As you no doubt have heard by now, Dispatch on both Switch and Switch 2 has been censored in a number of ways. When opening up the Dispatch settings menu on PC and PS5, there are censorship toggles for Replaced Licensed Music, Visual Censorship and Profanity Censorship. On Switch and Switch 2 the Visual Censorship toggle is completely missing, meaning visual censorship is always-on. This results in in multiple scenes where nudity is covered up by black boxes. Furthermore, there is at least one scene where a character’s moaning during a sex scene has been muted.
Shortly after talk of the censorship appeared, AdHoc Studio shared a statement on the matter. AdHoc said that they had “worked with Nintendo to ensure the content within the title met the criteria to release on their platforms,” and also stated that the game’s “core narrative and gameplay experience remains identical to the original release.” Unfortunately that didn’t really explain too much as to why the game was censored on Nintendo platforms, but it left people thinking Nintendo was to blame. Now we finally have a statement from Nintendo themselves.
Nintendo has responded to our requests for a statement on Dispatch’s censorship, and you can read their response in full below.
The statement is a bit of a word salad, and unfortunately the last bit makes it seem like Nintendo isn’t going to go into any more detail on what exactly happened. We were hoping that when Nintendo released a statement it would clear up some of the confusion, but this leaves us with different questions.
Lastly, there has been speculation running all day as to whether this whole situation is related to the game’s CERO D rating in Japan. Some fans believe that if just one universal Switch/Switch 2 version of Dispatch was released worldwide, it would have to cater to Japanese censorship rules overall. In other words, this would mean all regions would have the “Visual Censorship” toggle removed, thus resulting in the censored version we have in NA/EU. Furthermore, the reason why a title like Cyberpunk 2077 wasn’t censored for Switch 2 in NA/EU was due to CD Project Red releasing a separate version of the game in Japan that was rated CERO Z. This version still had censorship, but again, it was only made available to Japanese audiences or those purchasing from the Japanese eShop. (h/t Razorbeamz)
Nintendo and AdHoc’s statements leave enough wiggle room to be read in multiple ways. Some still believe the censorship might be tied to Nintendo and others think it stems from AdHoc, but we simply don’t have a definitive answer. We reached out to AdHoc pertaining to the Japanese rating situation to try and get some clarity, and we’ll be sure to bring you a statement if/when they provide one.