>>719029798
It definitely is or was a thing at some point. Picrel comes from a 2020 interview. It seems like every dev team is restricted, just in different ways and to different degrees. As much as people like to see Mario & Luigi as "the outlier", it has gotten more sanitized with time, with every game after Bowser's Inside Story dialing back the fetish content considerably while still being allowed to introduce new characters and races that exist in the same universe as the traditional Mario stuff. Of course it's noticeably less restricted than Paper Mario has been after its infamous 2012 lobotomy, though it's been slowly recovering since then and might eventually have another decent game... maybe. These kinds of creative restrictions and guidelines are to be expected with a massive brand like Mario, they just come off as weird because of all the inconsistencies they create across all the different facets of the franchise.