For those unaware, Skullgirls is a 2012 fighting game developed by Lab Zero. Initially created with the amusing goal of flipping the gender ratio of the traditional fighting game roster, it was a humble little title that released with a grand total of eight playable characters. Through the years, the game was screwed over on every front possible. Its budget was cut early on. Two publishers dropped it. The game’s big moment to gain publicity on the stage of EVO, the biggest yearly fighting game tournament, was lost when Super Smash Bros. Melee was narrowly voted onto the mainstage over it. The entire team chose to work without a salary for a while, purely because the game had become that much of a passion project for them. The game survived though, by relying on a mix of Indiegogo campaigns, fundraising efforts by the game’s staff and voice cast, and the connection between the developers and the fans. The little game that could eventually clawed its way onto the EVO stage when Covid restrictions meant only games with strong netcode could appear in the tournament, and the various fundraisers have earned it another nine (soon to be ten) characters in the form of DLC, the first six of which were free to everyone that had already owned the game. Pushing the limits of what an indie title could accomplish against the likes of Smash Bros, Street Fighter, and the NeatherRealms catalogue, Skullgirls expanded into a mobile game spin-off and a series of web comics, and up until two weeks ago, stood as the most positively reviewed fighting game on Steam. Lab Zero no longer exists, having been bought out by a larger publisher (it is currently owned by Hidden Variable and Autumn Games0, but their creation lived on. The game has always been niche, but few indie darlings can boast a more dedicated fanbase.

You may have noticed that I said it was the most positively reviewed fighter on Steam until two weeks ago; the more genre-savvy of you have almost certainly guessed that this change is what today’s article is about. I play this game somewhat regularly, enjoying the high-octane combat and the creative character design, and I’m used to seeing it get minor patches every so often. Skullgirls has never stopped being a living product, and especially with the new DLC characters being slowly moved from Beta to Retail, we see small patches every few weeks. Two weeks ago, a purely cosmetic update was made. We’re going to call this the censorship and “sensitivity” patch. It made a number of changes to the game, which we’ll go over in a moment, and while one or two good things came from it, it’s generally a very bad patch for a number of reasons.            

To cover the one good piece of it first, the patch made a decision on the always uncomfortable issue of mascot character Filia being depicted in the occasional sexualized shot. The character’s supposed to be sixteen, so this has always been a sore spot amongst fans, and the decision was made to adjust a few story mode cutscenes, slightly lengthening her skirt to sexualize her less. This is for the best, and comparing the shots, the new versions of these scenes are probably what they always should have looked like. Anybody getting up in arms about this change is somebody whose opinion you can safely ignore. They also updated a piece of Valentine’s art to resolve a legal dispute with the Red Cross, which I cannot fault them for. Two other characters also saw some major story changes though, and we need to talk about those, because what the new owners did to Parasoul and Big Band represents unnecessary sanitization and censorship overstepping its boundaries.

These two are some of the more popular characters in the game, with Parasoul (left) starring in the web comic, and Big Band (right) being the most universally beloved of the DLC cast (I can say this in confidence because everyone who donated to the Indiegogo campaign got to vote on which of several options would be the first character funded by it, and he was the winner). However, Hidden Variable deemed certain aspects of them problematic recently. Specifically, Parasoul is often accompanied (both in story and gameplay) by her soldiers, who wear armbands and bear a passing resemblance to a certain German military from the 1930s. The characters have never actually been nazis, but their design drew from nazi imagery to establish the subtle undertone that Parasoul’s squeaky clean army wasn’t as nice as she let on, an element that plays a major part in the setting. Meanwhile, Big Band’s backstory was that he was the one good cop in a corrupt precinct, was beaten to death by his coworkers when he tried to arrest the mafioso paying them off, and was later Bionic Man’d into the musical cyborg detective pictured above. On an unrelated note, this character is a black man.

So when the new patch came through, we saw a few changes to these characters. Parasoul’s soldiers, as well as her alternate costumes, were stripped of their armbands for fear of them being too similar to nazis. This was done to not just the gameplay sprites, but also to all cutscenes and artwork in the game, down to the concept art. That’s right, they edited the concept art made by a different company. Big Band, meanwhile, saw the opening of his story changed, replacing the cutscenes showing off his backstory with him talking over a black screen, because someone decided it was illegal to depict police violence involving a black man, even though it’s integral to his backstory. Now, there’s something to be said for being sensitive to modern events and current issues, but these two instances are fascinating instances of censorship. In both cases, the censored elements are key to the characters: Parasoul’s goal is to atone for the past mistakes her family has made, as represented by their questionable military decisions, and Big Band remains the stalwart idealist and local paragon of morality in spite of barely surviving an event that would have shattered most people’s faith in others. Unlike the Filia change, which was ultimately good sense, these decisions remove key elements from major characters and sanitize elements of their backstories. The fact that these decisions were made about characters other people created apparently didn’t factor in at all, nor did the fact that this game has been out for ten years without anybody complaining about these elements. Changing these things damages the original intent behind the characters while calling attention to a perceived problem nobody previously minded.

