How to give a Nickname to a Foreign Pokemon
6Nicknames
In this video I will give a short trivia around nicknames and show you exactly how you can change the nickname of a foreign pokemon, without having to buy an extra Nintendo Switch, extra copies of the Pokemon games or even a Nintendo Online subscription.
There are many clickbait internet articles and videos that tell you how you are able to give a nickname even to a foreign Pokemon, but they are false.
Being able to give a nickname to a Pokemon you love is a small but integral part of the games. I would argue it’s even more important than if your Pokemon is shiny or not. Some people just do not understand that.
In previous games even if you didn’t give a nickname to a Pokemon you just caught, you could visit the name rater NPC to give your Pokemon a nickname. In Scarlet and Violet you can finally just change the nickname from boxes.
You can only give a nickname once, except in Scarlet and Violet you can change the nickname multiple times of a Pokemon you’ve caught. If the Pokemon is from a different language region the games do not allow you to change the nickname for some reason.
What is most likely happening is a software bug. The game checks the current name of the Pokemon against the species name or Pokedex name of the Pokemon in the current region, and if it doesn’t exactly match that string the games treat it as a nickname, thus not allowing you to change them.
This Chinese Basculegion’s name is actually just Basculegion’s Chinese name. It has never been nicknamed and the game does not allow me to give it a nickname, because Gamefrick didn’t care to implement a simple programming check to see if a Pokemon was actually nicknamed.
So to nickname any foreign Pokemon we need to create a game instance with that language. And because you still cannot create a brand new playthrough, 20 years later, we will need to create a new Nintendo Switch user. Don’t worry, it only takes 5 seconds and you don’t need to register it to an E-mail address.
After that we will launch the game with that brand new User and we will select the Language Region of the foreign Pokemon. We need to unlock the boxes functionality to be able to transfer between Pokemon HOME, so we need to replay the unskippable cutscenes and beat Nemona.
After this you need to install Pokemon HOME on your switch. It is completely free and I recommend having it anyways to transfer Pokemon between games, after Gamefrick finally implements the feature 7 months after the release of a game.
The trick is to always launch Pokemon HOME, with your MAIN Nintendo Switch user, indeed you cannot even launch Pokemon HOME with your new foreign user because you would need to link it to a nintendo account, but it doesn’t matter because we can trasnfer between Nintendo users anyways.
First we transfer the Foreign Pokemon from the MAIN user to the HOME box.
Then we swap over to the Foreign user and transfer the Pokemon from HOME to their game.
At this point you can log back into the foreign game and nickname your Pokemon.
Remember: You can only nickname it once, and even if you nickname it to the exact ENGLISH name of the Pokemon, you won’t be able to change it later.
I don’t know if you needed to hear this, but Chinese Pokemon names are actually terrible. Basculegion is just “Black Tail Fish” in Chinese. It doesn’t even have a black tail... It doesn’t even have a tail...
I will give a very serious and not very funny nickname to my Basculegion: Salmon Ella
At this point you can retrace the previous steps to transfer Salmon Ella to the HOME box and then back to your main user.
Pokemon can come from 10 different regions, and you can only make 8 Nintendo Switch Users, so until Gamefrick decided to fix the software bug with the name strings, you will just have to mess around with my method.
Like and and Subscribe for more.
Time Stamps
0:00 - 2:00 WHY You Probably Cannot Nickname Foreign Pokemon
2:00 - 6:04 HOW To Nickname Foreign Pokemon
6:04 - 6:39 Ending Thoughts