The Square Enix movie team was apparently more than happy to create a shower scene so suggestive that it pushed The 3rd Birthday into a new rating bracket.
The 3rd Birthday, the third game in the Parasite Eve series, has had its plot tweaked to include a scene where lead character Aya Brea takes a shower, following overwhelming pressure from fans to include one.
The demands for a shower scene aren’t completely random, as the last Parasite Eve game, Parasite Eve 2 had a short cinematic where Aya showered in her motel room after a long drive through the desert. When asked on Twitter back in August about whether The 3rd Birthday would include a similar scene, director Hajime Tabata said that it wouldn’t, because there wasn’t anywhere in the game for such a scene to go.
But motivated by countless tweets from fans, Tabata managed to find – or make – a place for a shower scene to go, even tweeting a still from it on the game’s official Twitter feed. Speaking to Famitsu, Tabata said that he had initially been cautious about putting a shower scene in, as he wanted the game to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. Once he saw how many fans on Twitter wanted it, however, he relented and commissioned a shower cinematic from the Square Enix movie team. Art director Isamu Kamikokuryou said that usually any such request comes with a long discussion about budget and production time, but for this project, the team was more than happy to oblige, saying that it would make the movie, whether it got used or not.
There’s nothing wrong with videogame characters being attractive or even outright sexy, but shoehorning in a shower scene for literally nothing other than fanservice is quite a few steps beyond just putting in some eye candy. Apparently, the scene is so suggestive that it raised the rating of the game in Japan to “CERO D,” which is roughly equivalent to the ESRB’s Mature, and the highest rating in Japan that isn’t regulated by law.
The 3rd Birthday is scheduled for release on PSP later this month in Japan and early next year in North American and Europe.
Source: Andriasang
Published: Dec 10, 2010 09:26 pm