It’s 1 March, which marks the beginning of the end for Nintendo fans everywhere. Later this month, the 3DS and Wii U eShops are set to shut down forever, and thousands of digital games will vanish into the ether as a result.
We’ve known that this was coming for some time now. Last year, it became impossible to add funds to old eShop accounts without connecting it to a Switch account and putting money on that. Currently, everything is still available to buy (albeit with this awkward workaround), but not for long - come 27 March, it won’t be possible to download any new content, including free apps.
Take a look at this guy opening what has to be the worst pack of Pokémon cards ever.
Due to this, the Pokémon Bank and Poké Transporter apps will also be disappearing into the void for anyone who’s not already downloaded them. For those unfamiliar, these two handy dandy downloads provide the one and only way to move your old Pokémon from the fifth generation games (Black, White and their sequels) to the sixth gen and beyond - without them, any old Pokémon from the third, fourth and fifth generations will be permanently stuck on the Nintendo DS games, with no way to make it to the 3DS and Switch.
As GamesRadar+ reports, this means that fans could lose years of progress if they don’t act quickly and download the apps while they can. On Reddit, one user urged others to grab Bank and Transporter while they can so that they still have the option to transfer their old Pokémon, after they discovered that they’d not yet transferred theirs into the newer Switch app, Pokémon Home.
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“I’ve been playing these games for 18 years. 140 hours per game. I’ve bred Pokémon in rare balls with hidden abilities, egg moves and six IVs. Manual labour. Hundreds of hours upon hundreds of hours. Rare event Pokémon. ALL. GONE,” Crusnik_Asparagus wrote. “I wanted to throw up. Until I began to ponder. Yeah, I did download Pokémon Home when it was released, but did I actually transfer my Pokébank to Home? NO I HAD NOT! THEY WERE STILL IN THE POKÉBANK! All my 2000 lovelies!
“I’m sorry for the long rant. But the [moral] of the story: PLEASE DOWNLOAD POKÉMON BANK ON YOUR DEVICE BEFORE IT WILL BECOME UNAVAILABLE IN MARCH 2023!”
On a side note, the shutdown of the eShop means that soon, you won’t be able to purchase the digital versions of the Game Boy Pokémon titles (Red, Blue, Yellow, Gold, Silver and Crystal). Be sure to grab those while you can.