Stellar Blade: how to unlock the Holiday Rabbit costume and is it censored

How to unlock the Holiday Rabbit outfit in Stellar Blade, and the controversy around it explained

Stellar Blade Holiday Rabbit Nanosuit / Sony

The Holiday Rabbit Nanosuit is one of the early Nanosuits you can grab in Stellar Blade, and has attracted a lot of conversations about whether the outfit has been censored or not. We’ll break down how you can unlock the outfit, and what the controversy is about.

Stellar Blade: how to unlock the Holiday Rabbit Nanosuit

Stellar Blade Holiday Rabbit Nanosuit location / Sony

The Nanosuit can be found in the northwest of the Wasteland, just south of the Scrapyard. If you haven’t done so already you will face a boss fight with the Corruptor. You can find the chest containing the costume on a portion of the cliff that juts out. You can find it near a body. There are two Holiday Rabbit Nanosuits. The first is black, and the New Game + version is gold.

Stellar Blade Holiday Rabbit Nanosuit location / Sony

Stellar Blade: has the Holiday Rabbit Nanosuit been censored?

Stellar Blade Holiday Rabbit Nanosuit / Sony

Before we talk about the changes made to the Holiday Rabbit Nanosuit, we need to talk about the different versions of the game. When the physical discs were pressed, they were printed with version 1.000. The copy that critics were given is version 1.001, and the version available on release day is version 1.002.

If you purchase the physical version of the game and your console is not connected to the internet then you will notice that the Holiday Rabbit Nanosuit looks different to the costumes shown above. In the 1.001 update, developer Shift Up made slight alterations to some of the costumes. The 1.002 was to change the ‘hard R’ graffiti, and costumes have remained the same since 1.001.

For the Holiday Rabbit costume these changes can be best seen in the gold version. Shift Up added the gray mesh fabric around the thighs to give it a lower cut, and reduced the visible cleavage with a piece of lace. These changes have led many to believe that some form of censorship has taken place.

Shift Up has admitted to changing a number of costumes between the two versions, but the reason why these changes were made has not been revealed. However, thanks to our knowledge of the industry we can give an educated guess. Most people are blaming Sony Corporation of America for the changes, due to a number of games Sony has censored in the past, but this is unlikely to be the case here.

Stellar Blade Holiday Bunny Nanosuit / Sony

Before a disc goes into full production, a number of physical copies of the game are sent to Sony executives. If you have ever purchased a copy of a PlayStation game with a hole punched through the barcode, then you have bought one of these special pre-release copies. Sony gets to review all games before they go into full production, and this is when Sony is most likely to make changes to the game.

The most likely reason that Shift Up made changes to the game is because of age ratings. Depending on the country, age ratings are done at different times. Some countries like South Korea and Australia do these extremely early, which is why we know that a game release is on the horizon due to these age rating boards. However, some boards are much later, cut things fine until right before release.

This allows us to exclude a few regions and leads us to a likely conclusion. Due to the timing and the changes made, it is most likely that the Japanese age rating board CERO demanded the changes. Japan has a long history with censorship, and while it is most well known for censoring gore, it also applies to explicit content. This would explain the late changes to the game and the nature of the changes.

Of course this is still speculation, and it feels unlikely that Shift Up will ever reveal why they changed the costumes. For now we will have to enjoy the costumes as they are, or use the unpatched version with fewer costumes and no New Game +.