Patreon Letter - 3rd March, 2018 (Patreon)

Hello everyone, Em here today for a bit of a late letter. Apologies all around, it can be difficult to stay on top of absolutely everything right now when I'm going through a lot emotionally, but I'm doing my best. Thanks for your patience.

It's the one year anniversary of the Switch, and so many people are writing up articles about how they've enjoyed their new handheld 12 months in. There's a very good one on Kotaku I think is a nice piece. I haven't had my switch a year, but I do greatly enjoy playing it. They really need to redesign the store, it's already a disaster. These are takes for another day.

One thing that I have noticed that is tangentially related to this is that my feelings about my 3DS have changed a lot. The last Abnormal Mapping was covering Fire Emblem: Awakening, one of the first games I bought for my 3DS and a game that had sat fallow on my menu for literal years waiting for me to find the time to boot it up and commit to it. I did that. It's finished. 

I didn't delete it, because I have an absurdly large SD card in my 3DS, but I did move it to the completed folder along with other recent finished games like Picross e8 and Wario Land 3. My completed folder has an animal crossing bed as it's icon, because I've ... y'know, put the game to bed. This icon I received from the badge arcade, a bizarre experiment Nintendo built of a piece of software where you'd play a game somewhere between Pinball and Pachinko to get stickers that you could use to decorate your 3DS menu. You paid real money for spins in the machines, whose contents rotated daily. I'm pretty sure it's shut down now, or about to be shut down. I probably put $15 into it all told.

Those icons I have organized along my 3DS into large tableaux of stories. My most on-hand icons are right at the front, buttressed by oversized icons of Animal Crossing characters. Many of the icons like eShop and StreetPass are also Animal Crossing characters. Get a little deeper, and it turns into large 8-bit Mario sprites shooting fireballs at folders of Virtual Console games arranged by platform, each labeled with their own badge icon. The background rotates, I set it to do that, and there's a rotation of 8 different backgrounds of various things I enjoy. Pretty sure I paid for all of them? Probably at about $2 a pop. 

I don't boot StreetPass anymore. I finished all the games, and got all the puzzle pieces. I even finished the games in the next wave of StreetPass games. And the wave after that. I bought those too. No idea how much. It doesn't matter. I StreetPassed literally hundreds of times. I diligently collected them, spent my walking tokens from taking my 3DS everywhere, completed each of those games bit by bit even though I don't live in a place built for StreetPassing like NYC or Japan. 

As I put away Fire Emblem I looked at what I might play next on my 3DS and came up short. I'm actually ... getting close to being done with my 3DS? There's still games I haven't finished, but I probably won't finish those. There's games I'll never get rid of, like Theatrhythm: Curtain Call or OutRun 3D. And there's a bunch of physical games I haven't booted yet, almost universally long RPGs. Two Etrian Odysseys. A Dragon Quest. I never finished Shin Megami Tensei IV much less picked up the sequel.

All of this is to say that as I've been filing away some of the oldest games in my 3DS library and looking forward to Switch releases, somewhere in my mind a switch flipped and I stopped thinking of my 3DS as a platform where I play games and now think of it as a platform where I used to play games but anything I play now will be going back to play, a nebulous act of playing video games that is different mostly in that it requires intention the same way booting up my Switch to buy some bullshit off the eShop does not.

With the death of the 3DS comes the potential death of Nintendo's handheld efforts. They make phone games now, which I mostly dislike (HAL's recent release Part Time UFO is the exception that clearly proves the rule). The Switch's library is mobile ports and the sort of indie games that you'll find on Steam that used to make the Vita a niche but thriving ecosystem for a while. Maybe Nintendo will go back to making games that feel like handheld games, but we haven't seen it yet. I can't imagine a Wario Ware on the Switch, much less a Rusty's Real Deal Baseball. I feel like I'm watching something formative and magical to me and many others pass from the world unremarked upon, it's death long coming and happening just as everyone else finally realizes no handheld gaming was always great.

I will continue to play my 3DS. Maybe Nintendo will release a game or two on it. But where will the Etrian Odyssey's and Attack of the Friday Monsters' of the world find their home? The Switch is going to be the Steam storefront in months if it isn't already that, swarmed by high volume and mostly unknown quality. The Vita is as dead as a platform that still gets releases can be dead, beating out the Wii U only because people like visual novels so much. But the 3DS is dead, and we're living in a post-handheld world until Nintendo remembers to make those games again. 

It's sad. The 3DS wasn't the DS or the GBA, but it was fantastic. I'll still play it, sure, but it's over. All of it is over. Nintendo's back on top, and I'm kind of sore about it? Such is the way of things being on this video games beat for nearly three decades now. I like my Switch, but the 3DS it is not. Just remember that, and say a little prayer of remembrance for the decades of fun we had with the games that were too small and too limited to be 'real' games. I love them still, I never want them to go away, and I hope they never really do.

Until next time.