The “Switch” in Animal Crossing: New Horizons gets renamed “Light Switch” in English, but in Japan, a Switch is still a Switch

Publication date of the original Japanese article: 2020-05-01 00:05 (JST)
Translated by. Ari Clark

The name of the item previously called a “Switch”, which appears in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, has apparently been changed to “Light Switch”, according to Nintendo Life. A huge variety of furniture exists in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, including a wall-mountable Switch.

That’s right—it’s not a Nintendo Switch, it’s a plain old light switch. When I checked it out myself, it made a clicking noise and toggled the lever down when I touched it, but it had no effect as far as being able to actually turn the lights on or off. Still, if you’re the kind of player who collects everyday home furnishings, you’ll probably get a kick out of decorating your house with it.

The problem is with its name. As you probably know if you’ve played it yourself, in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, you can get a Nintendo Switch console as furniture after starting a game. It’s a simple toy that displays the familiar Nintendo Switch logo and plays a sound effect when touched.

That’s right—the game included both a “Nintendo Switch” and a “Switch”. You can immediately tell these two items apart once you’ve actually decorated your house with them, but when they’re just a couple of lines of text in the furniture list, it’s easy to get them confused. It happened often enough that the “Switch” item got a name change in response.

After the change, the item’s new name was “Light Switch”. As its name implies, it’s…still just a light switch. Nevertheless, when this seriously perplexing name change went into effect, it set off a flurry of jokes in the Nintendo Life comment section and on Twitter, like “What if I get it mixed up with the Switch Lite?”, “Which switch is which?”, and “I always called it the Dark Switch”.

Interestingly, the name change wasn’t actually carried over to the Japanese version. The “Switch” is still just a “Switch” in Japan. In other words, only the English version of the “Switch” has been changed into a “Light Switch”. Obviously, it caused confusion to have both a “Nintendo Switch” and a “Switch” among the English item names; but in the Japanese version, “Nintendo Switch” was spelled out using the English alphabet, while “Switch” was written phonetically in Japanese kana as “スイッチ” (suicchi), which prevented any confusion.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons was originally developed in Japan. Therefore, since the two item names were so unlikely to be mixed up in Japanese, even when they were listed together, it never became a problem. It might be fun to come up with paradoxical theories about how the “スイッチ” item got translated literally as “Switch” during the localization process, which sowed so much confusion in hindsight.

Whenever Nintendo updates Animal Crossing: New Horizons, there are rumors that all sorts of changes are being implemented aside from the ones in the official announcement. Twitter user Ninji investigated the spawn rates for different bugs using their own methods after installing Version 1.2.0. Among other results, they reported a huge drop (about 80-90%) in the spawn rate for Peacock Butterflies. Nobody knows for sure if this report is true, but when you look at this item name change, it seems like all sorts of changes are being implemented aside from just adding more events.