After Developer Shift Up Promises ‘Stellar Blade’ Will Release “Uncensored”, Sony Patches Out In-Game Graffiti Art Following Accusations Of Racism

Spencer Baculi |

Apr 24, 2024

Eve (TBA) looks out on the ruins of Earth in Stellar Blade (2024), Shift Up

In overwriting the promise made by developer Shift Up that the highly-anticipated action title would released completely “uncensored”, Sony has announced that they will be patching out a piece of graffiti found in Stellar Blade due to an absolutely reaching accusation from IGN that the in-game artwork could be read as a reference to a racial slur.

Eve (TBA) prepares her plan of attack against a Brute in Stellar Blade (2024), Shift Up

Shift Up first offered confirmation of an uncensored Stellar Blade release on April 21st.

Taking to the game’s official Twitter account, the developer announced in both English and Japanese that “Stellar Blade offers the same uncensored version in all countries, including the Japanese version.”

Shift Up promises Stellar Blade will release uncensored — Stellar Blade (@StellarBlade) via Twitter

And while this announcement was met with thunderous applause from the game’s excited fanbase, particularly in light of the Western video game industry’s continued criticism of its protagonist’s attractive appearance, it would take only a single complaint from IGN for the game’s publisher, Sony, to render the guarantee null and void.

During their review of the game, the video game news outlet found themselves clutching their pearls at the placement of a large graffiti piece reading ‘Hard’ next to a glowing neon ‘R’ sign, the latter object denoting a near-by meet-up location for one of the game’s NPCs, Roxanne, which they believed was a reference to the ‘Hard R’ version (the term referring to the dictionary spelling of the word as oppose the colloquial version ending in ‘a’) of the ‘n-word’ racial slur.

The 'Hard' graffiti, as seen in the original release of Stellar Blade (2024), Shift Up — The ‘Hard’ graffiti, as seen in the original release of Stellar Blade (2024), Shift Up via IGN

Proceeding to raise the issue directly to Sony rather than Shift Up, IGN was subsequently informed by a company representative that “The placement of two graphics near each other in Stellar Blade resulted in an unintentional objectionable phrase. Shift Up had no intention of creating offensive artwork and will be replacing the graffiti for the Day 1 patch.”

Further pressed by the outlet whether these censorious efforts would extend to removing the graphic from the game’s physical release given that said copies would have been printed with the original version of the game’s code, the representative again affirmed that the graffiti “should be removed for all users in the Day 1 update.”