Supposedly we will be getting the censored version of No More Heroes in a few weeks time over here but, I still haven't really read any confirmation about February 29th (yay, leap year!). On the other hand, release dates have always been pay day Friday so it might just be true. As long as it doesn't get delayed any further then, I don't care.

Meanwhile, there are Europeans continuing to complain about how we're not going to have any gore in our version. Someone has even compiled a set of videos, playing the Japanese and NA version side by side to show the differences during the cut scenes.

I watched through the clips since I don't mind spoilers and I think for the majority of the scenes, they looked pretty bland without the blood. You just don't have the feeling the onscreen characters are assassins and are holding deadly weapons. They feel more like toys.

For the action part of the game, I don't mind having no gore since this title has a very comicy feeling to it and you're fighting a bunch of cloned enemies most of the time anyway but, they probably should have left it in those boss finishing scenes for the extra dramatic touch. Then again, it would have looked inconsistent if there's only blood during the cut scenes.

According to another interview with Suda51 by the Edge games magazine (the man's been getting a lot of publicity lately), the NA version is the closest to his initial vision of the game apparently.

In the action part of the game, the moment when Travis finishes his adversaries is quite bloody in the American version. Was that always OK with Nintendo?

Indeed it was. But it’s an important point that the game is different in different territories. The Japanese and European versions have no blood and you simply kill those enemies. The US version is the closest to my initial vision of the game. The issue of having blood spilt is an interesting one. Today’s technology makes a very realistic visual experience possible, so does that mean blood has to be sprayed all around? I’m not sure. There is, in terms of videogames, almost a natural absence of blood: you kill an enemy and that’s all.

The opposite we’re now seeing, without going into too high a level of photorealism, is that you may feel the need to show blood on the screen to serve the action. Now, if you decide that action games as a whole can’t have blood on screen, from a user’s point of view that may make a particular game look quite unrealistic and actually harm the experience you are trying to deliver. It is still too early to see if the issues of graphic violence and blood are important because, in terms of fidelity, they are new – or if we’ll become accustomed to these sights as natural as technologies and minds move on. But I think that perhaps the bigger issue is shielding people from any form of violence.

Yeah, I'm sure it would have looked better on the Xbox 360. Is he a fan of the Battle Royale movie by any chance? That movie loved squirting gallons of blood too which made it cheezy instead of horrific.

Anyway, too late to change things now. Perhaps they're make things up by including a Manga version of the manual just like what the Japanese got. The Americans never got that so maybe it'll make up for the censorship.