19 ms·
Nintendo 3DS discontinued after almost a decade
- optimuspaul 6y agoseriously?! I just bought one now after putting it off for years
- jefft255 6y agoPersonally I wouldn't be mad, the homebrew and hacking community will probably stay strong for years. I'd be surprised if you bought it think you'd be playing brand new games?
- fishtacos 6y agoRight? There is a tremendous game library on the 3Ds, with several well known titles being exclusive to the console. Thousands of hours of gameplay on native games, let alone the emulated ones.
- JohnBooty 6y agoDid you really buy it with an expectation of a steady stream of new titles?
- fullstop 6y agoThere are cartridges which allow you to load games onto a micro SD card. They can be used to load homebrew games or roms obtained from less than legal means. I had one for the original DS and obtained ROMs for the cartridges that I owned. It was convenient to have them all in one place when traveling without having to bring a bunch of cartridges with me.
- frosted-flakes 6y agoEven better, if you load custom firmware[1] on it, you don't need the special cartridge at all, and you can dump your game cartridges right to the system's SD card (this only works for GameBoy Advance and 3DS games, but not original DS games). If you buy digital games from the eShop, this also gives you an effective way to back them up, including save files. [1]: https://3ds.hacks.guide/ https://3ds.hacks.guide/
- Geezus_42 6y agoIt works for DS games also. I had a few on mine.
- frosted-flakes 6y agoThat's true, but it requires TwilightMenu++[1] and is not as straightforward as the usual method for 3DS and GBA games. Also, I don't think DS games will show up on the home screen like 3DS and GBA games do. [1]: https://www.cfwaifu.com/twilight-menu-3ds/ https://www.cfwaifu.com/twilight-menu-3ds/
- slantyyz 6y agoYou must have had a reason to get it though, i.e. specific titles. As long as you can get them all for decent prices, I don't think there's much to regret, because if they're using any of the 3DS exclusive capabilities, you're not going to be able to reproduce the experience on any other console anyways.
- stevenwoo 6y agoI have one from the release year and still use it so you might get ten years out of it, too. The game selection/portability/travelworthiness is hard to top.
- abawany 6y agoI still use my DS Lite along with my 3DS XL: Nintendo really builds things to last, ime. Looking forward to the release of the retro Game And Watch Mario Bros in November.
- zargon 6y agoI've been meaning to get one forever too and now I go looking and they're quite difficult to find (new, retail). I guess Nintendo hasn't shipped any new stock in some time.
- freeone3000 6y agoThis page breaks the back button.
- NYCHomosapien 6y agoI can’t believe it’s been a decade! I bought one on launch day - $250 and barely a 3 hour battery life. I later bought a New 3DS XL (or whatever the crazy naming scheme was) and it was wild how much better the newer hardware was than launch day.
- beefhash 6y agoI sort of wonder if there's going to be a barrage of exploits held until end-of-life that's going to be released now. EDIT: I'm already aware that the system has been exploited to death and back, so I'm mostly curious if people haven't already dumped everything.
- goda90 6y agoThere's actually quite a large community of 3DS hackers: https://old.reddit.com/r/3dshacks/ https://old.reddit.com/r/3dshacks/ I was able to hack mine(though I don't use it much anyway) fairly easily. My brother did it to his so he could dump DS carts onto the SD card for better portability.
- Narann 6y agoThere are some cool homebrews still made: https://gbatemp.net/threads/wip-wumiibo-amiibo-emulation-for-3ds.572442/ https://gbatemp.net/threads/wip-wumiibo-amiibo-emulation-for... I suspect 3DS hacking community will stay active for long time as it's the only cheap (second hand 2DS), wide spreaded, hacked portable console available.
- simlevesque 6y agoyou know they'll sneak updates forever worded like: General system stability improvements to enhance the user’s experience. to patch exploits.
