Get these Nintendo 3DS games before you can't: Digital Exclusives, Pt. 2
Get these Nintendo 3DS games before you can't: Digital Exclusives, Pt. 2
About two months from now, Nintendo won't let you buy these games any longer.
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.
We opened up this series with Digital Exclusives back in February of last year, so let’s return to that specific kind of Nintendo 3DS game now, before the eShop closes at the end of March 2023.
As a reminder, you can no longer add funds directly onto your 3DS (or your Wii U), but you can add money to your Nintendo Account on the Nintendo store, or just load up some cash on your Switch and then spend it on your 3DS instead. So, you can still get these games now, even if it seems like Nintendo doesn’t want you to even before things close up. Or, you know, just make a mental note of them for after the shop has closed if you’re not in a place to drop hundreds of dollars on vanishing games. We all approach tragedy in our own way.
I’ll try to write at least one more of these before the shop shuts down — maybe one more Digital Exclusives bit, and a catch-all for whatever might have slipped through the cracks along the way. Here goes.
Attack of the Friday Monsters! A Tokyo Tale
A coming-of-age adventure featuring a young boy who has just moved to a new place, and that place happens to be attacked by tokusatsu-style monsters every Friday afternoon. What those monsters are, why they’re attacking, where they come from? That’s up to you and your newfound young friends to discover on your own, as you run around town exploring, helping citizens, forgetting your errands, and also playing a rock-paper-scissors-based card game that determines whether you are a boss or a servant to the other kids.
The card game is a central part of Attack of the Friday Monsters!, not just a side element you can ignore or get into at your pleasure. You use five cards — which you must collect pieces of scattered across the world, sometimes just lying around but other times in bunches once you’ve completed one of the game’s missions, known as “episodes” — and lay them all out against your opponent. You can’t see what their cards are, but the game does give you a hint as to the result of two match-ups, and then later in your prep, for a third. You can choose two cards to swap in order to shake things up, so you still need to use your head and your gut to try to win: whoever has the most wins out of five (and draws are possible) becomes the boss.
Cards also have levels and numbers representing their power, so if there is a draw — rock on rock for instance — they’ll go into battle, and whichever card has the higher number value wins. You level cards up by collecting more of the same, and then combining them together. You can build quite the varied deck of power levels and card types if you spend awhile completing all of the episodes and reaping the rewards, but you can get by just fine if you’d prefer to kind of let things play out in front of you for the most part, letting episodes and cards come to you instead of the other way around.
It’s a cute game in a number of ways, and an enjoyable way to spend a long afternoon or two. Developed by Millenium Kitchen, the makers of the Boku no Natsuyasumi franchise, Attack of the Friday Monsters! was published by Level-5 as part of their Guild series of games, which were released individually on the eShop outside of Japan rather than in a physical compilation. I’ve already covered Liberation Maiden and Crimson Shroud from that series, and there are more to come.
HarmoKnight
Game Freak doesn’t just make Pokémon games, even if sometimes it really feels that way. They’ve got a history with platformers, too, and one of those is the 3DS-exclusive HarmoKnight, which is a rhythm platformer. It’s a runner, too, with levels automatically scrolling by, while you attempt to keep the rhythm.
You’ll run and jump to collect the notes in your path, which will of course play out a song while you do, and you also have to swing your staff around to attack enemies, hit drums that are also plants, or even run and swing at the same time in order to crash a cymbal that’s high up. Timing is the key to it all: it’s not particularly difficult to get through a stage, and hearts are plentiful, but you need to be exact with your strikes in order to hit those drums and cymbals and enemies, especially since hitting enemies at the proper time gives you the angle you need to launch them into notes that are otherwise out of reach.
Whether or not you’d enjoy HarmoKnight is really up to your particular tastes: it got some pretty middling reviews alongside some truly glowing ones when it came out about a decade ago. If you enjoy a rhythm game, and you’re into platformers, this is certainly a quality mash-up of the two.
Sakura Samurai: Art of the Sword
Now here’s a game that doesn’t look particularly challenging with its bright colors and art style, but the entire thing is based on timing and baking in some instinctual reactions and movements. You are a young samurai entrusted with a special power that will help you rescue a kidnapped princess who happens to be the daughter of the cherry blossom god. You must dodge, block, and strike your way through the land, defeating enemies armed with weapons that require different approaches from you because of their range, as well as whether or not they’re being swung overhead or side-to-side. Earn coins to spend on upgrading your sword and sharpening it to keep it from getting dull, as well as items and resting at inns to recover health and save. And get ready to try again when it turns out your reaction time isn’t quite what you thought it was, or that fighting five guys at once as they surround you and take turns coming at you is tougher than when you have someone dead to rights in a one-on-one situation..
I’m not saying you’re in line for a Souls-like difficulty level or anything, but like in those games, timing and pattern recognition is the key to it all. Keep your sword sharp, be ready to dodge to the side or backward, and be just as ready to strike after your opponent has, hopefully, missed with their attack. Things might seem pretty simple at first, but give it time, for when enemies perform immediate follow-up attacks you need to adjust to and account for, or when they react to your dodges by not attacking and instead waiting to draw you in closer, instead of just slow, easy-to-read attacks.
Sakura Samurai was published by Nintendo and developed by Grounding Inc., which you might know as the developer formed by Mineko Okamura, who worked on titles like Rez and Space Channel 5 before eventually opening up her own studio.
Pocket Card Jockey
Another Game Freak title, and while this one isn’t exclusive to just the 3DS, it only released on iOS and Android in Japan. So, for our purposes, it’s exclusive.
