by Doc – Owner, Founder, Accidentally wiped his 3DS trying to homebrew it to get Pokemon Bank on there
The byline isn’t kidding, I actually did wipe my childhood 3DS trying to get it to homebrew. Somehow the B button broke, and there was no other way to install the thingamajig I was trying to get on there. Still, for those of lucky enough to have our 3DSes (or to have purchased one without taking a second mortgage) the Pokemon games are one of the highlights of the console. I just finished playing Pokemon Y on my AYN Thor and it’s as good as I remember it being, if not a little better. It’s no wonder then that Game Freak felt the need to keep the internet services running for the long, long period of… less than 3 years?
Yep, 3DS online ended in April 2024, and Pokemon Bank is planned to sputter along until February 2027, after which point you’ll no longer be able to send your 3DS-era Pokemon to Pokemon Home.
Everyone else on the internet is complaining about the fact that there’s some random half-dozen Pokemon you can’t currently get in Pokemon Home without transferring from Bank, and several others only available through limited-time distributions in Z-A and that’s fine, I get it. Every Pokemon is someone’s favorite… except for Watchog. I’m not especially worried about Pokemon availability in Home, especially now that Legends: Z-A has basically solved that in the short term and I’m sure that between Pokemon Go, SV, Z-A and whatever Winds and Waves reintroduces to the Pokedex we’ll have enough availability that all Pokemon will eventually be natively obtainable in Home in some form or fashion. That’s not what I’m concerned about.
What bothers me is the fact that my Pokemon are dependent on external storage in the first place. I have a collection of literally thousands of shinies that I’ve worked really hard for from all over the generational map. Several hundred are from Go, several hundred are from BDSP, much of the remainder is SV and Z-A. But I’m also a busy adult and I don’t have the time to pay attention to developments in the Pokemon business model. What happens if I get sidetracked with work, life or as the kids call it, “IRLmaxxing” and Pokemon Home goes down in the meantime? What if there’s a billing error with my card on file and I don’t catch it within the 30 day period before they all get deleted?
I realize Pokemon Home is probably still a better storage system than the old methods of “buy an extremely rare Gamecube game and hope your memory card doesn’t get stolen, wiped or destroyed”. But there’s gotta be some way to back up these lil’ guys. I’m not the type to get emotionally attached to Pokemon on some kind of actually deep level (besides Koraidon, I reserve the right to get emotional when talking about Koraidon) but I’d like to at least keep these guys so if I play Pokemon with my kids someday I can share them.
The fact that the Switch version of Fire Red and Leaf Green has been announced to get Home support in a bit does give me some relief. This suggests to me that not only will other games eventually get a digital re-release, but that they’ll also be able to connect to Home, which is good for the possibility of someday having all Pokemon games synced up in some kind of connectivity. That’d be way cool. It also shows to me that they’re not going to get rid of Pokemon Home anytime soon, as there’d be no point in hooking up FRLG to Home only to toss out Home a bit later.
I suppose at the end of the day, these really are all just pieces of data, and there’s not much point in getting worked up over it.
Amiibo Doctor 