3DS

I have a thing for the Nintendo 3DS. Maybe obsessive, but it's personal.

I used to stumble into walls as a kid. Had bilateral visual impairment. After surgery, my vision improved dramatically. One of the first things that worked with my new vision? The 3DS and its 3D mode. That screen made sense when nothing else did.

I still play it whenever I get time - airports, hotels, late nights. Turn-based RPGs mostly. Slow games that let me think.

Why Turn-Based

Turn-based combat lets me pause. Think through the next five moves. Plan around enemy patterns. There's no twitch reflex requirement, no muscle memory demanded. Just tactics and patience.

I can put the 3DS down mid-battle, deal with life, come back hours later. The game waits. No timers. No sessions that demand uninterrupted attention. That matters when you have a kid.

The Hardware

The clamshell design protects the screen. I throw it in my bag without worry. The sleep mode means I never really turn it off - just pause for weeks at a time. Battery lasts forever in sleep. Still holds 80% charge after a month idle.

Physical cartridges. No mandatory updates. No online service that might shut down and lock my library. What's on the cart works, period. Nintendo stopped making these in 2020. The library is complete. Nothing will change.

The Games

The ones I keep coming back to:

• Bravely Default - Job system lets you break the game in creative ways. Spent 80 hours optimizing party builds.
• Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers - Old-school dungeon crawler. Harsh. Loved the 90s cyberpunk aesthetic.
• Devil Survivor Overclocked - Tactical RPG meets demon negotiation. Multiple routes. Still haven't seen every ending.
• Etrian Odyssey V: Beyond the Myth - Map your own dungeons on the touch screen. Punishing difficulty. Perfect for flights.
• Fire Emblem Awakening - Permadeath makes every decision matter. Restarted chapters dozens of times to save units.
• Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer - Roguelike. Lost 20-hour runs to one bad turn. Still play it.
• Shin Megami Tensei IV Apocalypse - Press turn system rewards understanding enemy weaknesses. Brutal boss fights.
• Shin Megami Tensei IV - Dark. Atmospheric. Tokyo destroyed by demons. The alignment system still makes me rethink choices.

Backlog

Still need to play:

• Devil Survivor 2
• Etrian Odyssey Nexus
• Strange Journey

Why It Matters

The 3DS is done. No patches coming. No online features to lose. The experience won't degrade. What works today works in ten years.

There's comfort in that. A closed system. A complete library. Games designed for this specific hardware. No wondering if the next OS update breaks something.

I keep it charged. Ready. Whenever I need to step out of the present for a few hours.