Get these Nintendo 3DS games before you can't: Digital Exclusives, Pt. 1

Nintendo is shutting down the 3DS' eShop in spring of 2023, which means over a decade of dual-screen video game history will be locked away.

Nintendo announced that, as of the end of March 2023, they will be shutting down the digital storefronts of their last generation handheld and home console, the 3DS and Wii U. And without plans to make the games on those shops available elsewhere. This means a massive chunk of video game history will be closed off to the rest of us; before that can happen, let’s figure out what you should seek out and add to your system memory on those platforms, via a series of posts on the subject.

I’ve gone on at length about how much the closing of digital storefronts bothers me, and how it’s a travesty that we don’t actually own the digital games we have exchanged our money for, so I’ll spare you that in this space and simply direct you elsewhere. Instead, let’s, over the next year or so that we have left with working Nintendo 3DS and Wii U digital marketplaces, go through what’s available on those platforms. I wrote about how buying a Wii U can still be worth it last year, so now let’s get moving on the handheld side of things.

I’ll break this down, post-by-post, into digital exclusives, revamped classics, Virtual Console entries worthy of your attention, and even the backwards-compatible DSiWare games that are still available for purchase and play on their successor system. Let’s start things with a slate of digital exclusives, since there will be a couple of newsletters just for this category. The 3DS was a good system.

Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney - Dual Destinies

Phoenix Wright returns to the courtroom after the events of the DS’ Apollo Justice, and this time he’s paired up with not just Apollo, but newcomer Athena Cykes. The game has the typical Ace Attorney setup of crime scene investigations followed by courtroom drama, but rather than simply using Phoenix or Apollo all the time, you swap between the three depending on the chapter and section in question.

Each has their own style, too: Phoenix relies on the Magatama that was gifted to him multiple games back by Maya Fey in order to figure out when someone is hiding something from the attorney. These Psyche-Locks can be broken through deduction and the presenting of evidence, and sometimes you won’t be able to do so until you’ve done a whole lot of investigating elsewhere first. Apollo’s perception that lets him see subtle tics that betray what they’re saying as a lie returns, too, while Athena gets a “mood matrix” detects conflicting emotions in witnesses, which you then need to unpack in order to figure out why it is they are saying one thing but feeling quite another way.

Image credit: Nintendo.co.uk

It’s not quite as funny as the original DS trio, nor Apollo Justice, but it’s the best of the efforts from the past decade of Ace Attorney games despite this. In addition to Dual Destinies, its sequel, Spirit of Justice, is also exclusively on the 3DS eShop. And while Apollo Justice is a DS game that also happens to be available for download on the 3DS, let’s consider it notable, anyway, since it’s $19.99, the original physical version can cost at least three times that depending on the whims of Ebay sellers, and its only other platform is Android and iOS.

BoxBoy! (series)

There are three BoxBoy! games on the 3DS, all developed by HAL, and they’re all great. Those of you who have been reading the newsletter for some time might remember that the series made the Nintendo top 101, coming in at number 86:

The solutions for early puzzles will seem obvious, but the game keeps adding layers and layers, and then expects you to remember them all and how your individual previous lessons might be applied in concert. There’s a surprising amount of depth here for $10: not to get all bang for you buck about it, it’s just genuinely surprising that there is so much game here for that amount.

And it’s not just about solving the puzzles: you also want to collect the crowns strewn across each level. Some are hard to miss, or basically impossible to miss, as they are right in the path of whatever action you need to take to complete a puzzle. Others are purposefully acquired in a way that might even, at first, seem to go against your goal of completing a puzzle. Figuring out how to get those crowns is a significant part of the fun, but there are also practical reasons for collecting them. For one, they help you unlock additional content, but they also remove the limit on total boxes you can use, once you’ve collected all of them in a given level.

BoxBoy!, BoxBoxBoy!, and Bye-Bye BoxBoy! can all be had for a combined $20, which, again, not to get all charting your enjoyment vs. price about it or anything, is basically stupid in a good way.

Pushmo (series)

Pushmo, Crashmo, and Stretchmo account for the 3DS entries of this series. Like with BoxBoy!, this series, developed by Intelligent Systems, made the top 101, right behind it at number 87:

There is some division over which version of the puzzler is best, be it the original Pushmo formula or its followup variant, Crashmo, but, in my own experience, a lot of that preference has to do with how your own brain solves puzzles. Pushmo sees Mallo, a little puffball-looking protagonist in what appears to be a sumo’s mawashi, working his way through a 2D puzzle by pushing — hey guess where the name came from — and pulling parts of it out into three dimensions in order to ascend and reach your goal. Meanwhile, Crashmo, still starring Mallo as all of these games do, is three-dimensional from the start and focuses more on having pieces fall into place so that you can reach the puzzle’s goal. I’m a big fan of Crashmo, but I’m also comparatively total ass at it compared to Pushmo, where I always feel like I’m being challenged to think things through and experiment, but never like I’m stuck or failing to make progress.