- joan_kode 6y agoIndeed, I know some hacks were being held back until end-of-life. For example the author of SoundHax (one of the most important tools in 3DS hacking) said he was holding something off: https://twitter.com/nedwilliamson/status/874594459744423936 https://twitter.com/nedwilliamson/status/874594459744423936 However this all assumes that updates will stop, and I'm not so sure that Nintendo would even announce such a thing.
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoThe small New 3DS is the last portable console I can actually fit in my pocket, and for that I still take it out with me instead of the Switch on some days. So much easier to whip out of my pocket.
- kawsper 6y agoI do still play on my PS Vita, and I'm still sad that Sony abandoned it quite quickly after it was released, for me it's a perfect portable "Risk of Rain" machine (although I've played other games on it too!), it's also cool that they've ported some PS1 games to it like Metal Gear Solid, I wrote about my experience here: http://kaspergrubbe.com/i-bought-a-ps-vita-in-2016-first-impressions http://kaspergrubbe.com/i-bought-a-ps-vita-in-2016-first-imp...
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoI was never able to comfortably fit a PS Vita in my pocket. :(
- JohnBooty 6y agoThe PS Vita really deserved better. It really did so many things right. The OLED screen is still unmatched by portable consoles IMO. Sure, somewhat higher resolution or higher refresh rates would be nice, but those infinitely deep black levels? Just amazing. There are a few multiplatform games like Undertale for which I consider the PS Vita the best version.
- bogwog 6y agoThe PS Vita is an awesome console for homebrew and game development. I've been working on a small cross-platform game, and used my Vita to both implement cross-compiling in my build system (to port to other systems later), and develop the game for both a touch screen and physical controller. Why bother carrying around a controller, android/ios device, and cables to develop a game when a single Vita will do! If Sony and Nintendo would release their official SDKs for these dead consoles, maybe people would have less reasons throw them away. I don't understand why they're so defensive about it anyways.
- AdmiralAsshat 6y agoLooks like it's finally time to grab all those games I held off on grabbing because my backlog was already extraordinary, lest I have to find them in a couple years on eBay at wildly inflated prices.
- peruvian 6y agoMost in-demand 3DS games have not been cheap in years. They've been pretty expensive due to low printing (Bravely Default, DQ remakes, most Atlus RPGs) for years now. I'm guessing Nintendo games are OK due to so many people owning them though. 3DS eShop might be a safe bet but aside from the usual downsides of digital, the games are tied to the system, not your eShop account.
- mywittyname 6y agoThe 3DS homebrew scene seems pretty robust. The hardware is cheap enough now that you can have a modded system for preservation purposes, while keeping another for digital downloads.
- rdtwo 6y agoI sold my 3ds games for a hefty profit so I agree
- AdmiralAsshat 6y agoThere are some that remained in print, however, and so I held off on taking the plunge because I didn't feel like dropping $40 for Fire Emblem Echoes (for example), knowing it would probably be a year before I played it. But knowing that the console and likely all first-party games will soon be OOP certainly lights a fire under me, as I'd much rather pay $40 for a new, sealed copy of the game than $70 for a cart-only copy of the game off eBay in a year's time. Radiant Historia: Perfect Chronology evidently went OOP while I wasn't looking, and the Ebay price has already skyrocketed. Argh! EDIT: And yes, I've got a couple from the eShop (Devil Survivor's 1 & 2 and Soul Hackers), but I prefer carts since they're not locked to my system/account. And who knows when Nintendo will decide to shut down the eShop, just like they did for the Wii shop?
- datalus 6y agoHopefully Nintendo releases the SDK? It's been a decently active platform for indie titles and homebrew games. I'm not 100% sure, but I don't think the 3DS is covered by the same NDA as the Switch in terms of toolchain/docs/etc. I believe you can find those after signing up for a developer account at https://developer.nintendo.com/ https://developer.nintendo.com/
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoI can promise you Nintendo won’t do this.
- mattl 6y agoThe way things are going lately they’re probably already leaked.
