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Gamers are not known for taking censorship lightly, which is probably why the story around the Dispatch Switch 2 version being heavily censored has floated around since its release on Wednesday. AdHoc Studio’s excellent visual novel/narrative adventure game is rife with adult humor, swearing, and a smattering of nudity, none of which is present on Nintendo consoles. Why is that? Here is what we know – and why we think this happened.

Dispatch was a sales juggernaut for AdHoc Studio last year, which is great news since it was their first game since the studio rose from the ashes of Telltale Games’ closure several years ago. So, it wasn’t surprising when the small indie studio announced a port was coming to Nintendo consoles on January 28, 2026. Fans were excited because the Switch and the Switch 2 are both perfect for playing visual novels like Dispatch. However, it wasn’t the game they were hoping to see.

When fans booted up Dispatch on the Switch, they found that it had the nudity censored by default and, more seriously, that setting couldn’t be turned off. While this didn’t change the narrative, it did cause a lot of frustration among fans, who wanted to choose if they saw Toxic’s proudly swinging manhood in the Switch 2’s gloriously improved framerate. This felt like a blatant act of censorship, and there was a sense in the gaming community that Nintendo was to blame. It felt particularly baffling because games like Cyberpunk 2077 were released for Switch 2 with all their sex and violence intact. So why was Nintendo censoring on Dispatch?

The truth is probably a bit more nuanced.

We reached out to AdHoc Studio for a statement, and they told us this: “AdHoc Studio has worked with Nintendo to ensure the content within the title met the criteria to release on their platforms, but the core narrative and gameplay experience remains identical to the original release.”

So, it was Nintendo’s fault, right? Not so fast, my friend, because there is another wrinkle here to consider. The PS5 version of the game came out in many countries several months ago in the US, but it only came out on January 28, 2026 in Japan, the same day that the Switch version came out worldwide. Interestingly, the Japanese version of the game on PS5 also features the same censorship issue as the Switch port, according to observers on Reddit.

Fun fact: the Japanese governing body for gaming content is CERO, which is roughly equivalent to ESRB in the US and PEGI in Europe. However, CERO has a much stricter policy against nudity than other regions. What it seems to have happened (and this is just speculation as we await a follow-up statement from the Dispatch developers) is that AdHoc Studio developed a Switch version of Dispatch. And they could have made a version that had the nudity intact, but that wouldn’t have been able to be released in Nintendo’s native Japan, which may have been a sticking point for the company.

AdHoc could have gotten around this by developing multiple Switch versions of Dispatch that could be released in different regions, so they would be in compliance with local governing bodies. However, AdHoc, being a smaller studio than, say, Cyberpunk 2077 developers CD Projekt Red, might not have had the resources, the time, or the desire to do this. We’re not game developers, but we imagine that making a new local version of Dispatch is a lot more difficult than flipping a switch in the code, and the studio might not have seen the potential return on investment. We’re sure a lot of meetings were spent weighing up the numbers and finding the solution that made the most sense to the company.

We won’t know exactly why the version of Dispatch on Nintendo consoles is so heavily censored compared to the rest of the world until either AdHoc Studio or Nintendo releases a more clarifying statement, but, reading between the lines and sizing up the different evidence that we’ve got, this makes the most sense. And AdHoc Studio is right that the narrative isn't changed with the censorship; the impact of some scenes is lessened, but the overall story of Dispatch is intact. 

As soon as AdHoc Studio clarifies the Dispatch Nintendo console port’s censorship story, we’ll give you the update.

Continue the story with our deep dive into Dispatch with a conversation with AdHoc Studio's two main developers. If you're still confused after that, here's the Dispatch season 1 ending explained and how they changed it at the last minute.