ResetEra Accused Of Influencing Persona 5 Censorship

A few days back, Atlus Communications manager Ari Advincula confirmed that dialogue featured in a few scenes in the Western release of Persona 5 Royal will be altered. The most notable changes in the game, set to be released on March 31st, are dialogue lines of two gay NPC characters who repeatedly accost the main protagonist and his friend Ryuji in an over-the-top, predatory manner, including expressing their intent to publicly strip Ryuji naked.

In interviews with the video game news sites IGN and GameSpot, Advincula and Atlus senior project manager Yu Namba talked about how the changes were made to avoid presenting these characters in a "negative light." Soon after the interviews, some on Twitter accused members of the internet forum ResetEra, an offspring of once-popular gaming forum NeoGAF, of nudging the localization team into censoring the translated version, particularly via reaching out to the developers of the game via social media and its official survey.

Atlus West censors Persona 5 Royal after resetera users attempted to dox the game's director to get him fired, boycotted Atlus entirely and spammed their social media with censorship requests
But as always, it's never enough. pic.twitter.com/W1NBdJuhfS

— ResetEra Takes 🏳️‍🌈 (@ReeraTakes) February 17, 2020

Following the accusation, the gaming outlet Niche Gamer launched its own investigation into the issue. In an article on the subject, no hard evidence was discovered to back up the claims ResetEra had any impact on Atlus West's decision to alter the dialogues. However, in February 2019, a thread was created accusing Persona 5 director Katsura Hashino of homophobia. The author of the thread suggested several ways to put pressure on Atlas and Studio Zero when developing its future titles, proposing a boycott as one of the options. In the replies, one user wrote, "His views are garbage but hopefully this thread doesn't lead to him being doxxed or fired."

On February 21st, 2019, one ResetEra user linked the survey asking for suggestions for future games, with several others responding that they participated in it. While the survey is no longer up, an archived version can be viewed on the Wayback Machine.

While only circumstantial evidence that ResetEra might have affected the localization changes was found, its potential influence in the issue became a hot topic of discussions on Twitter, Reddit, 4chan and other platforms. While the full scope of changes coming to the international version of the game is unknown, you can check out one of the scenes which became the subject of the controversy below.