Surprise! South Park: The Fractured But Whole Earns A Well-Deserved Mature Rating

It’s nice to see that we’re finally nearing the release of Ubisoft’s South Park: The Fractured But Whole. The game, which was announced last year during the company’s E3 2016 presentation and set for a December 6th release date but ultimately delayed to this year, has been promising a whole new level of role-playing tactics over the original The Stick of Truth, along with the hilarious visual style that we’ve come to expect from the animated series.

Today, The Fractured But Whole was given its official ESRB rating, and, to no one’s surprise, it’s M for Mature. But its description is beyond the stuff of epicness, as the ESRB actually had to break down what the rating was for. Wait for it – this description is pretty much everything.

Here it is, verbatim!

“This is a role-playing game, based on the animated South Park TV show, in which players assume the role of a new kid in town embarking on an adventure to uncover an evil criminal element. Players engage in turn-based combat by moving around a grid and selecting attacks from a menu. Players use various weapons (e.g., blades, claws), blasts of energy/ice/lightning, and melee attacks during combat. Blood-splatter effects occur often, and cutscenes occasionally depict “cartoony” dismemberment or decapitation. The game includes several instances of mature humor, racial humor, and sexual material: characters are depicted urinating and defecating; one extended sequence (in a strip club) depicts a character performing a lap dance while emitting flatulence; one scene depicts a towel character performing an obscured sex act on a man in an alley; another scene shows a man watching security monitors and repeatedly reaching for lubrication behind his desk—all sequences are depicted in a cartoony and over-the-top manner. Characters are sometimes depicted nude (e.g,, breasts, buttocks, male genitalia). During the course of the game, players can observe characters snorting lines of cocaine, and in one level, players must complete a quest to bring a marijuana prescription to a character. The words “f**k,” “c*nt,” and “sh*t,” and racial epithets (e.g., “n**ga,” “sp*ok”) are heard in the dialogue.”

That’s, ahem, quite a mouthful, isn’t it?

The game does feature some awesome role-playing elements, though, along with the trademark animation style and dialogue we’ve come to expect from a South Park product. So, hell yes, we’re excited.

South Park: The Fractured But Whole releases on October 17th for Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC.