Secret Best 3DS Games

video games nintendo
1

Hello!

It has come to my attention yet again that the 3DS is the best console.

What is your favourite secret-best 3DS game? Ideally, I'm looking for games that are 1) exclusive to the 3DS, and 2) don't appear on "best 3DS games of all time" lists.

I'll put forward _Nazo Waku Yakata_ (”Mystery Museum"?) by Capcom. This is very much an early-in-the-lifecycle, tech demo type of game. Use the gyroscope to look around the room! Interact with spooky characters using the microphone! No buttons!

But it's also entertaining and unique. There's really nothing else quite like it on the platform.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6m4vdshvldI

I'd like to be able to mention Time Travelers, which is a weird interactive movie from that brief window where it looked like Level-5 was ready to take over the industry in Japan. But it had a Vita release too, so I guess it would violate my own dumb rule that I just invented.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjrhh9wdBro

2

Harolds Walk is like shitpost with a lot of heart that‘s actually good in a strange way, @“beets”#206 mentioned it in The 3DS Appreciation Thread, and i’ve been bizarrely fascinated with this game and its sequel since then. If you like weird broken stuff with decent controls and strange design decisions Harolds Walk is a treat!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVmgSGgEPaY

3

No one ever talks about Animal Crossing's #1 competitor, from Konami.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYhXgODYPFU

4

Nazo Waku Yakata‘s primary flaw is that the voice recognition is not especially good by default and is even worse in certain sections where they deliberately made it less accurate in order to build tension or whatever. I imagine it’d also be completely unplayable for some people—the big selling point, such as it was, was their heavy use of the 3DS‘ spatial audio, and there’s one chapter in particular that seems like it was explicitly designed to trigger misophoniacs.

Another earlier Japanese 3DS game I always thought was sort of interesting, if not particularly fun, was Level-5's Girls RPG: Cinderella Life—it was a massive flop and I never had a sense of who it was supposed to appeal to, but my understanding is that it was based on a mobile hostess sim they had that was doing well with women in their 20s, but as a reaction to a big shift in public sentiment around the hostess industry between announcement and release, they tried to paper over the direct hostess references and reposition it as a fantasy game for young girls, but it didn't take and nobody cared either way. What always intrigued me is L5 paid to include a ton of super-popular anime dudes as customers, and they picked a lot of characters you'd never expect in a game like this, like Salaryman Kintaro, Yujiro Hanma from Baki, etc.

5

I don‘t know if it’s that much of a secret, but I had to resolve to stop playing Pocket Card Jockey entirely as it was just too perfect at all the types of game-things I get addicted to. I would turn it on and 45 minutes would pass seemingly in an instant.

The combination of simplified mobile-phone style solitaire, the race positioning segments and the absolutely buck wild animations/music is so thrilling and I recommend everyone try it. Plus it's less than $10.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yCMzdZOaew

6

Yo, I feel like I was born for this thread

My immediate and maybe final answer is Pop Island. I could only find videos for the dsi version, but the look is the same, although the 3ds version was much simpler. All you do is control this box shaped penguin who surfs. That's it. The music, is awesome, there are some upgrades that admittedly take a while to get) and an occasional special stage that let you pull off wild tricks with a specific board and giant waves (the main stages were based on horizontal traversal and avoiding obstacles/collecting powerups(which were fish that you could transform into momentarily and could fit some reason flop around on the land that was normally damaging)).

I easily spent dozens of hours on that game, and it even took me a pretty long time to even understand how the game worked at all. Arguably my favorite

https://youtu.be/DY1fvenLJtI

EDIT- the game I actually meant is Rising Board 3D

https://youtu.be/OglWLVR6XGE

7

@“coreywilliams”#p35107 I too was morbidly obsessed with Pocket Card Jockey. Took a punt on it and it didn‘t disappoint. I’d love to see it expanded on for Switch.

8

@“coreywilliams”#p35107 I love this game a lot but man the difficulty can be really unforgiving sometimes

9

@“dylanfills”#p35108 HMMM what's the best way to play this rn? I have a hacked 3DS but seeing as I can only find the DSiWare version…do I need to do anything special to get it to work?

10

I am going to bring up my Personal Chulip and reccomend, for the 3th time, Dillons‘ Dead Heat Breakers. It’s a game where the missions have.

  • - Tower Defense

  • - Beat-em-up
  • - Driving combat

    • And it's also got an in-game town with

  • - Pachinko

  • - Motocross racing
  • - A fully fledged shop-running minigame
  • - A top down shooter minigame
  • - And much more

    • Your character and the entire party consists of you and your Streetpass Miis which are all *transformed into talking animals* who you recruit by going to the bar at the hotel before each mission. You end a game day by going to bed.

    There's so much going on in this game and it's kind of a mess, systems wise. I played if for a while but I found the missions to drag on, because they have so much going on that you have to do. Any one of the systems could have probably worked as a standalone game. It's really a 7/10 game but I appreciate it for being a weird mess.

    11

    @“marlfuchs2”#p35170 Yes! I had this game and your recommendation of it in mind when creating this thread. It's on my list of ones to check out, for sure. I played the first two games in this series, but not this entry.

    Sidenote: I can't believe there are _three_ Dillon games!

    12

    @“whatsarobot”#p35189 haha I‘m a little flattered! I don’t understand why there's 3 games too, since I barely heard of the first 2.

    13

    @“sabertoothalex”#p35168 I‘m heartbroken that I don’t have an answer for you. My 3ds xl got stolen like 3 years ago, and all I have for a DS is my sister‘s og 3ds, which I don’t even want to touch. I‘ve been debating trying to get one of the newer 2ds xl’s, but I can't remember how much I enjoyed the 3d

    14

    @“sabertoothalex”#p35168 You SHOULD be able to install DSiWare content the same way you would any other 3DS game file on a hacked 3DS. Have not tried this particular game, though.

