Valkyrie Drive Bhikkhuni is an action game released for Vita in Japan today, but trailers for the game seem to have gotten one of Marvelous’ YouTube channels banned. I say “seem” because there’s no way to be sure—YouTube is confusing that way—but, uh, the anime it’s based on is one step away from pornography.
Update (7:00 pm): Not long after this story went live, the videos are back. Did YouTube give this a closer look after our story? Your guess is as good as ours!
Warning: While there’s no nudity in this story, one could easily argue the visuals are not safe for work. Careful!
I first spotted the banning on the gaming forum NeoGAF. The change caught my eye because I’ve regularly covered the complex world of copyright on YouTube at Kotaku. Despite writing countless stories about the topic, it’s still confusing.
If you visit the “movie” section of the game’s website, it’s nothing but errors.
Marvelous has not responded to my requests for comment.
Anime News Network describes the anime this way:
In a world where five artificial islands exists, Mamori is a “mermaid” transferred to one of those islands. When Mamori is attacked, a newly transferred girl named Mirei saves her. The enemy doesn’t stop, however, and the two are soon cornered. Just when they think all hope is lost, Mirei kisses Mamori, and Mamori turns into a sword. Mirei then wields the sword and launches a counterattack against their enemies.
The genres it’s listed under are crucial: fan service and yuri. Not familiar with yuri? Me either, but it’s about love between two women. It’s really easy to imagine what a fan service-y anime about women in love might quickly become.
In a form that’s acceptable to post on this website, it’s this:
It doesn’t take long for it to get much more intense, to the point that I’m genuinely shocked this was actually broadcast uncensored on TV in Japan.
Valkyrie Drive Bhikkhuni, whose genre Google humorously auto translates to “aggressive tits hyper battle,” doesn’t appear as overtly erotic as the Valkyrie Drive anime, but there’s no doubt it’s in the category of aggressive fan service.
Between ladies making out, the anime features lots of fighting, so it’s not a surprise the game, which cribs from games like Senran Kagura, looks like this:
Chicks in skimpy clothing fighting mechs isn’t a reason for a channel to get banned, though. So I watched the trailer in its entirety, looking for answers
Another person, like YouTube clockwork, had hosted the trailer elsewhere.
The answer might come at the 1:10 mark, in which one character—17-year-old Mana Inagawa—grabs the boob of another character—14-year-old Momo Kuzuryū—and the latter begins to quickly lose their clothes to combine powers.
That’s just how I imagined it would happen, you know?
It’s ultimately impossible to know why the channel was taken down, as YouTube’s default error message doesn’t provide any context. If you try to visit the channel it originated from, you’re greeted with an equally vague message:
“This account has been suspended due to multiple or severe violations of YouTube’s policy against spam, gaming, misleading content, or other Terms of Service violations.”
Thanks to archiving, however, we can see what it looked like a few days ago:
It’s not the only YouTube channel that Marvelous owns. Those are still online.
A YouTube channel isn’t usually removed due to a single infraction, and while the ages of the characters in the video is suspect, we’ve all seen weird shit on YouTube. My hunch? People reported this. It’s possible the channel could return on appeal, but without more concrete information, we’re only left to speculate.
You can reach the author of this post at patrick.klepek@kotaku.com or on Twitter at @patrickklepek.