Back in late 2018, I decided that with the twilight of the 3DS on the horizon, it would be smart to upgrade to a New 3DS XL before Nintendo officially axed the thing. I ended up buying a brand new Samus Edition, and just to make I never had to worry about deleting old games to make room for new games, also got a hefty microSD for it as well.
So when Nintendo announced the closure of the eShop for 3DS and WiiU, it meant it was now or never to grab hold of all those games I was even marginally interested in playing, especially the ones that tend to be pricey on the physical market…
I’ve dropped about $650 over the course of two months on eShop title. The games in the first picture aren’t all new purchases; the console comes with AR Games and Face Raiders, Excitebike 3D and Four Swords were given away for free in the early life of the 3DS, and I did buy Animal Crossing New Leaf digitally back when the game first game out and I had trouble finding a physical copy. I did limit my purchases to games that I DIDN’T already have a physical version of, which is why I’ve got Dragon Quest VII and Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse on the console, but not DQVIII and the original SMTIV.
With all of these games on a single machine, this now feels like the most valuable game console I own. Even unboxed, the New 3DS XL Samus Edition can go for nearly double what I originally paid for it. Adding piles of games that can no longer be bough digitally just makes it that much more valuable.
The WiiU purchases aren’t as numerous. I already had Metroid Prime Trilogy and Wind Waker HD, but I was happy to add both Sin and Punishments to my console. I didn’t get any of the GameBoy Advance or DS games, but only because I already own a physical copy of Metroid Zero Mission.
I’m certainly in the party that feels bad about losing the ability to buy all these games. Nintendo’s reasons for doing so are certainly justifiable; the revenue generated from the eShop from two discontinued consoles probably wasn’t even close to the cost of running the service, but it always feels like they don’t have a concrete plan for letting us have these in the future. There are games that were on the Wii Virtual Console that never made it to the WiiU version, or even Switch Online. There are Satellaview games are completely lost to time. They literally stopped selling digital versions of Super Mario 3D All-Stars JUST BECAUSE.
On the plus side, they gave us a heads up. They told us outright that if you ever felt you might want to some day play Crimson Shroud or Parascientific Escape, this would be your last chance to buy them. If you missed this opportunity, it’s your own fault.