It's not the case in the scenes featuring cuno and cunoesse, though. The little gremlins are depicted as some sort of primordial forces of chaos, completely unrestrained, unhinged, and reveling in their transgressions. They are situated on the very verge of the society where all conventions break down (Cuno is a twelve year old drug addict with abusive parents that lives on the street and thinks that rolling with local gangbangers is the highest honor; when you first meet him, he's high out of his mind, throwing rocks at his "fuck-gimp," a hanged mercenary that has been in the noose for the last week). Sudden static in the VO and asterisks in the text feel completely at odds with the realistic, brutal, and honest depiction of the lost youth. The sheer number of times the bleeped out word is featured is ludicrous, so it makes me think that this thing was a last minute initiative by their PR agency/producers/managers, an attempt to avoid some bad press by the western polite bourgeois outlets before the approaching release.
Personally, I'm not too bothered by it (even though it damages the scenes with cuno almost to the point of crippling them, simply due to how distracting and immersion-breaking that static is), but I can see how people can be upset by this. Although what puzzles me is how strangely inconsistent it is: there's plenty of poignant, effective, and realistic content that can be considered offensive by The Politely Repressed Audience, yet I've seen only one word so mercilessly butchered. Maybe it's some Advanced Selective Cultural Responsibility Theory I'm not aware of, who knows.
