It’s never easy saying goodbye, but video game consoles aren’t people, animals or favourite stuffed toys, so why get upset about it? With the closure of the Nintendo Wii U and 3DS online servers overnight, Nintendo has carved another date into their respective headstones, cutting them off from multiplayer gaming and pretty much any kind of online experiences for the remainder of their usable lives. There’s a reason it hurts, but it almost certainly isn’t because you were still playing on them every day. This is the loss of childhood, the loss of communities and the loss of experiences that you still cherish. This is getting older, and let’s face it, it sucks.
The Wii U was a full-on weirdo, taking the 3DS dual-screen aesthetic, translating it to the home console forum, and putting a gamepad in your hands that was bigger than a Steam Deck. Despite that, it remains one of my all-time favourites, and you only have to look at the number of great games that Nintendo brought across to the Switch to know it wasn’t the software’s fault. The hardware was odd, and people never got over that.
Its online component was classic Nintendo as well, with a bunch of Mii’s chatting away on the homescreen, and the ability to ‘chat’ via scrawls and doodles in one of the most cathartic ways of expressing yourself. As ever, it made Sony and Microsoft look like the dullest citizens in dullsville, and it’s still disappointing that the Nintendo Switch has similarly bland online features.
At the centre of those experiences were games like the original Splatoon, a title which made way more sense with the Wii U’s gamepad in tow, using the second screen to see how your team was doing, and choosing where to launch your character. Committed players held a final wake there before the servers were shut down, and that sense of loss was clear to see. Saying goodbye is never easy, but even more so when the console itself fundamentally still works exactly as it did before.
For me, the loss of Xenoblade Chronicles X’s online component will hurt the most, not least because it makes the game harder, losing access to bosses and making it impossible to nab the best mech in the game. My yearly return to the game is still stuck on the Wii U as Nintendo hasn’t seen fit to give it a remaster. In communities I loved, the Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate gang were my regular 4AM compatriots, and it’s painful to think that I can no longer play it as Capcom intended, now forced to hunt Qurupeco’s alone.
For the 3DS, the wonderful Animal Crossing: New Leaf will feel the effects most, with people no longer able to visit the islands their friends have crafted, and games that never made it any further like Monster Hunter 4 will also stay resolutely frozen in time. Hopefully, you nabbed any games you wanted from the eShop before that closed last year, not least because emulating the 3DS dual-screen just isn’t the same.
But we have to face up to the changing times and the eternal march forward of the entertainment industries. Monster Hunter World and Monster Hunter Rise still have an amazing community, Animal Crossing: New Horizons saved us all from madness, and we’re onto Splatoon 3 now which has expanded and pretty much perfected the original game’s work. Only Nintendo and Capcom really know how many people were still loyally hopping onto the Wii U and 3DS entries in these series when the newer and arguably more refined versions existed.
We have the memories of those times, and, fundamentally, we still have those consoles and those games, albeit stuck in a solitary, single player world. The experiences we had can’t be taken away from us, and nor can they be altered, we just can’t return to them in the same way, and that goes for a bunch of things in life. University was fun, but I don’t really want to go back to living off pasta and Snakebite and Black, do I?
For the truly committed, there are ways to keep the Wii U and 3DS dream slightly more alive with the community created recreation that is Pretendo – some of the core functionality is up and running, with various games having partial support. This is in itself a niche group within a niche group, and while it’s great to have that option, it can’t ever hope to feel the same. And that’s OK.
The Wii U and the 3DS may have been retired, but the time spent in their online worlds will never be forgotten. Just remember to visit them in the retirement home, so they can show you what innovation meant and tell you about the days when dual-screens conquered the earth.
