During your travels you may occasionally encounter NPCs that are sideways, floating in mid-air, turned upside-down or even below the surface so that only their feet stick out of the ground. This glitch can affect every “travelling” NPC (not the stationary ones inside shops, inns etc.) and very rarely even monsters and animals. (More examples can be found on youtube here)

However, except for ruining the immersion a bit, this glitch is harmless - and not your fault. Many people seem to think that their game is broken, or that they did something wrong and need to reset the software / take a break and let the Switch cool down and the like, but this will neither fix the glitch nor is it necessary. But why does it happen?

The glitch was accidentally introduced with the Switch-exclusive VR compatibility update in 2019 and just never got fixed. Most people do not use the VR feature anyway: it requires additional expensive hardware, isn’t exactly nice, and it isn’t even proper VR in the first place - just a somewhat cheap 3D effect retroactively added to a game that wasn’t built with 3D in mind.

Nintendo never bothered to tweak the update further as people didn’t like it anyway - and so the glitch was also never fixed.

You don’t need to worry about it too much tho, as it really only affects the alignment of certain characters, but won’t interfere with actual gameplay or your save files. It is a minor inconvenience, but no data hazard.