This whole Dead or Alive Dimensions fiasco is just ridiculous for so many reasons. Basically a handful of European countries have banned the 3DS title from being sold in their countries because the game breaks their child pornography rules, and despite the game being certified PG here and in Australia, the game has now been unclassified and is banned from sale in Australia.

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe that any game that breaks a country’s child porn rules should be sold, but as far as Australia matters (I don’t know if the NZ version is the same as the one that went to the European countries) the game just doesn’t break those rules. First of all it is stated that the big reason the game is being pulled is due to girls under the age of 18 can be photographed in a way that allows the user to see their underwear.

Yes, there is a photography mode where you select a character, a preset pose from a list of unlockable poses and move the camera around them to take 3D photos, and yes, in some costumes, in certain poses, you can move the camera to see their tidy whities. Are any of the girls under 18? Not in the Australia/New Zealand version they aren’t. On each of the stats pages for the characters is a slew of information, one of which being age. I know that some versions of the game have the offending girl’s ages as under 18, but in our localised copy the ages for the three girls is clearly N/A. So they could be 17, if you so chose to think that way, but the way the girls look they could easily be anywhere in their 20s.

So what makes Dead or Alive Dimensions offensive? The fact that we don’t know their age? Excuse me, but that’s just plain bullshit. Sure, these characters have unlockable school girl costumes, but that’s more of a throwback to the fetishism of the Japanese schoolgirl than it is them being schoolgirls. Nowhere in the story mode do we see the girls associated with highschool and their ages aren’t listed anywhere.

If all the other female characters had their ages set to N/A would we be seeing the same fearmongering from the media? Or is this all because somewhere, someone is playing a version that states those characters are under 18? It’s just plain ridiculous for the Australian classifications to uncertify a game based on information that ISN’T IN THE GAME THEY ARE UNCERTIFYING. It makes little to no sense.

I hope that people of the media see this and understand the lies they are spreading. They don’t help the image of gaming and it shows them to be the amateurs they are to the gamers who actually know what’s going on in the world of gaming.

Rant over.

Oh, and here’s a clip from Dead or Alive 2, a game that was released in 2000 for the Sega Dreamcast. Note that the girl shown in this video is one of the “underage” girls from Dead or Alive Dimensions and there was NO media issue with this when it launched.

Originally posted on www.GameCulture.co.nz when DOA:D was busy getting banned.