This seems like a good conversion mod at the first glance, but I have couple questions that bother me, so I would've liked for them to be answered:
1. Once CERO was established (due to the known bizarre events), Japan began vehemently censoring and avoiding/blocking/removing any and all potential depictions/visualizations of any dismemberment (and especially so that of beheading) in any and all media, ever since. It's a well-known fact that BIOHAZARD franchise suffered a lot from such established enforced censorship policy, so...the question is - will this "English to Japanese version"-convesrion of the game affect any of the game's gore content in a detrimental/harmful way? Will this add the censorship that the Japanese release of BIOHAZARD REmake has and would completely remove all dismemberment/beheading/additional gore, once you apply this mod?
2. If I have an "original vanilla 1996's BIOHAZARD/Resident Evil voice acting" mod applied/installed prior, will applying this conversion mod overwrite/affect the said previously-enabled mod? For example, will Japanese voice tracks override characters' lines from 1996?
Thank you very much in advance for any answers provided (if any at all), have a nice day/night.
Censorship level, you can consult this Japanese site which lists the differences in censorship in Resident Evil games in Japanese version. But I have both versions for RE1 and 0 and I don't see any difference in censorship. Maybe I'm wrong, but I remember in that beta video Chris was getting decapitated by a Hunter, while in the final version it's impossible to replicate the decapitation from death.
Alright, so...I've played through this International-to-Japanese conversion mod fully and tested it thoroughly, and I can confirm that there's no censorship on decapitation/dismemberment, though, apparently (I'm still not 100% sure on it), it seems there's less blood effects and blood's color was altered slightly (seems to be slightly less red and more brighter?) in comparison with the "default" international version of Steam's.
However, it seems that Steam's default release already had still toned-down/less bloody effects than the ones which were present in Gamecube's vanilla original REmake's release of 2002, so...I guess that's that. Will still need to check up on that one, though (I'm not sure).
All in all, it's surprising that they didn't censor/cut out the dismemberment and decapitation completely in the Japanese version of this, given that CERO was already existing by then and that censorship was already rampant in full force throughout the Japan, and this is especially even-more-so surprising given the fact that this is an even-later re-release that was made in the time period when censorship became even stricter and censoring laws became even more asinine. I can only guess that there was some kind of an ultimatum-like option which Mikami presented Capcom with - "either you leave dismemberment/decapitation/gore intact, albeit with slight alteration, or the game wouldn't be re-released at all", as the last word on it was always Mikami's. Also, as for the mods: this mod currently does NOT work with "Gamecube fonts", "DualShock button icons", "real names for weaponry", BGM/music/sound fixes and edits (manually installing save room themes, Magnum's shooting sound fix, AND vanilla '96's BIOHAZARD soundtrack still work, however. All of these don't work with Fluffy's Mod Manager and must be installed manually, so maybe that's why, though several other manual installations still won't work even if you do it manually) and many other mods which were initially made for the default International release (custom costumes, however, work fine, as they're region-agnostic).
P.S. Both Wesker's Report I and Wesker's Report II are completely untranslated. WR I is purely a video with no subtitles (strange, given that everything else in the game was subtitled...it seems that they just directly ripped the photage from Umbrella's Chronicles' and Darkside Chronicles' Japanese versions, and spliced them up together with barely any actual proper effort), and WR II is a set of texts. If it's impossible to make and insert custom subtitles for WR I, it seems that at the very least translating WR II's plain texts by fiddling with fonts might work?
For the Gamecube Polices mode, the modder would have to make it compatible with the Japanese conversion mod. As for the Wesker report, it's largely feasible to add raw subtitles or even integrate an English-translated audio track. If someone makes it and asks me to implement it, I wouldn't mind doing it.
It's been done quite a while ago, see/check it out here and/or here (this one's much older and is purely optional/somewhat irrelevant nowadays, as the other one turned out to be better/more polished). However, always keep in mind that BIOHAZARD 0's iteration/variation of this mod turned out even better/more faithful. REmake has a lot of issues in comparison with BIOHAZARD 0, because they lost the source code entirely for REmake, so they literally had to resort to doing Dolphin emulation and tap into game's memory from there, when they were working on HD remaster of it, while BIOHAZARD 0's source code was never lost and they always got it on their hands as a reference, so HD remaster of BIOHAZARD 0 ended up being way more stable and bug/glitch-free than REmake's HD remaster ever will be. Including modding.
That mod deserves so much praise... Thanks so much for bringing the content of the Japanese edition to those who own the Western version of the game!!! Now we can finally enjoy the Wesker Reports in their full glory (even though they're fully in Japanese). Kudos!
8 comments
1. Once CERO was established (due to the known bizarre events), Japan began vehemently censoring and avoiding/blocking/removing any and all potential depictions/visualizations of any dismemberment (and especially so that of beheading) in any and all media, ever since. It's a well-known fact that BIOHAZARD franchise suffered a lot from such established enforced censorship policy, so...the question is - will this "English to Japanese version"-convesrion of the game affect any of the game's gore content in a detrimental/harmful way? Will this add the censorship that the Japanese release of BIOHAZARD REmake has and would completely remove all dismemberment/beheading/additional gore, once you apply this mod?
2. If I have an "original vanilla 1996's BIOHAZARD/Resident Evil voice acting" mod applied/installed prior, will applying this conversion mod overwrite/affect the said previously-enabled mod? For example, will Japanese voice tracks override characters' lines from 1996?
Thank you very much in advance for any answers provided (if any at all), have a nice day/night.
https://usa-jp.blogspot.com/2023/03/steam.html
https://youtu.be/oKloGAjT7qs?si=TQCCYmSMx6DbXGQz&t=123
However, it seems that Steam's default release already had still toned-down/less bloody effects than the ones which were present in Gamecube's vanilla original REmake's release of 2002, so...I guess that's that. Will still need to check up on that one, though (I'm not sure).
All in all, it's surprising that they didn't censor/cut out the dismemberment and decapitation completely in the Japanese version of this, given that CERO was already existing by then and that censorship was already rampant in full force throughout the Japan, and this is especially even-more-so surprising given the fact that this is an even-later re-release that was made in the time period when censorship became even stricter and censoring laws became even more asinine. I can only guess that there was some kind of an ultimatum-like option which Mikami presented Capcom with - "either you leave dismemberment/decapitation/gore intact, albeit with slight alteration, or the game wouldn't be re-released at all", as the last word on it was always Mikami's. Also, as for the mods: this mod currently does NOT work with "Gamecube fonts", "DualShock button icons", "real names for weaponry", BGM/music/sound fixes and edits (manually installing save room themes, Magnum's shooting sound fix, AND vanilla '96's BIOHAZARD soundtrack still work, however. All of these don't work with Fluffy's Mod Manager and must be installed manually, so maybe that's why, though several other manual installations still won't work even if you do it manually) and many other mods which were initially made for the default International release (custom costumes, however, work fine, as they're region-agnostic).
P.S.
Both Wesker's Report I and Wesker's Report II are completely untranslated. WR I is purely a video with no subtitles (strange, given that everything else in the game was subtitled...it seems that they just directly ripped the photage from Umbrella's Chronicles' and Darkside Chronicles' Japanese versions, and spliced them up together with barely any actual proper effort), and WR II is a set of texts. If it's impossible to make and insert custom subtitles for WR I, it seems that at the very least translating WR II's plain texts by fiddling with fonts might work?