- xena 6y agoThe kernel source code was leaked too
- toper-centage 6y agoThe 3ds has so much homebrew stuff right now. At this point Nintendo stopping to release updates is a relief.
- jhatemyjob 6y agoctrulib was pretty good when i used it in 2017
- phendrenad2 6y agoYes. Only thing it's missing is a high-level shader compiler, you have to write shader code in assembly (which honestly isn't too onerous for the graphical fidelity possible on the 3DS)
- gldev 6y agoAt long last it can rest, one of the best consoles ever and kept the legacy of the DS going im glad i was able to experience it first hand!
- Multicomp 6y agoNintendo insisted that the 3DS was not being replaced by the switch, in the same way that they told me that the game boy line would keep going after the DS began. Something tells me this is Nintendo hedging bets
- derefr 6y agoNintendo has never really wanted to discontinue a platform. Their vision was always that developers could support old and new platforms together through funky cross-compact measures. • Did you know that the SNES’s CPU starts up in a “NES 6502 compatibility” mode, sort of like x86-64 processors starting up in 16-bit real mode? It’s fully possible to design and build a game entirely for the NES as a 6502-assembler codebase; and then to “port” the game to the SNES, by taking that very same 6502-assembler codebase, and just adding a few minor SNES-level “enhancements” that temporarily switch to 65c816 mode, do something, then switch back to 6502 mode. Since the market penetration of the NES was so high, many games in the early 90s were “dual-released” this way. • Did you know it was possible to create a GBC cart that would act as a fully-fledged SNES game (i.e. mapping a separate SNES game ROM) when plugged into a SNES through a Super Gameboy? Or to have “progressive enhancement” logic in the GBC ROM itself that draws full-color sprites (OBJs) when played on a Super Gameboy? AFAIK, literally nobody has ever fully exploited this, not even demoscene devs. But, well, third-party devs just seemingly have no interest in releasing for old platforms. They want to “be where the action is.” And Nintendo can’t carry the momentum of a platform all by itself. (Plus, Nintendo’s software dev-teams are too busy acting as stewards and shepherds for how to make use of the newest-gen hardware capabilities — by making games for them, and by interfacing with third-parties — to have any labor left over for making games for older consoles.) That being said, Nintendo did try to keep the gameboy line going after the DS. They released the GB Micro. It was its whole own thing, with its own product code (OXY) that signalled that they had likely built up separate factories just to build it. But basically nobody bought it. (But really, I think Nintendo was speaking to developers there, not to gamers. They meant that there’d still be a point, as a game studio, in producing GBA games, because the DS would also play them.)
- saagarjha 6y ago
- kyoob 6y agoThis is like when someone like Gerald Ford dies and I say, "Wow. I could have sworn Gerald Ford died 8 years ago."
- JohnBooty 6y agoI'm nearly blind in one eye. The 3DS XL was the first time I ever saw 3D. In my life. I don't just mean "the first time I saw a stereoscopic 3D effect in movies or a game console." It was the first time I ever saw in three dimensions ever. As a human being. It's a little bit hard to describe my typical experience with you, since I've never had "normal" version and I don't know what it's like. I would compare my life to playing a video game with a first-person perspective. You know how when you play one of those games, you're thinking in three dimensions, even though you're seeing the game on a flat two-dimensional television? Well, that's my life. I see the world in two dimensions, even though I'm thinking about it in three dimensions. But playing Zelda on a 3DS XL? Wow. I mean, it took my breath away. THAT'S HOW NORMAL PEOPLE SEE THE WORLD? You can just look at things and immediately know how far away they are? You don't have to move your head around to see a parallax effect to help your brain compute the distance? WOW. AMAZING. I'm not a brainologist, so I'm not sure why the 3D system on the 3DS worked for me when nothing else had ever worked for me before, such as 1950s-style red/blue glasses. I'm still nearly blind in one eye, and the 3DS relies upon a lenticular stereoscopic effect that requires two eyes. It seems to me that it shouldn't work. But it did. (Maybe modern VR headsets with stereo displays would work for me as well; I don't know -- I tried an early one in the 1990s and it didn't work for me, but obviously that was ancient tech) Regardless, I had never ever experienced three-dimensional vision until the 3DS XL showed it to me. Thanks, little dude.
