Rumor: Bravely Second English localization has lots of edited costumes

I’m still more disturbed by the cowboy

[Update: Regarding Bravely Second‘s rumored side quest changes during localization that multiple commenters urged me to look into: I did.

What I found was that outlets covering these changes all pointed to the same GameFAQs post (beware of spoilers) by a person who claims to have played the Japanese game and the recently released European version. To summarize the poster, side quests in the Japanese version had multiple outcomes based on decisions made by the player, and it appears that the European localization only gives players the “good” ending regardless of the player’s choice.

According to another poster, these changes could be unintended. “Strangely, the journal in the game basically explains the bad ending, as if that was the one you got when you’ve really seen the good ending. It remains to be seen whether this is a bug.”

I’m not a huge fan of reporting stories based solely on a couple of forum posts (learned my lesson on that the hard way) and would take this with a grain of salt until it is confirmed as intended by Square Enix, the localization team, or the publisher, Nintendo; all of whom I’ve reached out to for comment. I’ll update this post if a response is received.

Thanks to community member SeymourDuncan17 for sending in information regarding this situation to our tips box as well.]

Bravely Second is now available in Europe and it looks like more costumes have supposedly been edited from the original Japanese release and not just the Tomahawk outfit.

An unknown person has data-mined the game’s files and compared costumes and characters between the versions using a model viewer and posted a list of changes on Pastebin. From looking through the list of rumored changes, it looks like a hell of a lot of “crotch shadows” have been removed, as well as an enemy characters’ “vagina bones.” A few of the supposed edits are shown in the video above.

The real question is can Bravely Second still be enjoyed without such important features as crotch shadows and vagina bones — whatever those are? I guess us Yanks will find out when the game releases here in the US in April.