Dispatch's Switch Censorship Is Awfully Silly

Despite Nintendo’s clean reputation, the eShop on the Switch consoles is full of smutty games. Currently searching “hentai” on the original Switch will bring up 339 results and “sex” has 126 results. While somewhat unthinkable in past Nintendo generations, players can see full nudity on the Switch and its successor. However, Dispatch is not one of those games. This port of the highly acclaimed episodic adventure title mandates everyone play a censored version of the experience, which was just a toggle in the PS5 and PC originals. It’s a strange disconnect, one that undercuts the maturity and humor of the game, as well as what its peers are doing elsewhere.

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All nudity in Dispatch has a big, distracting black bar on it. This ranges from the relatively intense sex scene that kicks off the fourth episode to Blonde Blazer’s comical nip slip. However, the black bars also rear up when characters, for example, flip someone the bird, and the aforementioned sex scene has been almost entirely muted, too. It’s strange for a game with so much violence and swearing to draw the line at obscene gestures and nipples. For example, the graphic murder some less noble players can see at the very end is untouched, as is the profanity-laced spiel that directly precedes it; the blood and the “f–ks” still flow readily. It makes little sense to be able to say “f–k you” but be unable to perform a hand signal that gets across the same message.

Dispatch‘s Censorship on the Switch Should Just Be an Option

Dispatch is a mature game and is rated appropriately. Weirdly cutting around those very parts that make it mature underscore what kind of game it is, especially when done with such heavy hands and inconsistency. The game isn’t directly about sex, but it is used as a storytelling element or a punchline like most other comedic movies or television shows, so having it presented in this jarring way is distracting and ensures that this will be the inferior version, portability be damned.

If Nintendo wants to have a variety of games on its platforms — and it should — then this sort of editing shouldn’t be mandatory or least a possibility. And it’s slightly unclear why this happened because both parties are speaking vaguely about what happened. AdHoc Studio told Eurogamer that “different platforms have different content criteria, and submissions are evaluated individually” and the studio “worked with Nintendo to ensure the content within the title met the criteria to release on their platforms” while promising that the “core narrative and gameplay experience remains identical to the original release.”

Nintendo then, surprisingly, chimed in with a statement that didn’t do much to clear things up.

“Nintendo requires all games on its platforms to receive ratings from independent organizations and to meet our established content and platform guidelines. While we inform partners when their titles don’t meet our guidelines, Nintendo does not make changes to partner content. We also do not discuss specific content or the criteria used in making these determinations.”

AdHoc then released another statement further explaining what happened a few days later and said it wanted to be “quiet for the last few days” because it wanted to “make sure [it is] being good partners with Nintendo.”

“As Nintendo states, any game that’s going to be on the Nintendo platform needs to ‘meet [Nintendo’s] established content and platform guidelines.’ This is the key point. Nintendo has content guidelines. Our game didn’t meet those guidelines, so we made changes that would allow us to release on their platform. That’s what happened here. Honestly we thought this would be obvious since we’re the devs that released the fully uncensored version of the game on other platforms.”

AdHoc said it thought that because games like The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 are on the eShop, Dispatch would be able to go across uncensored, glowing green penises and all. But this, for whatever reason, “was not the case.” And because of this, the team asked for a disclaimer to notify players that it was censored. Wires got crossed and the disclaimer went into a section in the store that isn’t very visible (it is currently at the bottom of the listing but still not too noticeable). AdHoc owned up to the mistake and said players have a right to be mad. It said it is also “already working with Nintendo on a path forward” and “can’t make any specific promises just yet,” but the studio is “confident [it will] be able to push an update to address at least some of the censored content.”

The eShop Contains Far More Damning Games

It is still a mystery exactly why Dispatch on the Switch can’t be as lewd as it is on the PC and PS5. AdHoc glossed over the exact reasoning and instead just noted that it — whatever “it” is — became clear during the porting process. Video Games Chronicle speculated that this is because having one censored version is easier to put up since it can go live in stricter territories and looser ones alike and, thus, be on similar update cadences since patches likely wouldn’t need to be tailored for different versions. This is the case with Cyberpunk 2077, as it is partially censored in Japan and thus has a more conservative version on that country’s eShop.

Regardless of the specific reason, Dispatch on the Switch loses a bit of its edge when some scenes are interrupted with comedically large black bars or altered in other noticeable ways. It remains a wonderful game with hilarious dialogue and beautiful animation, but it’s hard to accept this port as a comparable alternative, especially when many other games on the platform have nudity and other mature content; Cyberpunk 2077 on the Switch 2 still lets players pick what nipples and genitals they want with no hassle, after all. It’s a strange setback when considering where the larger culture is and how Nintendo has silently embraced it elsewhere. Dispatch hangs dong within the first eight or so minutes and crafts a great joke around it, and Nintendo players should be able to see that scene — and the others like it — in its full glory.