Nexus Mods has removed a mod that restored Tifa’s Cowgirl outfit in Final Fantasy VII Remake to its original uncensored state
As previously reported, last week Square Enix released a patch for the four-year-old Final Fantasy VII Remake which, despite only claiming to only feature “fixes to several bugs”, added an undershirt to the cowgirl outfit worn by a teenaged Tifa in order to cover up her cleavage.
Speculation currently suggests that this change was made because, at some point between the first and second titles’ developments, Square Enix had grown skittish regarding the possible bad faith backlash the original outfit could have drawn from Western critics.
However, as Tifa’s outfit only appeared in a cutscene, some fans were quickly able to undo Square Enix’s censorship.
Uploaded to Nexus Mods within 24 hours of the patch’s release, the “Uncensored Nibelheim flashback video files” mod restored the cutscene to its original state by way of simply switching out the offending video file for its pre-patch version.
But just one day after its uploading, players discovered that the mod was taken down by the site’s administration (and remains unavailable as of writing).
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In a post to his Discord server, the mod’s creator ‘Tifabro’ – who has also made several other FF7 Remake outfit mods for the main, adult version of the character – confirmed that it had been removed by Nexus Mods’ staff due to Tifa being fifteen-years-old during the scene in question.
Per Tifabro, Nexus Mods Community Manager Happybara reportedly informed him, “We do not wish to host a mod that portrays an underage character in a way that the original designers deemed was no longer appropriate.”
Tifabro then shared the mod files within Discord, which have since gone on to being spread around on Twitter and other social media platforms.
Nexus Mods have been known to remove mods that they deem offensive.
This includes, a gender-swap mod for Baldur’s Gate III which removed a lesbian romance, mods to remove the pronoun modifier from Starfield and a mod which replaced LGBT Pride flags with the US flag in Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered – the last one being removed despite it making the exact same edits to the game Sony did to get the game released in the Middle East).
Further, backlash to the removal of the Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered flag mod eventually prompted Nexus Mods’ founder and owner Robin “DarkOne” Scott to dismiss upset users by telling them to “delete your account and move on.”
During the writing of this article, the “Niblelheim flashback fix” was available on Nexus Mods from another modder. It stated that it “Fixes the video bug in the Nibelheim flashback introduced in version 1.003.” This mod was also removed before publication.