When the PSP port of Persona 2: Innocent Sin was announced earlier this year,
Andriasang unveiled a few new features added specifically to the port, including the Climax Theatre, complete with new subquests and the ability to download extra missions and create your own quests.
Sound kind of cool? Well, the subquests are still there, but Atlus removed the DLC and mission creation from the North American localization and neglected to tell anyone. The official explanation can be found at
Atlus' forums, which includes these quotes:
"As has been the case with other similar games and their custom content features, a number of challenges—technical and otherwise—prevented the inclusion of the basic creation/customization functionality within the Climax Theatre for the North American release of Persona 2: Innocent Sin for PSP System."
"And, before people ask, no, we really can't go into the "why"s and "what happened"s here, but it was not a decision made lightly, and it was not a case of something being removed just because we're the Big Bad Publisher that hates fun."
"The only thing I want to add here is that this [quest creation being in the NA version] isn't true. At no point from the NA announcement to the release was the Quest Creation aspect mentioned in any press releases, Faithful blasts, or website updates."
This does little to clarify the matter. Functionally, it's probably not all that big of a deal, because many players probably wouldn't have used it anyway. (I know I wouldn't.) It's certainly nothing approaching the Snow Queen quest from the original Persona, which was a huge part of the game and was hacked out of the original English PSOne release, but included properly in the PSP version. As noted by them, technically the quest creation was never announced as being part of the NA version, but Atlus should probably realize that a good number of their fans read import blogs like
Siliconera and
Andriasang, heard about it there, and assumed that it would make it in (like the
forum poster that brought up this issue!) But the biggest concern is that Atlus USA did nothing to say contrary up front, thereby committing the sin of omission. It's a no-win situation if they can't include it, but they preferred to go the skeezy route by letting people buy it and find it missing, rather than deal with a minor fan uprising before release and having them swear off purchasing it (though they likely still would've bought it anyway.)
It's especially frustrating in this particular case. Anyone with a bit of internet savvy can either hack their PSP or download ePSXe, patch an ISO and play the fan translated version of P2:IS for free. While this is technically illegal (unless you own the original Japanese PSOne disc), the availability of such an option should, in theory, have given Atlus an incentive to make any products superior to what you could download off the 'net. (And with less loading times, too!) Adding extra features is a good way to do this - silently removing them because fans should be grateful that they're getting it in the first place is not only disrespectful to their consumers but actually a little bit ignorant to the reality of the gaming world.
This hasn't been the first time this generation that this has happened. The DS port of Nippon Ichi's Rhapsody initially had a few extra scenarios taken from the later games, which were advertised on the English web site and would've been the first time English gamers would've gotten to play them. These were removed for the NA release and the web site quitely updated to remove those particular features. NISA was called out on it and eventually apologized. A similar thing happened with Yakuza 3 and its removal of its hostess bar simulation segments and other minigames, which caused something of a
shitstorm. This was discovered before release, and Sega admitted to it, sparking calls for a boycott. That didn't work, which was actually good, because the sales were enough to convince the company to localize the sequel, albeit without any stupid cuts this time. The English DS version of Dragon Quest IV was inexplicably missing its party talk function, though it was included in the releases of V and VI. But the only real way for companies to stop this crap is to call them out on it, and here we are.
