When the announcement came that the Nintendo Switch would be region free we all celebrated, then paused – what about the eShop?

Today we can confirm that the Nintendo eShop on the Switch is region free as you’ll ever get it. We signed into our Australian unit with an Japanese My Nintendo account, it worked just as it did for our Australian one. Once added we booted the eShop, it complained that the system wasn’t in Japanese but then loaded the eShop in Japanese anyway.

We didn’t think it would work, but then – boom – we were downloading demos for Puyo Puyo Tetris and Dragon Quest Heroes 1 and 2. We’ve tried our own Australian credit card to try and purchase some credit but it has been rejected by our bank, others are reporting it works just fine – you could also buy Japanese eShop card point cards.

All of these screenshots below are from an Australian Nintendo Switch.

Update: We’re trying to verify reports of which credit cards work with international eShops. At this stage all the ones we have tested don’t seem to work. This isn’t a total bust, you should still be able to buy credit for the Japanese or America eShop online and redeem it and this will work. This is the same process as the PlayStation 4.