“ Persona 5 Royal’s western localization might no longer actively push gay men out of its narrative, but there’s nothing it can do to bring them in,” Shepard writes. The original material, in reference to both Persona 5 and the Japanese version of Persona 5 Royal, remains the same. However, as our own Kenneth Shepard notes in a Gayming Magazine article, the localization changes were admirable but couldn’t make Persona 5 truly inclusive at heart. “On our end, it took a lot of effort consulting not just the production department, but talking with our marketing, and how they would feel about it if we changed how things were in Persona 5 to this new way–what would the public reception be, what the company would think, whether it would be okay if we do make the change,” said Namba. “As a localization manager, I really cannot do too much about what has already made it into the game … with Royal, we were determined to see if we could do something about it at least localization-wise.” When speaking to Michael Higham from GameSpot, Persona 5 Royal senior project manager Yu Namba explained the difficult but worthwhile process of pushing for such a change. One similar and recent high-profile localization move was the editing of an extremely controversial homophobic scene in Persona 5 for the Persona 5 Royal release. Such a move displays the power and influence of localization teams. Honey Bee Inn is the Queer Space Final Fantasy VII Remake Desperately Needed.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons Has Better LGBT Representation than the MCU.Persona 5 Royal’s Himbos Are Too Dumb to See I’m Hitting On Them.Wheeler ends the blog on the note that he hopes, “you’ll join me as we bridge the gap between the past and present for a new and yet wonderfully familiar experience.” One minor but important change for the North American and European releases of Friends of Mineral Town is that the “heart icon” indicating a marriage candidate’s romantic affinity for the player will display for all marriage candidates from the start of the game, where in the Japanese release it will only display for same-sex candidates after you confess and start dating.”
“This has been a very long time coming in the STORY OF SEASONS series, and the producer has been supportive of our decision from very early in development. “In our version, this will just be called “marriage,” and the relationship between same-sex couples will be given identical treatment to opposite-sex couples,” says John Wheeler from XSEED Games.
This obviously read as… a little funny, at best, to queer players because it was very, “oh my god, they were roommates.”īut the western localization of the game is doing away with any pretenses. It’s practically everything that marriage is - the ceremony is even basically a marriage ceremony - except in name. This system allows you to form a lifelong partnership with a character of the same sex. This would later seemingly come in the form of the “Best Friends” system in the Japanese version of Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town. Hashimoto had said that this was less a response to the much more LGBT-inclusive and modern Stardew Valley, which is heavily inspired by Harvest Moon, and more a part of building plans for the series.
Producer Yoshifumi Hashimoto had told Polygon in 2016 that the team knew same-sex relationships had to be included in the series sometime in the future, though there were development complications the team had to overcome. The original games and the Japanese version of the remake maintain the heteronormative system of being able to technically marry only men as a woman, and only women if you’re playing as a man. Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town is a remake of the 2003 titles Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town and Harvest Moon: More Friends Of Mineral Town. This will be the first time in the history of Story of Seasons, also formerly known as Harvest Moon in North America, that the player will be allowed to be queer. In the first localization blog for Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town, XSEED Games has announced that the western version of the game will let you have a same-sex marriage.