Monster Hunter: World review bombed on Steam after racist China joke

Chinese audiences were outraged over an offensive joke in a new movie based on video game Monster Hunter.

A video game has been bombed with negative reviews and the associated movie pulled from theatres in the world’s biggest market over a racist bit of dialogue.

The film, Monster Hunter, is due to be released in Australia on New Year’s Day, but it has already been pulled from cinemas in China.

The withdrawal stems from a short exchange that has apparently infuriated Chinese audiences.

Video game industry analyst at Niko Partners, Daniel Ahmad, shared footage of the offending clip on Twitter, which has since been disabled following a copyright claim.

The clip features one soldier telling another they have “Chi-knees”, which according to Mr Ahmad ”was very quickly linked to a racist rhyme / phrase that was used against Asians.”

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Anyway, this is going down about as well as you'd expect in China where it's being linked to the rhyme / phrase "Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees - look at these?" which is considered offensive. pic.twitter.com/pQCFNQ86Je

— Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) December 4, 2020

A chart shows where it all went wrong for the game as negative reviews flooded in. Picture: Steam

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“It’s not particularly clever or funny, just bad writing,” Mr Ahmad wrote.

The subtitling of the English dialogue reportedly doesn’t match up either.

Monster Hunter developer Capcom was quick to distance itself from the controversy, posting a statement on Chinese social media Weibo saying that it didn’t produce the movie but would follow up with the film companies to investigate.

In China, the Monster Hunter video games is distributed by local tech giant Tencent, who also co-produced the film along with production companies based in the US, Canada, Japan and Germany.

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A screenshot from 2018's Monster Hunter: World.

According to Variety, Chinese regulators are now censoring the movie, but it might not make it back into theatres.

Video game distributor Steam has also taken action against thousands of reviews that were posted on the 2018 title Monster Hunter: World’s store listing as outrage began building.

Steam warned users about ‘off topic’ review activity.

The platform warned users the title had recently been hit with “an abnormal set of reviews that we believe are largely unrelated” to whether you might actually enjoy the game.

“Bad racist joke from the movie,” one of the filtered reviews said. “A pity many westerners came out defending it as humour and thought it’s funny.”

Many other commenters made references to the killing of George Floyd after a police officer was filmed kneeling on his neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds, sparking widespread protests in the US and worldwide earlier this year.

One review said it was “surprising enough you guys still dare to talk about knees this year”.

Counter commenters sought to highlight China’s own problems including the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.