- messe 6y ago> I'm not a brainologist, so I'm not sure why the 3D system on the 3DS works for me when nothing else does. I'm still nearly blind in one eye, and the 3DS relies upon a lenticular stereoscopic effect that requires two eyes. Maybe the newer VR headsets would work for me as well; I don't know. Not a brainologist either, just a guy with a maths/physics degree who works in IT. My first thought is that the 3DS was close enough to your face that the parallax might have been apparent just from your one good eye looking at different places on the screen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallax
- JohnBooty 6y ago
- gambiting 6y agoI always try to imagine what the final production run looks like at a factory for one of these. Is there usually some sort of ceremony for the very last unit rolling off the line? Or does it just run towards the end of the shift as normal, everything gets boxed up and shipped to retailers as normal, there just....isn't another shift after that? What happens with all the manufacturing hardrware?
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y agoI'd assume there's probably only one line producing (at a single factory) as all the other ones have retooled to something else.
- gugagore 6y agoIt's not the same, but ‘Farewell, Etaoin Shrdlu’ (you can find it easily online) is a documentary about the last day that the New York Times used linotypes and hot metal typesetting before they switched to electronic/optical typesetting. I think it's a wonderful, heartfelt, and technologically fascinating documentary. I recommend it when you have a half hour to spare.
- generj 6y agoThank you for this recommendation, I heartily enjoyed it. There’s something beautiful about the pride the printers had in their work. Even if the output is somewhat ephemeral - a daily newspaper.
- jbay808 6y agoEphemeral perhaps, but for almost every issue, there was likely someone -- somewhere -- that would frame and keep it, because someone in their family got a mention, an interview, or an article published in the New York Times.
- bfieidhbrjr 6y agohere it is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MGjFKs9bnU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MGjFKs9bnU great video
- TillE 6y agoThe nice thing about the 3DS is that the emulator (Citra) is pretty good. I've used it to play "undubs" of games I own, where fans have taken the audio from the Japanese version of a game and put it into the US or EU version. It's not perfect, but tons of games are fully playable and development is still very active.
- perardi 6y agoI wonder what the game plan is for offering these games in the future. The dual-screen setup obviously doesn’t map to the Switch, so it’s not just a simple eShop port like you’d have for an old SNES game. I am mostly thinking about Pokémon. They’ve got this rich new Pokémon Home system to transfer between generations, but that’s reliant on having functioning older hardware. Now, there’s a massive pool of functional 3DS systems out there, so it’s not a pressing issue, but eventually, some poor Ash Greninja will be trapped on a 3DS cartridge. (I suppose the answer is: port all the Pokémon games, profit, swim in giant Scrooge McDuck moneybin of coins.)
- CDSlice 6y agoMaybe they could something like what Drastic/Citrus does and have the two 3DS screens share the Switch/TV screen? I would say the main problem is that it has an effective resolution of 400x240 pixels on the top screen and 320x240 pixels on the bottom screen and the games were designed to look good on the really small displays, not blown up to a TV or even a Switch size display.
- coldpie 6y agoThe Wii U eShop sold DS games with a variety of different display options: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCV8Y3lEPr0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCV8Y3lEPr0
- mikepurvis 6y agoThe Wii U had a pretty natural default though, with the touchscreen on your lap as the lower screen, and TV as upper screen. That whole model was (rightly) tossed for the Switch, so now any games which really depended on it are a bit of a dead end.
- perardi 6y agoYup, that's what I'm getting at. It's not an easy 1:1 translation. It was nice for games like Pokémon; easy access to the inventory, little mini-games on the touch screen, stuff like that. It obviously blew right up in their faces with the Wii U, but it worked for a certain class of game.
