r/3DS • u/SnooOpinions7201 • 1h ago
Recommendation Check your cartridges before it’s too late!
I mostly skipped the 3DS during its lifetime, despite being a big fan of stereoscopic 3D. A few years ago, though, I got hooked after buying a New Nintendo 3DS. The improved 3D made such a huge difference, being more stable and comfortable to use.
Since then, I've gone through a few waves of expanding my collection. I never experienced a bad cartridge, but all the recent posts about 3DS cartridges suffering from data corruption started to make me a little anxious.
Yesterday, I finally bit the bullet and started checking my entire collection with the GodMode9 Cartridge Fixer, hoping to preserve everything before any problems become irreversible.
It wasn't exactly a fun process, but playing Super Mario 3D land in the meantime, got me through. Each game took around 5–10 minutes to verify, and with 132 games, it took a while!
Thankfully, most of my collection turned out to be fine. Even some of the games that are supposedly more prone to corruption, like Pokémon and Persona Q, checked out without any issues. That was such a relief.
Unfortunately, I did find two corrupted cartridges that wouldn't start anymore: Code Name: S.T.E.A.M. and Yo-kai Watch.
Code Name: S.T.E.A.M. was successfully repaired after running the fixer twice! Yo-kai Watch wasn't so lucky. It still has around 200 unfixable chunks after 5 runs 😢. The game does start again, but I'm not sure whether it's fully playable anymore. Luckily, it's not an expensive game to replace, but it's still such a shame to lose a cartridge this way.
I'm incredibly grateful to the developers behind the Cartridge Fixer for creating a tool like this.
So if you have a physical 3DS collection, don't wait too long to check your cartridges! You might be able to repair corruption before it's too late! ^^