Welcome back to Save State, where it’s time to do some past-due maintenance. You may have surmised by the fact that I talk about having shelves upon shelves of video games that I’m a tiny bit of a collector. Unfortunately, even collecting has its busy work due to some reason or another. This week’s Save State is a little different than usual because, well, I spent a lot more time this week trying to fix a problem with a 3DS game cartridge than I did playing video games. Today’s column is going to be a little less “here’s some cool stuff about some older title I remembered,” and it is instead more of a public service announcement.

The Nintendo 3DS is one of my favorite handheld systems of all time, right after the Nintendo DS. Unfortunately, due to some goofy cost saving decisions when the 3DS cartridges were originally manufactured, some of the titles for this fabulous system may die over time. I experienced this myself, this week, when a friend mentioned Smash Run to me and made me nostalgic for 2014 (remember how much simpler things felt 11 years ago??). So, I took out my Super Smash Bros 3DS cartridge, plugged it into my Majora’s Mask 3DSXL… and nothing happened. There wasn’t an error that the cartridge couldn’t be read, but the banner that plays on the top screen upon inserting the game wouldn’t play either.

Conducting a basic internet search for this phenomenon revealed that this isn’t entirely an uncommon problem for 3DS games at all. Some cartridges may suffer from this issue for different reasons than others, like Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire which had a production problem that caused some game cards to stop working after a time. Apparently, it’s common knowledge for 3DS owners to be required to plug their cartridges in every so often to “refresh” the flash memory that contains the games. I was blissfully unaware of this issue, and in my attempt to relive some memories of an abandoned game mode from a single Super Smash Bros title, wound up discovering a small problem that affects only a handful of people who owned this wonderful little system.

So, my Smash Bros game card was dead: What comes next? More internet searches, of course! Searching specifically for problems with Smash Bros for 3DS, I found a variety of posts by people also suffering this problem with this exact game, largely from GameFAQs, Reddit, GBATemp, and just all sorts of different websites with differing values of useful information. Some people were able to get theirs to work again for a while by plugging the cartridge into the system a few times which forces the 3DS to run a refresh and fix bad blocks of memory on the game card, but nothing was working for my decade-long abandoned copy of Super Smash Bros for 3DS.

Looking further, I discovered that an intrepid individual made a program that forces a 3DS to run the refresh cycles on a cartridge repeatedly, in an attempt to fix a dead or dying 3DS game card. The only drawback was that it required installing custom firmware on a 3DS, something I had never done before. I’ve been no stranger to soft modding my 3DS, or any other Nintendo console for that matter, but I avoided custom firmware because tinkering around and running an FTP by launching Cubic Ninja or Steel Diver was much funnier. Well, since Nintendo removed the eShop service from the system, I felt a lot less compelled to care about what Nintendo has to say when it’s shoddy workmanship on my store-bought Smash Bros game that’s caused me to even look this far into this to begin with!

All in all, setting up custom firmware on my 3DSXL was incredibly easy- almost startlingly so, considering some of the hoops I had to jump through to use Ninjhax back in 2015. After that, I loaded up the appropriate files on my SD card and booted the refresh program, carefully following the instructions to make sure I did everything correctly. This made accessing the game cartridge slot and running the verification command a breeze.

Of course, my Smash Bros cart failed verification- makes sense, it literally won’t even boot, it’s so far gone. Failing to verify means it’s time to run the “fix cartridge corruption” command, and I remember feeling somewhat surprised that a broken cartridge could be fixed in just an hour. Man, I was extraordinarily naive.

The screen said, “time left: 59:59” which I thought was just going to take around an hour. This tool wound up running from 7PM to 7AM the following day, finishing sometime after three in the morning. It forced tens of millions of refreshes on this cartridge to try and fix it. After this, the instructions said to try and verify the cart again…. Verification failed. Neat. I decided to run the corruption fix again and check on it after I returned from a doctor’s appointment.

This time the corruption fixer only ran a few million refreshes before finishing just a couple hours later. This is a stark contrast to the tens of millions across over eight hours of time. Unfortunately, it still failed verification, so I ran the corruption fix again. This time, it only took around 4,000 refreshes before finishing in under an hour, but verification still failed. At this point, I thought the cartridge may have been a lost cause, but I ran the fixer tool one more time, it completed in roughly 30 minutes, and it successfully cleared verification! Huzzah!

I then booted the game up immediately, despite it being in the middle of my workday (I hadn’t taken lunch yet) and played roughly 30 minutes to an hour of Smash Run. It’s a great little side mode that I hope they bring back even more fleshed out in a newer Smash Bros entry. After turning off and closing my 3DS system, however, I had a realization: If Super Smash Bros 3DS can have these issues, it can likely happen to other games on the system, right?

Unfortunately, that does seem to be the case: Games like Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia also seems to be likely to suffer from this data corruption problem, though thankfully I was able to plug in my cartridge, and it verified just fine. This was good, because Echoes is one of the best Fire Emblem games out there, which is representative of the 3DS library. The 3DS system as a whole had a lot of fantastic titles which could ultimately just die on people’s shelves without anyone knowing what the issue is. Apparently once this data corruption problem hits a certain level recovery is practically impossible, and I just happened to catch my Smash Bros cartridge at the best of worst times.

So have this entry of Save State be your reminder: Plug in your 3DS games periodically to prevent them from corrupting and never booting again. If you can, install custom firmware to run a tool that can outright check your cartridges for corruption and verify whether they’re functional or not, too (the corruption starts as slowdown or crashes, not booting at all like mine typically means they’re considerably corrupted). There are conflicting reports of how often you should plug in your cartridges, and this can definitely get exhausting for those with extensive collections, but it truly doesn’t take that long even if you have 79 3DS titles like I do.

Heck, maybe it’ll even be an opportunity to open that 7th Dragon III: Code VFD launch edition game you’ve had sitting on your shelf for years but never even opened the plastic. Perhaps, just maybe, that’s going to be fuel for a future edition of Save State. Who can say? In any case, I think this entry of Save State has run its course, so be sure to plug in your 3DS cards and lick all of your Switch cartridges!