Credit of the thumbnail goes to Censored Gaming.

Last month, as my very first blog post, I talked about how Sony has become increasingly apathetic towards the Japanese video games market. Key leading figures left Japan Studio; Sony began cracking down on even mild sexual content in Japanese video games; and small Japanese studios have determined that developing their games on PlayStation is not worth the hassle.

Well, apparently, this is not the end of Sony's desire to be a moral arbiter on what content is or is not allowed in video games. On February 19, Japanese gaming outlet, GameSpark, published an article about Cyberconnect2's President and CEO, Hiroshi Matsuyama's response to a fan's question. The person pointed out at the lack of blood in the Kimetsu no Yaiba game even though the anime depicts a lot of blood and asked what would happen to the game's depiction of violence. (This is how I interpreted it from DeepL and Jisho, so if anything is fluent in Japanese, please correct me if I'm wrong.)

Hiroshi Matsuyama responded that the games are first designed with the CERO rating in mind before the platform manufacturers (e.g. Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft) propose their set of changes. He referenced the Naruto Ultimate series where Sony, not CERO, demanded Cyberconnect2 to not depict character Minato Namikaze without his arm even though this is canon in the original story.

He did note that this was not a problem with Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot where the depiction of Nappa chopping off Tien Shinhan's arm remained faithful to the original anime. Matsuyama guessed that it was due to the different impressions between Dragon Ball Z and Naruto, and the "changing times", which are extremely vague hypotheses.

While Matsuyama's comments make it sound like Sony made progress in reeling back the censorship on violent content (Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 4 came out in 2016 while DBZ: Kakarot released in 2020), there is concern on whether Sony has reversed course with Kimetsu no Yaiba with the game's lack of blood relative to the anime. After all, Sony does have a history of demanding developers to remove content that do not adhere to their arbitrary standards. I highly recommend watching Censored Gaming's video on the "Sony Check".

Matsuyama ended his talk by noting that restrictions on what can be depicted can change, and telling his listeners to wait and see what will happen to the Kimetsu no Yaiba game when it eventually releases later this year. It is to be determined if Sony has expanded its censorship to violent content on top of sexual content.