@Rusted Blade
Stop spinning this that the internet is at fault when the misinformation through bad translation was spread by Eurogamer. Not only that but the translation from both Eurogamer and that Twitter post say there is a ethics department that had influence with the design decision, something you said doesn't exist.
Second sentence from the second paragraph in that twitter post.
And in the Euro Gamer article the ethics department is mentioned in the head line and the very first sentence.
I'm absolutely flabbergasted at the level of gas lighting you're pulling off in here especially in the face of evidence on the same page. Listen, after this post I'm not going to press on this issue any further as we have deviated way off from talking about Soul Calibur and I'm perfectly fine if you want to have your say after this but please, as my final words on the matter, have some self reflection with what you've just done here.
LMAO, "gaslighting"!? 'I do not think this word means what you think it means.'
Ok, a few things here: First off, many large corporations do have something called an ethics committee, but they have nothing to do with product development. Rather they are a part of corporate governance and oversee matters like oversight of conflicts of interests for directors and corporate officers, legal compliance, and other matters essential to making sure that a company doesn't land itself in hot water with government regulators regarding how the business itself is run. But such a committee would have no role in telling anyone what should go into a game; the role of such committee is mostly limited to what are called fiduciary matters.
Rather, what has been poorly described as an "ethics department" here--and I'll spare you the details about the complexities of the translation here, aside from to say that the miscommunication here was very much a combination of mistranslation, internet rumor mill exaggeration, righteous indignation about the saddest possible thing to be upset about in the history of the universe, and imprecise/idiomatic language on the part of Nomura himself in the original interview--is actually what we would, in English, call a localization and quality assurance office.
You see, back in the day, a game would be developed first and foremost for the local market. Only if it hit a certain level of success was it likely to be ported to other regions. But when export was deemed economically viable, very frequently the ports needed to be adapted multiple times in order to be legally complaint and/or culturally palatable in the local markets--though it's worth noting that very often this is more about issues of language and religion than sex and violence, as some may expect. As games became more commonly ported across more and more markets, this became increasingly cost-inefficient because this meant composing a localization team for each market. So in time, developers created a more streamlined approach--they rolled localization into the core development for a game: where necessary, slightly different localized builds would be built contemporaneously, but even better was when you could develop content which would be palatable and sell well across all major markets, which is the main role for localization teams today--to advise on the front end and save as much trouble as possible needing to re-do multiple versions of a given piece of content down the line.
But these teams don't trump the senior developers or have a veto power over their artistic ambitions--rather they just advise on how to make content as successful as possible in all markets and they develop approaches to certain common issues in localization that tend to crop up often. When a developer is constituted by several different studios located in different countries, each is likely to have its own localization and QA teams, but they coordinate to advise one-another and polish localized versions of the game. It's just a much simpler approach and a more efficient use of resources. However, in this instance, since Nomura used ambiguous wording, it's unclear if we are talking about a localization team request, a QA suggestion, or even some team within the core development staff who have input on making game assets, y'know, not look like shit.
Now, the problem here is that the average consumer of media puts very little effort into understanding how the art they enjoy is actually produced. If gamers did know these basic facts about how developers create their content, they would have seen the nonsense in this story a mile off. For that matter, even somebody who knows absolutely squat about game development still should have smelled the bullshit here, because directors are not in the habit of bad-mouthing their company's internal practices and admitting to instances where they were overruled by beaurcracy. Actually, there are about a dozen additional reasons why anybody who heard the outrage-steeped version of this story should have been instantly suspicious, but I'm not going to spend any more of my own time today discussing remedial critical thinking strategies and proving why a bunch of f---boys losing their shit over Tifa's bust size is an absurd waste of moments out of a human life.
What I will do is assure you that nothing that is accurately described in English as an "ethics department" forced the game's director to compromise his vision of the final product: someone suggested that Tifa, a martial artist being rendered in a modern engine, should have a sports bra instead of a tank top, so it would make physical sense that her breasts weren't flopping around while she did roundhouses and backflips. And he agreed with that obvious assessment, because of course he did. That's it. That's the whole story here and everything else is very much the internet's creation. So 'flabergast' away if you must.
