The Government of Japan declares this state of exception due to the health crisis of COVID-19, which fully affects all economic activity.
Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has declared a health alert in several regions of the country on Tuesday for the rapid spread of the coronavirus. The state of emergency, activated by Abe himself, will last until May 6 with the aim of containing the outbreak. On the occasion of the entry into force of the measure, Japan's video game classification agency, the Computer Entertainment Rating Organization (ZERO), has announced its temporary closure until that date, which will inevitably involve delays in many releases.
ZERO warns: launch delays may be inevitable
The agency assumes that inactivity in the classification processes of the next launches – a mandatory step before the sale of any video game in the Japanese archipelago – until May 6 will affect, to a greater or lesser extent, the plan for Many of the games slated for release this spring are released for a very simple reason: Unclassified there is no legal release authorization.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. | Photo: EFE / Tomohiro Ohsumi.
Specifically, the games scheduled for the next two or three months "will be affected with high probabilities." Notable, Nintendo works like Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition, scheduled for May 29 on Nintendo Switch, may be one of the main releases developed in Japan that have to undergo a change in its release date. In fact, Nintendo warned in its March Nintendo Direct that some dates confirmed there were susceptible to variation. At this time, Nintendo has not reported a possible change in the date of this remastering.
Computer Entertainment Rating Organization (ZERO)
The equivalent of PEGI in Europe and the Middle East or the North American ESRB has published a statement explaining that, due to the recently decreed state of emergency in Japan, “all our operations, including the review – also those that were currently in the classification process – They will be suspended from today until May 6. " The CERO team will continue to work from home, but for other tasks away from software certification.
The health alert, which takes effect this Wednesday, does so in the Tokyo Metropolitan Area and six other prefectures in Japan: Chiba, Saitama, Osaka, Hyogo, Kanagawa and Fukuoka. Until this Monday, the spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19) has experienced exponential growth with more than 4,000 infected; more than double that just a few days ago.
