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Blue Archive Smartphone Game Director Apologizes For Art Alterations in Global Version
posted on by Kim Morrissy
The Blue Archive smartphone game English Twitter account posted a message by the game's director Yongha Kim on Thursday apologizing for art alterations in the global version. He explained that although he previously stated in an interview that the team had no plans to alter the illustrations for the international version, he confirmed that the presentation of a visual novel segment featuring Aris has been altered due to "external requests."
The message further explains that the differences are "not due to the policy of development studios and publishers favoring or neglecting certain regions," and that the team's options included removing the entire content, modifying the images, or changing the presentation. The team opted for changing the presentation because it would "minimize the damage to the content."
"We are fully aware of the importance of preserving the original contents, but we believed providing stable service of the game was more important," he stated.
Kim furthermore explained "the official stance for future 'censorships.'" Although the development studio aims to share the same content across all regions without alterations, modification requests can occur. In those situations, the team will implement the modifications in a way that "preserves the original intention as much as possible." These changes will be mentioned in future update notifications.
According to a Reddit post on Tuesday, a cutscene illustration of Aris in volume 2 chapter 1 episode 4 was cropped in the global version to hide her nude upper body.
In an October interview, Kim described the illustrations as "of the utmost importance." He said, "We ourselves have not made any changes to the illustrations at this point. And we don't plan doing that in the future either."
Blue Archive is developed by the Korean game studio NAT Games (a subsidiary of Nexon). Yostar Japan first launched the game in Japan on February 4, and Nexon published the global version on November 8. The game is free to play with optional in-app purchases.
Source: Blue Archive English Twitter account
