Alright, I feel I should weigh in on this since I have played the Japanese version of the game myself and put in countless hours into the game as a whole.

The skinship mini-game occurs when you go to your character's room within "My Castle" and choose a character. It functions much like Pokemon Amie in that you rub the faces of soldiers in your army to fill up hearts on the tops screen in order to increase their affection towards you.

It sounds weird on paper, and well... it's just as strange in execution. The main gameplay has you leading these characters into battle to defeat the armies of foreign nations. The pure juxtaposition of both the actual game and this mini-game is just so jarring. It makes the characters a lot weaker as well imo because they end up feeling more like dolls in a box that say lines when you pull the string on their back than legitimate characters and the game is worse off because of it. Not to mention that since the mini-game itself is so boring and tedious and offers little to no reward for doing it, you'll probably stop playing it after trying it once or twice because you have no real reason to when you could be spending that time playing the actual game or seeing actual dialogues between characters. I personally like that it's gone, not because it offends me or something dumb like that but because I felt it's existence made the game's characters weaker as a result of being included. The game assets most likely aren't removed anyways, since they use those in the confession scenes. So if you still wanted the mini-game in just to see the art of each of the characters, there's no way that's going to be removed. The only thing gone here is the actual action of rubbing.