Polygon’s favorite 3DS games to grab before the eShop closes

polygon.com:

The Nintendo 3DS eShop closes on March 27, 2023, and with it, games will be much harder to legally obtain. In the next week or so up until its closure, you may be scrambling to figure out how to add funds to your account and which games you should lock in before they’re gone. We’ve got your back.

We initially planned to include Wii U games on this list, as the Wii U eShop is also closing on the same date. However, in scouring the list of Wii U games, we realized something: Most of the iconic ones have already been ported to the Nintendo Switch. (Though we’re still waiting on ports for The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker HD and Twilight Princess HD. Ahem.)

While you can haggle on third-party marketplaces for physical copies of some 3DS game, you’ll no longer be able to wait two hours for your 3DS to struggle to download a new game from the comfort of your own home.

Below, we recall some of our favorite 3DS games that we had the pleasure of playing on this miraculous console, some of which do not even have physical copies to buy. Is this list definitive? No! It’s just a collation of our opinions (and what we could remember within the time we had to write this). Thanks for understanding.

Before Animal Crossing: New Horizons, there was Animal Crossing: New Leaf. (OK, technically, there were also three more titles that came before this one, but ...) New Horizons dropped us on a beautiful but empty island, and gave us free rein with customization options, deciding where to put each individual building, bridge, and floor pattern. New Leaf was the blueprint.

Animal Crossing: New Leaf kept all the things we loved about the previous titles while toning down the horrendous parts of the game, like grass wear. Nintendo really did say,