Yesterday, we reported that Nintendo’s life-sim, Tomodachi Life, is to receive a release in the West.
Previously, the game had been the subject of some controversy, following reports that Nintendo had patched out the ability to marry members of the same sex.
Not so, apparently. Our man Wesley Copeland did some digging, trying to get to the bottom of the matter and posted the response on his personal blog - Shame on you Wes, ignoring us like that!
Here’s the response he received from the publisher:
“Two developments occurred that led to some misunderstanding about this,
“First, as a result of a mistake in comprehension of Japanese, some people misinterpreted Japanese reports and fan activity and thought same-sex relationships were possible.
“This occurred because they saw Japanese fans posting game screenshots of male and female Mii characters, where female Mii characters were designed and clothed in such a way that they looked male. Since these explanations were made in Japanese by the Japanese fans who posted the images, the Japanese people do not have such a misunderstanding.”
So, basically, players were only pretending to be same-sex, in order to create the illusion that gay marriage was a possibility. But what of the patch?
“Second, a critical bug occurred in the original Japanese version of the game which made it impossible for the player to continue the game.
“When Mii characters were imported from a Wii console, or the previous game in the Tomodachi Collection series on Nintendo DS (which was only released in Japan), into the Nintendo 3DS version, it could lead to scrambled Mii data within the Nintendo 3DS version.
“This could result in different Miis being randomly assigned to existing in-game relationships, such as already married Mii, or as just one other example, giving the appearance of same-sex relations. Because this bug caused the inability for the player to save the game data and continue the game, we released a patch.”
So there’s the explanation - two different things became conflated, and due to a mis-translation, it was erroneously reported that Nintendo had removed same-sex marriage in the game via a post-release patch. In reality, same-sex marriage never existed, and the patch was simply released to fix an unrelated bug.
We’ve reached out to Nintendo to see if they ever plan to include the feature in future games.
Dale Morgan
Latest posts by Dale Morgan (see all)
- No Man’s Sky Developer Settles Lawsuit With Sky TV - June 20, 2024
- E3 2016: Microsoft Unveils New Xbox, Project Scorpio, For Holiday 2017 Release - June 13, 2024
- Injustice 2 Announced, First Trailer Inside - June 8, 2024
