Legendary Pokémon apparently don’t like their own names. A Pokémon Go player was in for a rude surprise when they found out that their Ho-Oh’s own name was deemed to contain “inappropriate text.”
Niantic, Pokémon Go‘s developer, has had a name filter in place since 2018. While the intention was to censor unbecoming names, it has run into woeful problems like most other word filters.
A Reddit user might have found the most egregious censor to date yesterday. The player wanted to reset his Ho-Oh’s nickname but quickly realized that the Pokémon’s own name wasn’t allowed by the name filter.
If you’ve run into a similar issue, the quickest solution is to simply leave the nickname field blank and press OK. The game then defaults to the Pokémon’s given name.
Other users also chimed in with their experiences. Pokémon like Lickitung and Shroomish will also be caught by the filter if the player tries to manually give them their own name, due to words like “lick” and “shroom” being censored. Even numbers like 69 aren’t allowed.
Nicknames given before the filter was set up are unlikely to be caught. As such, if you’ve christened Pokémon with naughtier names than usual, they might just be one-of-a-kind in your catalog.