- coding123 6y agoSorry about this, as it's an old argument that everyone here knows, but I wish Nintendo would stop making systems and just focus on their games on competing platforms. They do it for the money. So if I want to have the next Zelda, Mario/MK, DK I have to pay the 300 cost for the system first, then the price of the game ($60 on release day?) I mean, I get it from their perspective. Every Nintendo I purchase the number of games I buy for it seem to drip closer and closer to Nintendo only titles, essentially making it so my favorites really cost about $135 each. (Z/M/MK/DK + 299). I suppose that price is still worth it - not really - but what's killing me is this new thing they're doing where they just kinda stretch a title out for 9 years between the AAA releases. I don't consider a bunch of ports from DS style Zelda games as one of the titles I would buy.
- reocha 6y agoDamn capitalism is a bitch
- mixedCase 6y ago> I suppose that price is still worth it - not really Either it is, or it isn't. From there you can determine whether you should spend your money there or not. Nintendo isn't stupid, if people stop buying their consoles and manifest wanting just the game for another platform they will eventually do just that; but their large customer base is saying that the price of the console is worth it and Nintendo deems it better that way so it will remain like that.
- coding123 6y agoBut if I'm already teetering on whether $135 is worth it, AND you have the long delay between games, then the reality is I'm saying f--- no to a $360 Zelda right now. (for example) If I already have a PS5 (not out yet, but which is already purchase worthy) then I would say f--- yes to even a $100 Zelda (were it available).
- InertBrake 6y agoEvidently not enough people have reached the point you are at yet.
- DCKing 6y agoThe 3DS, in particular the "New" models, I think are really recommended to pick up cheap. They are well built devices that are supremely hackable with access to lots of fun games. The 3DS library is good despite somewhat lacking in diversity. But the 3DS also has native compatibility with the entire excellent DS library, and after hacking it can also run the entire great GBA library without emulation (like Matroshka dolls, the 3DS hardware includes the complete DSi hardware which in turn includes GBA hardware, and it has firmware support to access them both). The old models emulate a lot of 8 and 16 bit consoles well, whereas the New models have nearly complete compatibility for 8 and 16 bit consoles and additionally can emulate some Playstation 1. Moreover, hacking the 3DS has become even more accessible due to recent newly found exploits. Still getting a lot of fun out of mine.
- komali2 6y agoYes! Don't forget you also get GameBoy Color and GameBoy games. IMO this massive library (N3DS, 3DS, DSi, DS, GBA, GBC, GB, SNES, NES) has at least 10 "must play before death" games in them (for people that care a lot about videogames, anyway). Of course all of this can also be achieved on a PC with a simple 10$ amazon controller and free emulators, if you're comfortable pirating games.
- tasogare 6y agoI’ve played a GBA and a DS game on emulator and this is far from the real experience, especially for the DS one. The new 3DS, DS lite and GBA SP are such nice hardware it’s part of the experience.
- echelon 6y ago> has at least 10 "must play before death" games Could you make some recommendations? I'd be very interested in your list.
