Recently, Pokemon GO players have noticed something rather bizarre relating to the way the game has been handling nicknames for their Pokemon, namely that its been blocking real Pokemon names thinking they have “inappropriate text”.

The phenomenon was brought to mainstream attention by Reddit user sliceanddic3, who shared a screenshot of an attempt to re-name their Ho-Oh as “Ho-Oh”, only to be told that the name contained “inappropriate text”, even though it was the name of the actual Pokemon.

Apparently Ho-Oh name is inappropriate
byu/sliceanddic3 inTheSilphRoad

According to later comments, this error occurs not only with Ho-Oh, but to other Pokemon with “suggestive” names like Shroomish and the Lickitung line. It also occurs only if you enter the nicknaming screen and re-type the Pokemon’s name manually, and can be worked around by pressing “ok” while the nickname entry is blank, or by deliberately mispelling the name (e.g. “Hoe-Oh”).

This is of course not the first time a Pokemon game’s nickname censor has accidentally flagged a real Pokemon’s name as “inappropriate”. In Pokemon Black & White, players were not allowed to trade the Pokemon “Cofagrigus” on the GTS unless its name was changed.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments.