Cover image censored by yours truly for your safety. God bless.
Square Enix, known for popular franchises such as Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts, has once again come under fire this year based on some business decisions. However, this time the development has been so egregious and so related to sex that we couldn’t resist writing about it here on the blog. Recently Square unveiled an English version of their manga-reading app, Manga Up!. The app would include several popular series such as FullMetal Alchemist and My Dress-Up Darling. However, fans were quickly soured on the launch once they discovered a huge amount of censorship within the app. And when I say huge I mean “holy fuck even Kotaku is writing about how this shit is censored too much”.
The above images should paint a good picture of the severity we’re talking about here. What the fuck was so bad about the jeans that they had to coverr up the crotch area… of pants? I’d understand if Square wanted to include some bussin’ doujins on the app but needed to tone down depictions of raw pussy and dicks everywhere, but they’re censoring anything that even remotely relates to sex. Those girls couldn’t even wear swimsuits, and to my understanding there is censorship on almost every single cosplay that Marin Kitagawa from My Dress-Up Darling does. And if you watched the anime, you should know that most of that series’ value IS her damn sex appeal in the first place because it damn well isn’t the plot. When pressed by the community on this issue, the Manga Up! Twitter account responded with a statement that in order to release the app globally, “some modifications were unavoidable”. They are planning to continue working on the app and reducing censorship where possible it seems, though at this point the damage has been done reputationally and I don’t see many readers who are against censorship coming over to the app now. Especially since this was only strike one.
Somehow the trainwreck continues with monetization. Shonen Jump charges users $2 a month with a daily reading limit of 100 chapters. In other words a limit of 3,000 chapters per month. By comparison, the daily reading limit for Manga Up! is eight (8) chapters or 240 a month raw. After that, users must complete video game-esque tasks in order to unlock further chapters. Reading chapters gives points that you’ll need later to unlock certain other chapters. Of course, if you want to speed this process up you can simply pay some money to get in-app currency to quickly unlock chapters of your preferred manga. What’s worse is that even some chapters are split up into sections which means more points/coins/xp down the drain. Sorry I can’t keep up with which currency is used for what but rest assured knowing they’re all designed to drain your wallet.
You know, this about sums the whole thing up.
Between microtransactions, censorship, and Square’s recent interest in NFTs, the company is ruining its reputation in the West faster than ever. However reputation pales in comparison to sales, and with Kingdom Hearts IV and the new Final Fantasy game on the horizon, I doubt any of these push backs will be a real cause for concern for the company, which sucks. But hey, perhaps over time Manga Up! will be updated to be less shit. If any consumer sticks around to find out by then that is. Have you heard about Square’s new app? Do the microtransactions and censorship turn you off? Grab your phone, find a manga reading app, and try to avoid shitty business practices in the comments below!
