Sega's crusade against Shining videos

If you've followed the blog for any amount of time you know I tend to ramble on, so I'll try to keep this short.

This video explains something I had heard about in 1 or 2 of the of the retsupurae podcasts. Something about Sega acting crazy and removing videos on YouTube that were even vaguely related to the Shining Force series. This video explains it in detail.

Although I recommend listening to the entire video embedded bellow, I'll provide a link to the part of the video where TotalBiscuit explains the situation seeing as the entire video is considerably long.

And since the video is rather long, here's a summary.

Sega Going Nuts

Months back, Sega began to systematically take down videos on YouTube that just mentioned Shining Force, even videos that didn't even feature ANY footage of the game. As long as Shining force was mentioned, it was taken down from YouTube.

Videos were flagged down so fast that it caused several channels to be taken down entirely. Sega isn't even responding about the situation at all.

I'm fairly sure false copyright claims is a crime and thus illegal, but I'm no lawyer and it may vary from country to country.

It's assumed it's someone that works at Sega, or at least someone in Japan. It's suspected that they're just removing all videos that mention Shining force just so they can manipulate the search results for those keywords.

Backstory (Optional read)

In my opinion, it's worth going to the beginning of the video and watch all of it. It talks about how Sega of Japan seems to hate it's non-Japanese fans.


There's a considerably big and devoted fanbase to Shining Force, these fans have sent emails, packages, and even petitions to the developers of the Shining games, to express either their love for the games, how they would love to have a translation to the 2 final episodes of Shining force 3, and asking them to make more games in the style of the older games.

Sega of Japan's response in particular was harshly cold, if a response was given at all. The current producer of the series actually went on twitter and posted a rude comment towards the person who organized the campaigns and sent the packages.

I'm really summarizing it though. If you're interested, watch the whole video.

My Opinion

As for the YouTube issue thing, it's been confirmed it's someone from Japan. I guess there's still the possibility it's not someone from Sega.

More than that though, it makes me think about how it's a miracle that YouTube even works. The "shoot first, ask questions later" policy is just terrible and unfair. Really makes me wonder how that site hasn't had more issues like this in the past or even functions at all. Also makes sense why most serious LPers use blip.tv or other hosting instead.

For me this is more about how badly YouTube's policy is than how crazy Sega might have become.

Sega really should issue some sort of statement about this mess though, but it may be too late as it is. This whole Shining story kinda makes them sound like massive dicks and everyone who has heard of it considers boycotting Sega to some degree.


I don't believe there was that much miscommunication between the new producer of the Shining series and the non-jap fans, I think at most he jumped to illogical conclusions or was butthurt that people liked the older games for whatever reasons. There's some fucked up ego thing going on there.

You know, any developer should be honored to have fans like that, and Sega of Japan basically spits in their face.

I'm starting to suspect Sega doesn't actually have a PR department at all.