Stretchmo is the least necessary of the three from where I’m sitting, but maybe, like with my brain and Pushmo, that’s the one that will speak to you. Like with BoxBoy!, it won’t cost much to find out, as Pushmo is $6.99, Crashmo is $8.99, and Stretchmo, as a free-to-start release, depends on which package of levels you end up purchasing.

Kokuga

G-rev is a studio that shmup enthusiasts likely know, as they were formed by Taito developers who had worked on games like the exceptional G-Darius, and put out a couple of Japan-exclusive Dreamcast games worth your time, too, in Border Down and Under Defeat, the latter of which got an HD re-release on the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 six years later. There’s a little gem of theirs hidden away on the 3DS shop, too: Kokuga.

Kokuga has you piloting a tank, and it is not easy. Those are two of the things you need to know right off the bat about the top-down shooter. Another is that it was developed by G-rev, but directed by former-Treasure but then-freelance developer Hiroshi Iuchi: if you don’t know Iuchi, you likely know games he’s directed, designed, or planned, such as Radiant Silvergun, Ikaruga, and Gradius V. That’s not to say Kokuga is on par with those three absolute classics, but it’s still a damn fine effort in his post-Treasure, pre-M2 career, and one of G-rev’s finer efforts, to boot. If you don’t mind failing, give it a try.

Liberation Maiden

If you enjoy shooters like Rez or Panzer Dragoon, Liberation Maiden might be something you want to check out. It’s part of a series of one-off downloadable games from the “Guild” series that Level-5 developed and published on the 3DS, and you’ll read about quite a few of those in this space over the next year. This one was actually developed by Grasshopper Manufacture and directed by Goichi Suda, or Suda 51 if you’re more into that sort of thing. Liberation Maiden isn’t as weird as you might expect from Grasshopper or Suda, no, but neither was Sine Mora: not every Suda game needs to scratch that specific itch to be good.

It’s a short game, sure, but it’s also one with a whole lot going on the entire time. What it lacks in depth it makes up for in presentation, and it’s probably just as long as it needs to be in order to have you walking away satisfied. Which, for $7.99, you could do worse.

Crimson Shroud

Another of the Level-5 Guild games, this one was designed by Yasumi Matsuno, who, before his brief time at Level-5 and more current development on Final Fantasy XIV expansions, worked with Quest on Ogre Battle, Square on Final Fantasy Tactics, and on PlatinumGames’ MadWorld. Crimson Shroud combines tabletop role-playing with typical JRPG mechanics to create something that seemed wildly out of place in 2012: the characters are all designed to look like pieces for an extremely nerdy board game, and you roll dice to determine if some of your choices or attacks will be successful.

Wildly out of place, yes, but also welcome. An RPG experience that you’ll likely enjoy if you appreciated the stripped-down nature of Square’s 2021 release, Dungeon Encounters. They’re not the same kind of gameplay, no, but they do both serve to go to the basics of the genre in a way that succeeded and made for enjoyable titles.

Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball

I cannot stress enough how much you need to get Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball and play it before you can no longer experience the joy of haggling over digital download prices with a depressed dog dad afraid that he’s going to get divorced if he doesn’t start making a profit. It ranked number 96 on the Nintendo top 101 for a reason (it’s amazing):

What makes this all work is that Nintendo (Nontendo?) made these seemingly disparate genres of “baseball mini-game” and “depressing visual novel starring Willy Lohman, but he’s a dog” work together by having them weave into each other at every turn. You progress the story by playing through baseball mini-games and excelling at them, in turn winning yourself food and tickets for discounts on other Nontendo 4DS products — more on that later — as well as seemingly random items like nose hair trimmers or a coupon for a free session at a remedial cooking class.

Yes, it is extremely weird, but I say that with complete adoration and respect. If you’ve ignored this game because it seemed like something you wouldn’t enjoy, you are robbing yourself of the opportunity to be surprised at something you might not have the chance to experience later on.

Kirby’s Blowout Blast

This is a full version of a sub-game from Kirby: Planet Robobot, and it’s worth your time despite how rude the various reviews listed on Metacritic are about it. Yes, it’s short, no, it’s not the most difficult game you’ll ever play, but the scoring mechanic that focuses on combos and efficiency and a little bit of foresight are vastly different from how Kirby usually works: it’s a much different way of playing Kirby, and not just because it’s a top-down platformer instead of the traditional side-scrolling one.

I’ll admit that there is a better downloadable Kirby title on the eShop that you can’t find elsewhere, but we’ll get to that another time: 14 games is a pretty good start to things.

---

Previous entries in Get these Nintendo 3DS games before you can’t:

Digital Exclusives, Pt. 2

3D Classics

DSiWare, Pt. 1

DSiWare, Pt. 2

DSiWare, Pt. 3

Virtual Console, Pt. 1

Virtual Console, Pt. 2

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter.