 Hey everyone it's been a hot minute hasn't it. Welcome back. Before we get into the video I want to remind you to enter our Trials of Mana giveaway. You can get it on any platform that's releasing we'll be giving away a digital copy of the game on the final day of this month. To enter all you have to do is comment down below, like this video, subscribe for more content and hit the bell icon and set it to all notifications. That being said let's get into the video. Yes folks it feels good to be back. Been a little bit of wonky with this whole pandemic thing going on. Homeschooling. Finding the time I need to do this has been really really difficult but I am here I am back and we are gonna just make this content whenever we can and today we have a story that I don't actually like because it involves animals across the New Horizons in a negative light and kind of a political light. Now you know we don't talk about politics that much on the channel but this is important because an entire country has now banned both the sales and importation of animals across the New Horizons which is continuing to blow up at least based on the Japanese sales charts over 3 million in sales all that jazz. Let's just get into the story and I'm going to use Nintendo Life as the primary source for this because they kind of gathered everything together. So here we go. So it says China banned sales of animals across the New Horizons suspected censorship scuffle. Political messages most likely the cause and as you can see this is like one of the big images being shared around right now Free Hong Kong it's in the thumbnail all that jazz. It says imported sales of animals across the New Horizons have been banned in China it has been reported. The instruction filtered through Alibaba's e-commerce platform Taibao to sellers yesterday April 9th and it's expected to come into full effect today. According to the screenshots posted online by Taibao sellers the ban impacts not just the game but all merchandise and related hardware. While no official word has been issued on why the ban has taken place some are suspected it is related to the fact that the game can be used to share materials online such as political slogans that are generally frowned upon by the Chinese government. The game's pattern editing mode permits players to create their own messages and slogans that can be viewed by other players all over the world. Bloomberg is reporting that the game is one of many that is being used to highlight the political struggle in Hong Kong. One of Hong Kong's most famous democracy campaigners Joshua Wong tweeted about using the game to share his message and then in Joshua Wong's piece says animal crossing is fast becoming a new way for Hong Kong protesters to fight democracy. The COVID-19 pandemic has halted public demonstrations. Some protesters are taking their cause to animal crossing. This is my island. I play the game. I bought it a few days ago for lots of people around the world who play this game. They have to put their ideal life into the game and for Hong Kongers we have to put our protest movement and our protest sites inside the game. Animal Crossing New Horizons isn't officially available in China yet but Nintendo is partnering with Tencent to ring a special Animal Crossing console to the region. In fact you can only officially buy three games at the time of writing in China which has forced many Chinese Nintendo fans to resort to importing games and hardware into the country using services like Taobao and Pinduo Duo. Ping West reports the demand for titles like Animal Crossing in China has caused sales of Switch hardware to skyrocket. New Horizons like many Switch games as a Chinese language option despite not being officially released in that territory as of yet. It's not known that the game will actually come out in China following this ban and if it does it's highly likely that some of its features will be disabled to avoid players using different online protests. As an example they're probably going to require Nintendo to remove the ability to create your own patterns or download other people's patterns or share patterns among people. They might even eliminate a lot of the online features just to be safe. This is entirely insane to me. Obviously I don't want to get into the whole political struggle between Hong Kong and the government of China and all that. That's something that people that are much more knowledgeable on the situation news but I don't like the idea of any government entity banning a game over protests. Now obviously I'm from the United States where protests are legally encouraged and allowed and something that we can do within reason and certainly putting a protest message in a game would not be something that the United States government would really frown that much on. Yes Donald Trump might throw a tweet about it but it's not actually against the law and you are just fine. They're not going to get a game ban because people are putting political protests inside a game. But China's different. There are a lot stricter about things and obviously we all know about how the government might have been using some sort of minority slave thing happening with their factories and all this. That's why things are so cheap. I don't know. There's a lot of crazy stuff happening in China but I don't like the animal crossing and this isn't even like the sale of the game. You can't even import the game because people are potentially putting political messages in the game and it's weird because outside of social media these political messages can only really be among people that you're already friends with on switch that you invite to come to your island. So I don't really get how they're that concerned about it. It doesn't make any sense to me at all that they're worried that some people are putting political protest messages on their own island. It's not like these are available to thousands and thousands of people typically. I mean yeah it can be shared on social media but China already cracks down on social media. So I honestly I don't really get the point. People are going to continue to protest and do what they do and there's not really much the Chinese government can do to outright stop it you know unless they want to start mass killing people with the military and I don't know that I put it past China to do that but yeah this is just not a good situation and it kind of sucks to see a game that I'm sure even people in China are excited to play during a time of you know quarantine even though as their quarantine is slowly being lifted still there's going to be people without jobs who are still too afraid to go out especially if you're in the Wuhan province and they're going to want to pass the time away with Animal Crossing even if it's just an imported version and it kind of sucks to be completely honest and I feel for some of the people there that use video games to escape. Obviously this is not going to be an issue for Japan or the United States or most of the European countries but it's a problem in China and it sucks. This does give me a greater appreciation for where I live and this isn't me trying to be like oh America is so great and we're the best countries like that. I recognize that's not even close to the case but we do still have more freedoms than certain other major countries out there including China and this is just a nice reminder to maybe appreciate where you live right now that you're able to even watch YouTube videos because there are countries that won't even let you watch YouTube videos. Just be appreciative of what we have in life because a lot of us are you know we have a bit more privilege I guess than a lot of other places in the world and I think a lot of us know that but we don't think about it that much you know we always you know there's always that starving kids in Africa I think that goes around to kind of remind us how bad it can get but it's still a situation where we need to be a lot more appreciative of the freedoms that many of us do have and the things we have available to us you know whether it's our our phones or switches or you know the ability to watch this stuff this camera all my equipment I really appreciate where I am in life as someone who doesn't really have a lot of money and lives paycheck to paycheck and yet I still have a pretty decent life going for myself here you know and kids I got a good home I have a loving family so yeah I don't know I'm sorry if you folks in China this sucks hopefully Nintendo and Tencent can work something out at least get the game there in some form even if like online functionality gets banned which would kill part of the game but whatever at least you can still build your own island on your own switch I don't know you guys let me know what you think about the story down in the comments below I get that this is probably going to be politicized in some cases for some of you guys I tried to stay mostly out of the politics of it all but it's hard when this when politics seem to be very much part of the story but you guys let me know what you think about this down in the the comments below remember to enter our trials of mana giveaway as well otherwise folks I am with any rubber jents from Nintendo Prime and I will catch you in the next video or live stream whenever the hell it happens because I am just as unaware of what's going on right now day to day as the rest of you as I monitor this COVID situation as I monitor this homeschooling situation and as we have a religious holiday as well that we celebrate in this host this weekend like just kind of monitoring everything and figuring out the best course of action moving forward for the channel during these trying times but thank you so much for your support thank you everyone who showed up at our last live stream and dropped massive support there that's been huge for this month considering that my video productions are are a lot less right now just due to what's going on I just thank you guys for sticking around and and bothering to even give one view of this video because without you guys I'm just talking to no one and that's no fun all right folks have a good day