You are a jockey, and not a very good one. You’re so bad, actually, that you end up dying in the line of duty, which is a real bummer for you since your character only cares about being a very famous and very successful jockey. An angel makes it so that your ability as a jockey is no longer tied to… well, your ability as a jockey, and is instead directly related to how good you are at solitaire. It doesn’t have to make sense to play well, you know.
It’s not exactly the solitaire you boot up on Windows — you’re not concerned with getting every card in the proper order and suit, but instead are making patterns of cards directly next to each other, like 5, 6, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 4, and so on — but it uses enough of the same principles, and is integrated entirely into the speed, path, and stamina of your horse during a race. Some cards have bonus effects on them, and at the start of the race, you’re not trying to get to all of the cards, but to one of the START cards in the top row, each of which has a specific effect that will help you out in the race by improving motivation, stamina, whatever. Fail to reach one of those cards before the brief time limit runs out, and you’re probably doomed in that race. Get off to a strong start, though, and build on that base in the card games you play in between turns on the track, and you should have plenty of stamina left to push your horse to the limit as the finish line approaches.
You’ll use a number of horses, win money which you can use to unlock special or standard items, and eventually, be able to achieve your dream of racing (and winning) in the race with the most prestige going in the world of jockeys. It all depends on how well you can play this version of solitaire. Normal stuff.
Aero Porter
Another of Level-5’s Guild games, Aero Porter tasks you with moving luggage around at an airport to whichever flights require it, in order to grow the reputation and size of said airport. There are multiple conveyor belts which take on different colors to correspond with the different luggage colors and flights, and you need to get the luggage from the starting belt to the one it needs to be on: you do this by pressing the L or R buttons to lower or lift different sections of the conveyor belt, but the trick is that pressing these buttons lowers or raises it for every conveyor belt. Meaning you need to do this without accidentally dropping or lifting additional luggage to places it shouldn’t be.
You have to do all of this within specific time limits for each flight, while also watching a fuel gauge for the conveyor belts. You’ll have goals for the number of passengers you move through your airport in a day — more flights can move out the quicker you get the luggage where it needs to be — and reaching these thresholds will grow the size of your airport. It’s a simple game, in terms of what it sets out to have you do, but it can get busy and requires plenty of focus.
The game was designed and directed by Yoot Saito, whom you might know from some really bizarre [complimentary] experiences like Seaman and Odama. It’s pretty rare that he develops a game, and Aero Porter, released in 2012, is currently the most recent one he’s put together.
Dillon’s Rolling Western/The Last Ranger/Dead-Heat Breakers
This is actually three different games, but if you’re into the first one, the second is right there waiting for you, too… more on the third in a moment. Dillon’s Rolling Western is a tower defense set in, as you might have guessed, a western setting. It was developed by Vanpool, the studio responsible for games like Freshly-Picked Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland as well as co-development with HAL Laboratory on a number of modern Kirby games, and features an armadillo who is traveling around the desert protecting towns from nightly attacks by the Grocks, who are trying to eat all the livestock they find.
Each defense is broken up into multiple segments, with the ones at the beginning focused on preparation: Dillon will travel around the map that will eventually become a tower defense arena, entering caves to do battle and mine for materials. These materials will then be used to build towers and defenses, repair defenses, and strengthen the doors to the town. You only have so much time to prepare, so you have to excel in battle to make the most of each of those periods rather than wasting too much time struggling to put foes away, or else you’re going to be hanging on for dear life in the actual tower defense portion of things. Which still sees Dillon in battle, intercepting the Grocks that the defenses have let through or weakened. It reminds me in some ways of the way that Lock’s Quest worked, with your “builder” also being responsible for active attacking and defending as enemies poured into the arena, but the how of it all is very different.
This is certainly a game that you’re either into or you’re not, as it does take some finesse and practice to figure out the best way to go about attacking and being efficient enough to survive as the difficulty jumps up. It’s very satisfying when you figure it all out, though.
Now, if you don’t want to deal with the kind of touch controls that can cramp your hands a bit, there is Dillon’s Dead-Heat Breakers, which simplified things to focus more on just the circle pad analog nub and buttons, but there’s a trade-off: that game is $40 (as opposed to $10 for the original and $11 for its sequel), and only available digitally in North America since it released very late into the 3DS’ life. It was also criticized by some reviewers for being overly repetitive, but others had plenty of positive things to say. You might want to read a full review of that title elsewhere before committing that much money to it, but if you’re into the other Dillon games, well, you probably already have it.
It’s kind of annoying that these games did well enough for there to be three of them, but they haven’t been reworked for a Switch release yet. Ah well, I can say that about a whole bunch of fun stuff that Nintendo did on the 3DS. At least BoxBoy and Pushmo made it out of there.
Siesta Fiesta
What if Breakout was played in an automatically scrolling, horizontal level, and also felt a little like pinball? That’s Siesta Fiesta, a bright and colorful game where you control a bed with either the stylus or buttons, and aim to keep a sleeping, bouncing child from going splat on the ground. Hitting the ground? Bad. Whipping the kid into blocks to break them, letting them pinball around the environment to rack up combos and high scores? Good.
It’s got a charming art style, the music has as much life and energy as the incessant gameplay, and the complexity of the game ratchets up in a hurry, as you go from different and more difficult bricks to break to ones you want to avoid entirely lest they sap your score. If you’re into this kind of game, well, there’s plenty of Siesta Fiesta to go around, especially for the price, and it will take some replaying in order to get gold medals in each stage, too.
Previous entries in Get these Nintendo 3DS games before you can’t:
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.