By 2016, owning a 3DS wasn’t a hobbyist thing. It was closer to a default setting. Nintendo‘s handheld sold well enough that you could reasonably assume the person sitting across from you on the bus had one in their bag, or its 2DS sibling.
Is it too early to feel nostalgic about it? We don’t think so.
The library holds up. You got remakes of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Dragon Quest 8, plus new entries from series that had been running for decades like Mario Kart and Animal Crossing. And because of backwards compatibility with the DS, the thing could play thousands of games spanning more than a 10-year window.
Plenty of 3DS games sold well. But a few of them felt genuinely inescapable.
The village that ate everyone’s commute
Animal Crossing: New Leaf became one of the best-selling 3DS games of all time. It might have been the best-selling game in the whole series, honestly, if New Horizons hadn’t shown up on Switch and swallowed global attention whole during the 2020 pandemic.
New Leaf still gets treated as one of the best entries, and for a stretch after its 2012 launch it felt like every 3DS owner you knew was in there watering flowers.
The content load was enormous. It gave players more freedom to customize their village than any Animal Crossing before it. Working shifts for Brewster. Building public works. Those are two highlights among many.
Being on a handheld almost certainly helped. A game about checking in on a small town every day works better when the town lives in your pocket. It’s a ton of fun.
The generation that broke Lumiose City
Pokémon X and Y landed on 3DS in 2013 with a save glitch in Lumiose City that could break your game outright. Didn’t matter. The Gen 6 pair became some of the best-selling titles on the system anyway.
The Kalos region took its cues from France and handed us starters that stuck, including Froakie and its final evolution, Greninja. Fairy-types arrived here. So did Sylveon, still the most recent Eeveelution.
Graphically it was a clear step up. And Mega Evolution remains one of the most popular mechanics the 30-year series has produced.
The National Pokédex meant the game didn’t end when the credits rolled, which is a big part of why these carts stayed in people’s systems for months.
Pokémon had a run on 3DS that’s tough to match: Gen 6, the ORAS remakes, then Gen 7’s Sun and Moon. X and Y are the ones everybody seemed to own.
The one that came in the box
Mario Kart 7 is the best-selling game on the Nintendo 3DS. Perhaps unsurprisingly.
We say “unsurprisingly” because bundles existed, including 2DS packages, that shipped with MK7 already on board. That’s a substantial head start.
This isn’t the best Mario Kart ever made. It’s a solid entry that happened to be in everyone’s hands, which made it the easiest game in the world to play with friends.
If you owned a 3DS or a 2DS, odds are good you played it, alone or crowded around a table with three other people who also had one. So many systems were later sold with the game included that it became the number one title everyone owned almost by default.
Try picturing a 3DS without Mario Kart 7 in the slot. You can’t.
