One fact which is not well known about Shadow of the Beast is that there are two Mega-Drive versions. Besides a standard edition which was released in the rest of the world, there is an own version for Japan as well.

The background story is as follows: When Shadow of the Beast was converted for the Mega Drive, an accident happened at the creation of the module for the NTSC-market: The guys responsible for the conversion of PAL to NTSC messed around in such a way that the whole game, including the sound, ran too fast by 16 %, which raised the difficulty level (you can correct the speed on an emulator). However, the problem does not occur if you play the game on a European Mega Drive console with 50 Hz refresh rate. The later programmed Japanese Mega Drive version featured the game with the right speed and improved sound and graphics as well.

Nevertheless, in doing these changes for the Japanese Release the programmers probably considered the game to be able to make use of some additional blood along the lines of "blood is good". So this is not a censorship report in the classical sense but a comparison between the English Mega Drive-Version and the special Japanese Mega Drive-Version.

Japanese Version	English Version

Added blood

A lot of blood has been added to the first boss of the tree-level, i.e. on his horns as well as some on his two skull-heads. (Strangely enough, the new sprite looks much worse and poorer in detail than the old one)

Japanese Version	English Version

The huge corpse of the cave-level, in which you find the second key, grew moss on one of its arms. This has been removed and replaced by bloody remaining meat.

The metal rods which are shooting up from the level changed their color and are EVEN bloodier now.

The huge zombie hands which are rising up from the ground are partly decayed and a lot bloodier now.

The enemy with the knife sticking in a bloody wound at the top of him, who can be found inside the castle which looks like a head on two feet, bleeds much more briskly now.