It's kind of ironic because this is a reversal on the last time a lesbian character was in a Fire Emblem game; Heather (from Radiant Dawn) was the first, and in the Japanese version of the game she's pretty explicit about it, saying that she only joined the army to follow the cute girls around. They removed those lines in the American version, though her attraction to Nephenee and Ilyana was still so flagrant it was almost a "Haruka and Michiru are cousins" scenario.
Of course, then Awakening happened, and Nintendo realized they could make a lot of money appealing to the otakus. "Fixing" the lesbian is a pretty common trope in trashy harem anime, so... therefore Soleil.
Oh, but it's okay because if you're a girl that wants to date a girl you can have the yandere who is just a copy and paste of the yandere from Awakening. Thanks, Nintendo.
whut.
Fire Emblem has been half brutally difficult tactical RPG and half dating simulator since Genealogy of the Holy War; hell, the kids mechanic is pretty much ripped directly from that game.
I had a lot of issues with Awakening (XP grinding is an awful mechanic that has no business being in a Fire Emblem, they should have given the kids their own narrative with Lucina as the main lord rather than dumping them in the middle of Chrom's story in the most forgettable manner possible, Chrom is the most boring of the Buff Blue Lords by a mile) but at least it was okay. Fates does... not look okay.
Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
Yeah, funny thing about that... at least in America, the ratings board tends to be really, really generous to companies. You can get away with a LOT and still keep a "Teen" rating. (I know, 'cuz I interviewed them on the subject awhile back. Fun times.)
Now, companies have different reasons for wanting to get specific ratings.
For example, there's one group that just doesn't want to get rated AO, and otherwise doesn't care what rating they get (although, when they edit content they were specifically told would get an AO rating and thus prevent the sale of the game at all, they tend to be hideously demonized by people who would rather them release it totally uncut... which is not legally possible. Go figure).
Then there's the group that wants to sell to young kids and generally wants an E for Everyone rating - and they'll fight just as hard because that's the demographic they want.
For both groups, getting a specific rating is part of their business strategy. And, of course, ratings are different between regions, so sometimes content has to be changed to match the business goal. *Shrugs* Personally, I'm fine with the scene this thread is about being changed. It did sound somewhat offensive, and if a company decides they don't want to publish something like that, I have no reason to object.
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It has been claimed that ratings institutes are not censors. How are they not? They decide on what people are allowed to see, handing out death sentences for various movies, with massive budgets that will not be recouped without certain ratings. Over time, they have caused a massive streamlining and sanitation of the entire media production. Not to mention, they work from pretty questionable principles, such as the one about not showing proper results of violence. In America, showing someone bleeding seriously, or having a seizure from traumatic brain damage, or the like, will doom the movie to a very small-audience rating. In Japan, I have heard that NOT showing proper results of violence has the same effect. It sounds to me like the japanese have a far better idea here. IF movie violence is desensitizing, not showing what it results in should be worse. This is, as a rule, not questioned in American debate.
The movie rating boards are not the same thing as the video game rating boards, and the video game boards are what's relevant to Fire Emblem: Fates. They do not behave the same way, and the difference, for this discussion, is important.
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They are still censors, and with no arguments actually forthcoming to why they shouldn't be.
...Because the ESRB, at least, does not censor material? They're not some kind of nefarious cabal desperately trying to strike certain kinds of content from the marketplace. The ESRB, and I quote them on this, "assigns rating information that is consistent with expectations that parents and other consumers have about content and age-appropriateness. To accomplish this, we base ratings on the human judgment of raters not formulas that are written in stone. We also regularly conduct research to determine if our rating assignments match consumer expectations. Although consistency in rating criteria is important to earn consumer trust, it’s also important for a rating system to evolve."
Furthermore, they don't actually get content that could be rated AO very often, because "[We have] been assigning rating information for 20 years and developers and publishers are familiar with the type of content that may result in an AO rating assignment. As a result, it isn’t often that we receive a submission that warrants this rating, but when it does happen, we share this information with the publisher who can decide to either accept the rating or revise the game and resubmit it, which starts the rating process anew."
The game publishers I've talked to have always seemed to think the process was very fair (and, if it erred, it was usually on the side of rating too low instead of too high). If you want to blame someone, blame the stores that don't sell AO material and the console publishers who refuse to allow it on their platforms. Most publishers legally can't publish certain kinds of content, but the ratings board isn't the one making that decision. It's the market. *Shrugs*
And Fire Emblem: Fates, of course, is faaaaaaar from AO territory - meaning there's no real concerns about that here. So what the rating board thinks doesn't really matter, as it's unlikely to affect sales very much.
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It doesn't matter if it evolves, or if it conducts research, or if it caters to the expectations parents have, or if it "bases ratings on the human judgment of raters", etc, it is still a group designed to strike certain kinds of content from the market. It provides no other function than limiting who can see what.
If you wanted an actually useful ratings model, why is there nothing other than "no sex, drugs, swearing or violence (that is not cartoon)"? I wanted to buy a good game for a three-year-old once. Every game had clear ratings on the above content, but NOT ONE had a recommendation as to what age someone would likely have to be to a) be able to reasonably play the game, what with manual coordination, difficulty and complexity of the plot, b) appreciate the intricacy of the setting/plot/etc, and c) like the graphical design of the game.
Yes, as you say, there are other people involved who act as censors. That doesn't mean the rating boards do not.