- lghh 6y agoHere's my rough list of games that you can play on a 3DS that are not necessarily 3DS games that I think are "must play" type games. Does not include all games that should be on the list. 1. LoZ: Ocarina of Time 2. Super Mario 64 (ds version) 3. Donkey Kong Country Returns 4. LoZ: A Link To The Past 5. Shin Megami Tensei: IV (maybe not "must", but you should give it a shot) 6. Earthbound 7. Super Mario World
- Razengan 6y agoI've been playing games all my life on many different platforms, but some of the best fun I've ever had has been on handhelds. Even when I also have the PC or console version, some games just feel more at home on a handheld, and more appealing when you don't have to commit to a whole session of playing them. On one hand, handhelds take less focus than sitting in one place staring in one direction, so you can play on them in bite-sized breaks, putting them away at any time and instantly resuming where you left off. But on the other hand, something so close to your face, that you can snuggle with in any position anywhere, also has a level of intimacy not found in bigger screens and bulkier controls. Nothing can compare to dozing off in bed while engrossed in a game with a captivating story, mechanics, and music.. Laptops are too bulky, and phones or tablets don't have built-in physical controls. Which is why I'm a bit concerned about there being only one handheld left. The Vita was amazing and I still love it but Sony did everything they could to kill it off, and the Switch's success hasn't inspired them to try again. If anyone feels like making a new handheld that anyone can develop for, my money is yours. :)
- mikepurvis 6y agoThere are a whole bunch of those OGA-derived handhelds (see https://obscurehandhelds.com/ https://obscurehandhelds.com/). I have an RGB10 on its way to me right now. Unfortunately, the library of native titles is very, very small, basically just Tux Kart and whatever open source engine recreations have been packaged for the particular distro you're running on it. So it's mostly about emulation, which means that what you're seeing is a pretty far cry from the "real" capabilities of what that processor could do on a 480x320 display. For my part, I'm hoping to get the toolchain set up enough to try compiling OpenJazz for it. On the other side of things are deliberately wacky low-powered, lo-fi devices with novel distribution mechanisms, like Playdate: https://play.date/ https://play.date/
- Razengan 6y agoAh thanks, some of these look pretty cool, like the Retroid 2 and the RG350, and I love Panic so of course I know about the Playdate. :) The problem as you say is the lack of native titles, and an uncertainty about how long the devices will be supported for. In this day and age an official distribution channel like the App Store/eShop is important too, even if it's just a website you can download from onto an SD card. But I'll try one of these out!
- r00fus 6y agoDoing some Marie-Kondo style cleaning, found a 12 year old Nintendo DS with Advance Wars 2 cartridge. Hadn't been plugged in for years (I don't have a charger). Turned on and played a game. Amazing.
- Guybrush_T 6y agoIt's a shame how many people didn't get to experience the Advance Wars series since they were only released on the GBA/DS. I think a Switch version would do really well.
- snicky 6y agoThere's a PC game similar to Advance Wars called War Groove. I haven't played it yet, but I've heard it's decent.
- dpiers 6y agoMy first job coming out of college was working on a multi-platform game engine, and my first task was assembling a 3DS prototype board[1] and porting the engine over. It was horrible and fantastic at the same time. The debugging tools were poor, most of the documentation hadn't been translated to english yet, and testing the dual-camera rendering pipeline required hunching over the desk to be in the sweet spot for the parallax to work. I still love that kind of low-level development, but these days python and shell scripts pay the bills. RIP 3DS, and thanks for the memories. 1: https://www.engadget.com/2010-05-17-is-this-a-prototype-of-the-nintendo-3ds.html https://www.engadget.com/2010-05-17-is-this-a-prototype-of-t...
- gxqoz 6y agoThe docs were probably better than they were for the NES. Nintendo's were poor translations from the already sparse Japanese version (think of an entire book full of the Engrish found in early NES games). Australian developer Beam Software did good business writing their own NES docs that were much more user-friendly. Dominic Arsenault goes into why this was something of a deliberate strategy for Nintendo in his book on the SNES, Super Power, Spoony Bards, and Silverware.
- m-p-3 6y agoSo it's a great time to run homebrews and emulators on it, as it's unlikely to be patched or updated.
- rootsudo 6y ago3DS is an excellent platform to learn Japanese games. I fully recommend it. I think it's an amazing time, and the games will stand the test of time just like the original mario series because the content is rich and great vs having to fall back on pushing systems & I/O to the max. Nothing recently has given me as much joy as to replay N64 classics on the 3DS with better graphics, added gameplay and 100% solely in Japanese after originally growing up with them as they were released in the USA/English. The context and general idea helped alot to drive me to replay the games and relearn vocabulary in a different language. And how the games are targeted at a young audience makes full kana or furigana available, with settings to use just Kanji if you want is fantastic. It's something that every other learning app doesn't have for Japanese - but then again when you learn more languages you don't really go for the cultural angle, you do it to communicate and use culture as a reference point.
