9 Video Games Banned For Ridiculous Reasons

6. Mass Effect Banned In Singapore For Lesbian Sex

FemShep Liara
Bioware

The original Mass Effect was banned in Singapore for a very specific incident. For the benefit of anyone who's not played it you are given a choice to play as the female or male version of Commander Shepard.

You should always play as female Shepard as the voice actor actually sounds human. It's this ability to fight and love as either gender that prompted the game's banning.

If you like to think outside the box (the box in this analogy is 'human'), you can have female Shep enter a relationship with the Asari, Liara.

And this is where Singaporean censors took issue: the portrayal of a sexual encounter between two women.

Equal representation of straight and gay characters aside, the ban itself is pretty out there when you understand two points of context.

The Asari are not strictly female as their species only has one gender that closely resembles the human female in appearance.

The other point of context is that Shep and Liara aren't even the same species. It does seem absurd to ban something over homosexuality but not interspecies sex.

The ban was eventually lifted, but the logic behind it remains lost.

 
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