Hentai Girls is a simple puzzle game series produced for the Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2. It’s already had its problems with the My Nintendo Store, having multiple titles delisted over the course of this year, and is infamous among Switch users for its AI generated art, provocative namingand the tendency to clutter up the new releases and best deals section of the store. The series’ publisher Pakotime announced on June 19 that all future instalments of Hentai Girls will be renamed to “Kawaii Girls.” While the exact reason for the change wasn’t stated, it is implied that it might be due to the titles not appearing in Switch 2’s new releases section.
In an official announcement on X, publisher Pakotime announced that the upcoming entries in the Hentai Girls series will be renamed to Kawaii Girls, starting from July this year. However, they clarify that previous Hentai Girls games will not be subject to renaming. Furthermore, they advise users looking up Switch 2 versions of existing Hentai Girls titles – including Hentai Girls: Charming Chef, which released on June 19 – to use the keyword “Pakotime” instead.
I was able to confirm this myself – the games show up without any issues for Switch, but are very hard to find for the Switch 2 – they will only come up if you search the publisher’s name. This means that “hentai” and other similarly sensitive words are possibly being shadowbanned by Nintendo Switch 2 store’s search engine.
It is interesting to note, however, that the word “hentai” doesn’t seem to be blocked in the US eshop. While the new Hentai Girls: Charming Chef still hasn’t released there, past titles which include the word “hentai” appear normally on the new releases page. This suggests that the keyword “hentai” is possibly only blocked in Japan – this could be due to the fact that the Japanese word “hentai” is a lot more associated with sexual deviance/inclinations outside of societal norms, while in the West, the term “hentai” usually refers to anime-styled explicit content in general.
