So, I recently picked up a replacement 3DS.

A little while back, my 3DS was in my backpack during a rainstorm, and it suffered some pretty substantial water damage. The exterior got all crusty and the paint was flaking off all over my palms whenever I touched it, the screen had a weird patch of brightness on it, but otherwise the thing remained surprisingly functional.

But, that said, I figured I ought to get this baby fixed, and so I sent it into Nintendo to get it repaired.

Their response was that they couldn't repair it, and instead they offered me a replacement 2DS.

Now, I can't accept that!

You see, I'm one of those weirdos that REALLY likes the 3D part about the 3DS. It has always completely captivated me, and this feature is completely compulsory towards my 3DS-owning experience. And so, since the device was already reasonably functional, and I wasn't interested in a 2DS replacement (that would have wiped my save data by the way!!!) I decided that I would just keep it as is and live with it.

Of course, I wanted to get it replaced eventually. Even during my last trip in Texas, I scoured the flea markets in hopes that maybe someone was looking to part with one, but to no success.

Lately, my roommate has been going on a shiny hunt in Pokemon, and for efficiency he needs as many screens hunting shinies at once, so naturally I've been letting him use my 3DS to do it. One day when I got home from work, he explained to me that the circle pad just... popped off. I'm not surprised by this, this was a very well loved console of mine and I would imagine that my roommate just coincidentally happened to be the guy holding it during its final hours, I don't blame him at all for what happened.

Regardless, my hand was played.

So, I immediately went on Ebay and picked up the first console I could find. No more waiting for a bargain or for me to stumble upon one in the right place, I just needed a new 3DS now.

And then, a couple days later, it arrived, and it's gorgeous.

It's this completely hypnotic shade of green, I genuinely consider it the most aesthetically pleasing piece of hardware I own now. Just looking at it makes me wanna treat it as an accessory, to carry it around just so people can see me playing on it, and it also makes me wanna play the 3DS even more! I know you guys probably aren't as thrilled about this thing as I am, but it just looks so pretty to me, and with its brand new screen and buttons, it just feels like, y'know, a whole new console.

So of course, this makes me wanna play my 3DS more, and that makes me happy because I'm a big fan of the 3DS. I think I would venture to call it one of my favourite consoles, in fact!

But as I've been playing it the past couple days, I keep running into this problem that started really eating at me: I have nothing to play on this thing.

How could that possibly be?

I've got thousands and thousands of hours logged on this console. From 2014 to 2017 I was never caught without this thing on hand. I played it on the bus, between classes, all day and every day during the summer. I have over 500 hours in each 3DS Pokemon game alone, so what on earth changed between then and now? I still have my whole collection, after all!

Well, I'll tell you what it is! The answer is obsolescence.

So, a couple of the games I would play often on my 3DS were Pokemon, Smash Bros, Kingdom Hearts, and Final Fantasy Theatrhythm, alongside my collection of DS games.

Now, a lot of the reason I play Pokemon is social. I like to compete with friends and collect cool Pokemon and fight in tournaments. So, naturally, while the older games are great, I will always spend the bulk of my time on the most recent and most favoured entry.

With Smash Bros, as awesome as Smash 4 was, it's pretty much completely outclassed by Ultimate at this point. Every character, and then some, with very little content to hold it up on its own the way a game like Brawl does.

Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance is already a weaker title in the series for me, but even if I DO want to play it, ultimately I'm better off with the HD port on my PS4.

And Final Fantasy Theatrhythm was recently released wfor Switch with twice as many songs and pretty much no missing content.

So, needless to say, all the games that I once poured hours and hours into on the 3DS are now elsewhere. And that leaves me in a tricky spot, right?

Of course, there are some games that I genuinely do still have valid reason to play on the 3DS. Last year I had the pleasure of beating VVVVVV, as well as Shovel Knight. These games are also on other consoles, but not in 3D! And the 3D alone in these titles is glorious enough to warrant playing them in my opinion.

But even these are relatively short singular experiences. I still have some content left to burn through in Shovel Knight and Bravely Default, but it's unlikely I'll be returning to them often after the fact. VVVVVV has sat untouched on my console for months now, too.

So, the sad truth is that I'm literally running out of reasons to play my 3DS.

It's funny, because unlike the 3DS, I actually do have a stockpile of amazing DS games to go back to. Last year when I went on a cruise, I elected to bring a DS rather than my 3DS, because the Game Boy cartridge yielded more total options to keep me busy, and I got a lot of mileage out of it!

The 3DS is just in this unfortunate position where it doesn't have much to its own name. If I want a DS game, I should use the console with the GBA slot, and the games exclusive to the 3DS have more or less become obsolete by titles on the Switch.

So, what now? Do I hunt for increasingly obscure 3DS exclusives? Do I replay games I don't really feel like replaying all for the sake of justifying using this beautiful console?

Or do I just accept the fate of Last Gen, caught in limbo between Classic and Modern?

It's hard to say.

There's a relatively easy answer to this all as well, which would be emulation. The 3DS is very easy to hack, and I've done it myself. This baby could be transformed into a god tier emulation monster.

But on the flipside, is that really what I want? I want to play the 3DS for the stunning 3D effect, for the slick green shell, and, yes, for nostalgia, too. Turning it into a glorified Game Boy carrying case feels to me like a disservice not only to the 3DS itself, but also to the games I would be emulating. After all, I like playing games on their original consoles just as much as I like the 3DS, and I have decades and decades of saves on those cartridges that are precious to me. Even if I were to legally dump all of my Game Boy and DS games and load them into my 3DS, save data and all, it would make my collection feel less like a collection. It's a very difficult question to grapple with.

I don't have the answers. I love the 3DS, and even wanted to call it one of my favourite consoles in this blog  but I haven't been given a reason to yet. I think, just out of stubbornness and love, in going to keep messing with it to see if I can turn it into my best friend once again.

Oh, and of course, if you have any suggestions, let me know!