A look back on my month of 3DS
Back in April I decided to do a little experiment. I would play only my 3DS for an entire month. While I wrote up my initial experiences and impressions in a first blog post, I want to use this occasion to look back on this experiment and to evaluate my time I had with the handheld.
I started with a lot of enthusiasm. As a big JRPG fan, I always loved my 3DS since it has a lot to offer in that regard. So, I thought that going back to it for a month and really focus on it would be a lot of fun. And to be sure, I had a lot of fun. There are many games for the system I never spent any time with, and I was itching to get back to. Back when the 3DS eShop closed I made sure to buy as many “essential” games as possible. And when the used market was still affordable, I put a lot of money into creating a neat little collection. So there were plenty games to go around. But it turns out that focusing on a single system can lead to a burnout. At least for me.
I tried to chronicle some of my experiences on my Mastodon account. And at a certain point you could see my enthusiasm vaporize. Yes, it was great that I finally got to play Mario and Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story. It’s a great, fun game with an amazing soundtrack that I want to get back to. But after playing it for 8 hours I had to take a break from it, as I so often do. I tire of a single game quite quickly and need to switch it up, very often by using a different device too.
This was unfortunately when I found out that your old 3DS games can corrupt and become unusable. My copy of Paper Jam Bros. and of one of my Pokémon games are completely corrupted and unusable. Turns out you need to play them occasionally, to stave off that corruption. With a hacked system it could be possible to restore it, but I have yet to try this.
I got some decent time in with Zelda: Link between worlds and the second Phoenix Wright game. While I always have issues with Zelda games, I enjoyed the short amount of time I spent with it. It didn’t hook me, but maybe I’ll return to it to complete it one day. And I love the Phoenix Wright games and Visual Novels in general, but I must be in the mood for them. And quite often I wasn’t. Also, I played the original so long ago that I feel that a refresher is in order. So, I might play all the games in the collection I have for the Switch. I even managed to play and finish a game: Kirby Triple Deluxe. It is a fun, but short romp and I enjoyed every single second of it. It’s not as good as Planet Robobot (very few things are), but it was a very neat change of pace from the JRPGs and Visual Novels I was playing. Because as it turns out, I burned out on those two genres quickly, which lead the weird situation of me not playing any games in the final week of the challenge. Really, I got disgusted even by just looking at the device!
This might be because I always had the 3DS with me. Took it with me on my commute, it was always close by in the house and I tried to get in as much time on the device as possible. In those thirty days I managed to get in about 41 hours of gametime. For comparison, that’s more in one month than I played the system in 2023, 2022, 2021 and 2020 combined. If I had played it a bit more in those days I chose abstinence, I could easily add another handful of years. But I honestly think I overdid it and I should have paced myself better. Maybe I should have set a time limit to really enjoy myself.
This experiment also led to me to buy a couple of new games to add to my collection. Kirby Triple Deluxe was one of those games, but I also got Rhythm Paradise, which was very fun in short bursts, Professor Layton Vs. Phoenix Wright, just to complete the collection, and Lifesigns, a Visual Novel nobody talks about.
One other aspect I got to reexperience is the great local multiplayer the handheld provides. Tetris DS is amazing and just so much fun when playing against others locally. And it made me appreciate the fact that for many games you only need one cartridge and can share the game with others locally. A feature that is nowhere to be found these days, which is sad.
Do I return to my 3DS more often now? Yes, I have started a new playthrough of Samus Returns recently and that is going quite well. I will try to finish a couple of games on it every now and then, but considering my huge backlogs I got everywhere, it will take a lot of time. Will I do another 30 days challenge like this anytime soon? Maybe next year or the year after. Right now I am enjoying my time with my other consoles a lot and as I said, those backlogs are not going to complete themselves.