Cussing in RPGs

Well, there's not much I've been able to do as of late, so let's have a little rant on something. Cussing in RPGs! Oh no, get the parental advisory stickers and the ESRB ratings! Not once have I made my blog to showcase some actual cussing in any kind, so this will be a bit interesting.

There's nothing really important about cussing to be honest. The majority of games I play have it in spades without overdoing it, and that's completely fine. Some games are of course geared for younger audiences (Rhapsody, any Mario RPG) and get rid of it altogether while pulling off funny little alternatives to cuss words. The majority of games though are T-rated, offering off the occasional "damn" every time something awry happens, and it doesn't matter if it's hero or villain who says it. It just makes sense whenever its used.

Of course, some characters are more vulgar than others, and what better way to show that than to look at Final Fantasy VII's own Barret and Cid, two of the most foul-mouthed individuals, to the point where they're censored with symbols sometimes. Not all the time though, as the word "shit" is uncensored in a few scenes, surprising when you consider how often these two guys cuss. Another game that throws the word "shit" uncensored just so happens to be Soul Nomad & The World Eaters, with almost 40 sayings, almost all of them made by the incredibly hammy Gig. You ought to be surprised these games somehow hold on to a T-rating despite the excessive swearing. In other cases, the word "shit" ends up being shown uncensored exactly one-time, the kind of thing that PG-13 movies would allow if and only if it's used rarely. Some games that do this are Final Fantasy Tactics (after beating Dycedarg), Valkyrie Profile (Badrach's recruitment cutscene), and Thousand Arms (Bandiger, and this is a game that gives audible censor beeps when someone cusses too).

Now every game I mentioned so far has an international release, whether PAL or North American. For the Japanese-to-English-translated RPGs, it seems that the cuss words are a lot more common. Well, not a lot more, as it still is used sparingly, but it's a little more noticable. Dual Orb and Langrisser II have "shit" being used several times by characters throughout the game, of course at appropriate times, but you just can't help but notice it. Then there's the DeJap translations of both Tales of Phantasia and Star Ocean:

Hooray, first time I put images on this blog, these I saved when I played these games. Note that the usage of cussing is a little more liberal in these two translations, especially in the second image as well as the Tales of Phantasia boat scene which is a little more than just the "fucks like a tiger" line Klarth puts up. Not to mention that last image, which also is from ToP, where a little kid NPC is the one to cuss. Yikes. Personally I'm more comfortable when you are fairly stagnant on the cussing, do it sparingly, do not overbear it, and definitely don't goof with the translation all that much. I get that edgy teenagers are okay with this, and I am too, and that's how it should be. Hey look everyone, this blog stopped being PG-rated! Oops.