without worrying about anything else.”

It is becoming increasingly common for Japanese developers to tweak the sexualised content of their games to bring them more into line with the gender equality demands of Western audiences. Nintendo recently altered Wii U titlesXenoblade Chronicles Xand Project Zero for the West while Koei Tecmo has decided to pull the Western release of Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 altogether.