Back in August, we discussed both bad news and good news for the Corpse Party series: although Corpse Party II was delayed to 2026, the Corpse Party Tetralogy Pack had been confirmed for a western release.
Well… not anymore.
About a month ago, Xseed Games tweeted that they had “run into an unanticipated complication” that could prevent them from releasing the Tetralogy Pack and stopped pre-orders as a precaution.
And this past Friday evening, they followed up with the unfortunate update that the games’ contents “did not comply with current platform guidelines.”
The Tetralogy Pack, as well as the digital release of the games that weren’t already on the Switch, has been cancelled.
Corpse Party and Blood Drive are both on the eShop already, so since their tweet says the problem was with multiple games in the collection, it sounds like both Book of Shadows and Sweet Sachiko’s Hysteric Birthday Bash break content guidelines.
(I would have otherwise guessed it was just Birthday Bash, since that one has so much fanservice compared to the others.)
On the other hand, I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that even content in the other games is no longer acceptable, and the games already on the eShop just aren’t being removed even though they wouldn’t be accepted if they were new games.
There’s no denying it, something has definitely changed with Nintendo of America’s content guidelines. For the whole Switch era, Nintendo was the more relaxed platform when it came to censorship. Third-party games could do just about anything as long as it was covered by an M rating. But this year, several companies ran into trouble with western Switch releases, Idea Factory being the most prominent one. Now this incident leaves no room for doubt.
Fortunately, the Japanese version of the Corpse Party Tetralogy Pack supports English. As soon as Xseed made that first tweet in October, I ordered a copy from VGP. They’re all sold out now, but you should keep an eye on Play-Asia and VGP if you want the Corpse Party Tetralogy Pack.
What will this mean for Corpse Party II, though? I’d hate for them to tone down its content in anticipation of problems. Right now all we can do is wait.