    15

    Pushmo / Pullblox / Hikuosu is one of those confusing games that changed names in too many regions to keep track and will probably end up becoming a @“hellomrkearns”#99 thread within the next six weeks. I‘ll call the game Pushmo as an olive branch held towards the US audience still basking in their Independence Day’s celebration.

    [upl-image-preview url=//i.imgur.com/6xJgO2Q.png]

    **Pushmo** is now a game that has seemingly fallen out of pretty much everyone's mind. But it was kinda the first _cool_ game of the 3DS.

    2011 became, to put it kindly, a rough year for Japan following the tsunami in March. It understandably sapped the entire country's morale, economy, and many industries. The 3DS launched right around then, with a rather subdued lineup, and it did not feel like the best time to enjoy video games? There were some good games, of course, but the mood wasn't there.

    Things turned around in September, with a hefty price cut and [a really energizing September conference](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVNm03nTT30) that featured tons of soon-to-be iconic games, and more importantly the 3DS killed off the PS Vita before its release when it was announced at the very end that portable Monster Hunter would move to Nintendo 3DS. So the mood around the handheld got much better from that point, and you could feel and see the console really lift off, both in sales and mindshare, with the consecutive releases of Super Mario 3D Land, Mario Kart 7 and Monster Hunter 3G in the space of five weeks.

    However, just before these three big games, Intelligent Systems released Pushmo in October 2011. (It came out in December in the US and Europe.) And that was the perfect bitesize game to coincide with the renewed energy surrounding the hardware. It was a new IP, it had an offbeat sense of humor, [a lovely soundtrack,](https://forums.insertcredit.com/d/9-lets-share-some-game-music/445) a cool but simple concept, it made great use of the stereoscopic screen, user generated levels could be shared with autogenerated QR codes i.e. organically using both the screenshot feature and the camera feature of the console... So it was kinda also the first cool tech demo of the console, really. But almost unassumingly, a bit like what Astro Bot does now for Sony. Pushmo was not trying very hard to be cool. It was just there, and that was pretty cool.

    https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUpvqdWE9EWCQIX_YCH0xsXwjA108FSll

    Pushmo also kickstarted the belief in the Nintendo eShop's catalogue. Full packaged games were not available yet on the eShop and the service had a lot to prove regarding what the digital games could bring to the console and whether they could find an audience, compared to what the XBLA was offering at the time. Pushmo became this sort of viral hit that showed there would be cool stuff on there too, and that users might find them.

    Also, it's crazy to think about it now that Fire Emblem is a super successful IP with a popular gatcha on mobile and tons of teenage Tumbler fangirls but, until Fire Emblem Awakening came out in Japan in April 2012 (and a whole year later in the West), things were looking dire for Intelligent Systems. So it was pretty cool that _this_ developer released _this_ tiny, clever, charming game out of nowhere, just before Fire Emblem Awakening tabularasa-d their destiny.

    So we are now ten years later. The 3DS ended up selling over 70+ million units, it got five Monster Hunter games ( and two spin-offs), it got a full-fledged Smash Bros, somehow Fire Emblem and Tomodachi have become big franchises worldwide, Animal Crossing unprobably outgrew its popularity from the DS era and introduced the megapopular Isabelle who is probably the breakout character and unofficial mascot of the 3DS. We also got tons of excellent Atlus games, and the best Final Fantasy game ever made (Curtain Call). And StreetPass games got better, and people got into StreetPass, and StreetPass Plaza took over that role of the weird, charming offbeat game that will forever be associated with the 3DS. Also, several Pushmo releases followed in quick succession, diluting the impact of the original game a little bit.

    And so Mallo the little sumo... Walrus ? Doughboy ? Sentient chickpea? I am not sure what Mallo is supposed to be, but Mallo has kinda faded away from everyone's mind when we talk about amazing 3DS games, right? Yet, that lil'buddy really gave the console a crucial first push.

    16

    Funny because 2-3 weeks ago I dedicated a whole twitter thread to why 3DS/DS is secretly the best console ever. My angle was slightly different, tho, as I was trying to point at how incredibly valuable it is to get a 3DS right now and enjoy both its own catalog and the Nintendo DS one, which is, in my opinion, even better. I was basically considering both the same platform, which isn't untrue, since you can play both systems on the same console!

    Anyway, here's the list I did! (it's in spanish, but I included the cover/pictures of each game, so it should be readable).

    https://twitter.com/JoJoestar/status/1402938696630996996

    As for strictly 3DS games, I have a soft spot for the Guild 01-02 anthologies Level-5 did. The idea of getting a bunch of well known developers and inviting them to make a smaller scale game is super appealing to me, and I hope it would be more common/popular outside game jams and stuff. The 3D Sega ports are all extremely good as well, and some of them are the best versions available of those games (like Fantasy Zone II DX!).

    17

    If the rumours are to be believed, IntSys not only started but completed a HD Crashmo game for Wii U that ended up being shelved during the “Wii U‘s dead but Switch isn’t ready yet” era.

    In general, the 3DS was Nintendo's peak for bite-sized downloadable games: they and their partners put out all sorts of novel, original eShop games, but for whatever reason they didn't maintain that direction with Wii U or Switch or what have you.

    18

    I‘m not sure how secret they are, but I’d never heard of Ever Oasis (Grezzo) or Fantasy Life (Level-5) until recently. I had a really good time with both!


    19

    @“treefroggy”#p35072

    Will I spoil myself if I play the fourth Tongari Boushi game before any of the others? You know, ruining the fun of an earlier iteration by playing one with more stuff.

    20

    @“MDS-02”#p36708 Nah. But the one on DS is the only one in English.