In today’s episode of Super Crucial Questions The World Needs Answers To RIGHT NOW, we have: Why don’t the men of BlazBlue have♏ nipples?🐷 Here comes series director Toshimichi Mori to illuminate us.

Now, wherever you live in this wide old world of ours, you probably think you got the poop൲y end of the stick, region-wise. It’s a natural gamer instinct to want wh🐻at you can’t have, and then whine like a banshee because you can’t have it. In Europe, for instance, the issue of localisation (all of those languages to translate into) makes any RPG or other text-heavy title take an eternity to arrive.

As it turns out, that same line of thinking is the reason why Bang Shishigami and his shirtless BlazBlue buddies don’t hav♎e nipples. It’s all about loca🌌lisation and cultural differences.

Speaking to last week, Arc System Works’ Mori confirmed this to be the case. He and Guilty Gear creator Daisuke Ishiwatari were being interviewed after some friendly rounds of the upcoming BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle, when the fateful question came up.

“I heard that overseas it wouldn't be too well received, so we intentionally abstracted that,” Mori said. In Europe and the US, he explained, shirtless men don’t tend to get a second glance (they don’t exactly scream professionalism in a formal setting, but you get the point),♛ while Japan take a more conservative approach to the idea.ꦑ Man-nipples are a bit of a no no.

This wasn’t an issue for Mori himself, but it’s more about the censoring. “I am of the school of thought that it's acceptable as a form of expression, but I noticed whenever they'd take some of the artwork that I do with the nipples, in Asia it gets erased,” he continued.

This is all well and good, of course, but why is the rest of the world denied their fix of BlazBlue nipples? Why is it not a similar deal to censored artwork on Yu-Gi-Oh! cards, say, where an original and international version can both happily co🌜-exist? Because that would be too much effort, that’s why. As reports, the conclusion was that it’s easier to simply standardise the artwork worldwide, rather than have to keep tweaking each piece for different regions.

So there it is. Mystery solved. It’s interesting, really. With the furore that always surrounds women’s chests in fighters like Dead or Alive, it’s about time that men’s chests got a little limeli♏ght too.

It’s not for the first time recently, either. On Super Mario Odyssey’s release, the reveal of the boxers-only outfit for Mario (complete with nipples) was a huge deal. A –which sees players completing to unloc♐k the boxer shorts the fastest—is actually a thing.