I don't even understand why this is on the front page. It's just an animation that could be interpreted as vulgar and it seems that people are more offended by the animation change than people recognizing the first animation as vulgar.
I know that Nintendo goes "yolo" sometime with censorship, but this... it's just crying and complaining over nothing.
Question for any programmers out there. Is it possible to run animations client-side? As in, when playing multiplayer, your system simply gets told to play an animation, and the system itself chooses the animation to run?
Would it have been possible to just censor this by checking the region that the player is in, and if it registers as EU (where this would be considered offensive), to play the replacement animation, while if it registers anywhere that doesn't consider it a problem, it runs the original animation? If you play online against somebody in the EU while you're in the US, for example, while you both get the generic "play animation" command, the EU player sees the edited animation, while the US player sees the original animation?
You know that there's going to be an uproar over unnecessary censorship, so you would think that a system like this would minimize it as much as possible while still allowing any edits to be made in the appropriate countries.
For this game specifically, I believe you can, since the game resources are local and not server side. The mario kart 7 's server was only here to interpret what client were sending to him and share with the others clients. That's why cheating was easy.
And I don't think Nintendo took care of dealing with this kind of "details" for MK8.
Edit: though it's on Switch, you need to be able to apply handmade patch (not possible for the moment). But this detail gone, you'll be free to do so.
Generally, server sided game (mmo, online fps, etc) try to deal with a maximum of things server side so client cannot touch it.
Examples? Early days of dofus, each time you connected your account, some data where send to the client and stock here (RAM) so you could modify them and resend the value to the server.
Defiance, a MMO tps, decided that it was intelligent to stock weapons data client side... resulting on people modifying their data, weapons damages/spread/...
But a good part of MMO let weapon/armor/... skin client side, so you can mod it (it does not have a real influence in game except for looking so.....). That's how a "uncensored patch" went live for Tera.