Wow, I forgot about beyond good and evil 2! So did everyone I guess.
But yeah, I do think it comes down to that American media thing, but also how much of American media, for SO LONG (including a lot of it now) is just aimed at teenage boys. I remember reading my friend’s script in highschool, and like every other word was “fuck” and I said it was a bit much. but he was like “haven’t you seen pulp fiction?” I hadn’t. I watched it, and I was like well, this is a silly amount of swearing. But the main thing about pulp fiction is Samuel L Jackson can pull it off, because he’s that kind of actor, he’s got that kind of face, and that kind of voice. Everyone thought it was cool and tried to ape it, but you can’t just try to be Sam Jackson, you have to work at it for years, and who wants to do that - so let’s just do the swearing bit.
To me, watching a movie that’s constantly swearing, I feel like, okay, this was made for someone younger than me, who still thinks swearing makes you edgy and cool, kind of to that earlier DmC point. Another interesting thing I’ve thought about sometimes is you never hear somebody being like “why’s there no swearing in this” - even a mediocre script doesn’t make you notice its absence. But you notice its overuse very quickly. It takes a very strong script to support a lot of swearing intelligently, and we don’t have a lot of that in games. I guess that’s another thing that makes me feel like it’s… not lazy, but a coverup. Using swearing can jazz up a mediocre script, but it’ll make it divisive. But if you write a good script, you don’t need it at all.