- DanielleMolloy 6y agoCan you make some recommendations? I‘ve tried my luck with the Japanese DS Zelda games because they have furigana (either above characters or when tapping), but I couldn’t get far since there has been too much dialect. In Pokemon B/W there overall has been too much text. I didn’t try playing something I knew by heart yet tho. Are you referring to something like the N64 Zelda 3DS remakes (which are excellent)?
- rootsudo 6y agoAs with learning any language, immersion is key. This is very late intermediate stage - to put yourself into having to read "Japanese." I would only do it after knowing and writing/speaking Hiragana and Katakana outloud, several times, written it over and over and listening to songs (or any text, but songs have lyrics and it's easy) over and over and doing the lyrics over and over to kick in the muscle memory. My secret, really, was learning the kana via Kyary Paymu Paymu songs. I enjoyed them, but, after doing that, over and over, the alure was lost and it took me about 3 years before I could listen to Pon Pon Pon again. But - the repetition in the song drilled down the kana for me. If you already know Kana, then basic vocabulary/grammar. There's a great app on the Android App Store called "Kanji Study" https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mindtwisted.kanjistudy&hl=en_US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mindtwiste... It's been further tweaked and is more refined then what it used to be, but the memory games are super useful for both kana and N5/N4 Kanji - the basic of the basics. As for playing with a game/any game, it all falls together after a while - you see the pattern, you "get" the idea, but I would use a dictionary such as Akebi on Android or Jisho.org (Jisho literally means dictionary.) or even translate.google.com and each word you don't know, add it to a unique list and study/drill those over and over. Soon it will come together. It's very slow at first, and painful, even though I could read Kana and had N5, I suffered reading the "warning" screens on the 3ds even though they're for kids, some of the words did not make sense, but the context was implied. That's it, as for the games: Pokemon is great, Zelda is also great, but if you really want to excel - Karaoke. You can go to youtube, and find karaoke songs to listen too - the 3dS joysound app stopped/died, but it's still on the WiiU and on the Switch and it is excellent, it offers near 100% furigana (except for very very simple kanji) and being forced to sing along makes you vocal quick. You can also youtube "karaoke battle" or general karaoke after songs. "カラオケバテル” ”カラオケ” I personally enjoy lots of J-pop (which made learning the language much more easily/motivated) so I used songs I knew such as Tatsuhiro Yamashita https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rzBvkcHUz4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rzBvkcHUz4 山下達郎 RIDE ON TIME （カラオケ） And then just drilled on that as if it was memory cards or study drilling. Pokemon games are good, zelda is great. Mario isn't per se as there isn't much "text" The inkling for a bit of puzzle makes it more that you need to "understand" what the meaning is, as it's different in English. Context is much more inferred then stated in Japanese. Phoenix Wright Professor Layton Animal Crossing Then you can go onto some normal plain jane ds games, final fantasy and Square Enix titles are great once you're nearing the end of intermediate understanding.
- causality0 6y agoEver since the 3DS launch I found myself hoping for an upgraded version that would render at a higher resolution. 400x240 has always looked terrible to me for 3D graphics.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dikknavis 6y agoComing soon--All your favorite 3DS classics on the Nintendo Switch for $20 each!
- fomine3 6y agoFinally portable gaming console platform is dead now. Why portable-only form factor isn't accepted well nowadays? (Switch is the replacement with hybrid design)
- ThatPlayer 6y agoPhones have replaced it for the majority of people. The same way they killed mp3 players and point-and-shoot cameras by being good enough.
- undersuit 6y agoAre there any other programs like SmileBasic? Maybe Squeak, APL/J/K, Lisp? Or maybe are there any better ways to input text into a 3DS?