There were a number of other changes, but the ones I want to focus on are the changes to the game’s digital artbook and sound design. Several pages of the artbook included with the game were altered, and the optional “Soviet Announcer” was deleted entirely. I call attention to these because they were part of the fundraisers that saved the game when it was dropped by its original publisher. The Announcer was a campaign goal people paid money to have included, and the artbook featured fanart created by people who donated to the game in exchange for the inclusion of their work. I cannot understand the decision to, with no community input, remove these backer goals people paid for.

So this raises some important questions about the nature of censorship. While the core concept of “we don’t want to show people things that are both upsetting and too relevant to modern events,” has some basis in making people more comfortable in playing a game, it is also unnecessary sanitization. This is an M rated video game, which is advertised as having some uncomfortable elements (primarily the body horror some of the characters are regularly subjected to), and I believe that it is acceptable to use a mature game that advertises itself as such to discuss mature or uncomfortable matters. If we say that we cannot discuss these things in art or media, then where does it become okay to discuss them? I’ve seen a trend recently in which people wish to sanitize works of uncomfortable subject matter, either removing or softening those elements to make the subject matter that upset them into something comfortable. This most commonly shows up in places like BookTok, where there is a massive push towards novels that have virtually no conflict in them. To sanitize or remove these elements is to remove the author’s original intent by pretending the subject they wished to discuss does not exist. It also makes light of serious issues by pretending they’re something comfortable. You strip the power from the art by sanitizing content this way, and that’s an insult to both the artist and the intelligence of the people consuming the work. It should be possible to portray something in a work of fiction and trust the players to engage with it on a critical level. Or maybe trusting the populace to use their brains is too much? I don’t believe so.

Now, games are different from other works in that as players control these characters, they are actually stepping into the roles of these characters. While I don’t think having a multiplayer FPS where one side can play as the nazis inherently makes that a bad game, there is some psychological research to suggest it could passively generate sympathy for the side the player controls. To that end, there’s a good argument to not make them playable. At the same time, Parasoul isn’t a nazi, and neither are her troops; they just wear an armband with a loose resemblance to the one nazis wore. While there is definitely some inspiration taken in the general design of her soldiers’ uniforms, they are a very different group that spouts and represents approximately none of the real-world group’s ideology, and for that reason, I think it’s okay to leave them as they are. And while I might excuse this on a normal day, the fact that they are choosing to be revisionist by altering concept art to hide the fact that this was ever part of their design speaks volumes. Capcom doesn’t hide the less than flattering, occasionally racism-infused old designs of their Street Fighter characters. Warner Bros. doesn’t sanitize old Looney Tunes shorts for expressing outdated ideals. To sanitize the past is to claim that it never happened, which is a disservice to everyone involved. And that’s without getting into the fact that this is a different company’s concept art. Hidden Variable bought the rights to the game, but Lab Zero made that, and now their influence on their own art is being erased. I could discuss much the same issue regarding Big Band, but acknowledge that a racial issue might not be my place to speak on. For that reason, I will leave it at: Removing his story as a survivor of a real issue cheapens the value he might have to a community that is affected by the issue in question.

Making matters worse is that the company started by being dishonest about the situation. While they explained why they made some changes in the patch notes, said notes purposefully omitted information, most notably not discussing the removal of the Soviet Announcer at all, despite it being a Kickstarter reward that customers paid for. If Hidden Variable really believed these changes were strictly good, then why not be honest about everything being changed? Why call attention to these changes after the original content has been in the game without complaint for the better part of a decade? Why remove artwork that people paid to have included in the game?

There’s some other minor changes I won’t get into, largely because they’re not as big a deal as these, but the primary questions stand. Where does sanitization and censorship become acceptable? Should we ever accept the censoring of art that was designed to talk about an uncomfortable issue? Frankly, I don’t think any of what was done was necessary (sans the legally mandated Valentine update). Even if I agree with some pieces of this patch, revising the history of the game in a dishonest fashion is not something that we should ever accept. We aren’t going to sanitize Fahrenheit 451 for showing uncomfortable material, so why should we subject a game to that censorship when it’s fully honest about what it wants to discuss?

Anyway, that’s why Skullgirls, one of the best fighting games on the market, is getting review bombed to the point that it lost its status as the most positively reviewed game of its genre.