Gaming What is going on?

[1B51004]

Long story short, I bought a copy of Fire Emblem Warriors for the 3DS off of Amazon so I didn't have to pay 39-40 dollars to get the digital version and to mod it later. When it arrived I booted it up on my Japanese 3DS (i couldn't find my unhacked north American one) and I had gotten a crash. I ripped the .3ds file using GM9 so i could test it in Citra later. When I found my NA 3DS, I got the usual "something wrong occurred, please turn the power off" message. Today, I downloaded the 1.15 patch on my NA 3DS to hopefully fix the error and when I booted it up, I got the 1.15 update text in Japanese.

So what happened? I don't think extracting the .3ds file should have done anything to the cartridge. Could it be a bootleg? A reproduction cart? Some unexplained third answer?

 

[KleinesSinchen]

You already put in into the 3DS carts dying thread – and that was my first thought as well; uncertainty how wide-spread the issue is or gonna be.

For the case the cart is damaged, ripping the game doesn't heal this (that would be nice). Bad solder joints, lose connection, could possibly be (temporarily) solved by just handling the cart (gently pressing against it, inserting multiple times…). This could explain why you got a working copy. Did you try to install the copy on the hacked console?

If you can't get the cart and/or the dump to fully work… Mhmm. I would just download a working CIA file without feeling bad. After all you do have a license. Yes, I know this is still considered illegal in many countries.

I have never heard of 3DS bootlegs (not my interest anyway). They would be much harder and possibly expensive to create than on older devices¹ which get spammed with – partially very low quality – bootlegs ("repros"). Doesn't mean there is no such thing. Even on the older DS there are mostly low-end flashcarts with tape over the µSD slot preloaded with several hundred ROMs rather than real bootlegs of single games.

About the problems in Citra: The official compatibility list says Fire Emblem Warriors doesn't really work anyway, so this is hardly a good indication.

The reason for the Japanese text could be a save created on the Japanese console (just a guess).






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¹ It took surprisingly long for the 10NES and the newer counterparts in SNES/N64 to be fully reverse engineered. Since the Super CIC exists the market got flooded with bootlegs.

 

[1B51004]

Yeah I didn't have enough time to tell you yesterday, but after downloading the patch, the game now worked, only problem is that it was in Japanese. I'm guessing you were right in that I created a save on my Japanese 3ds and that somehow converted my English copy into a Japanese one
Is there any way to turn it back into English? or is it forever stuck as a weird Japanese-English hybrid cartridge?

 

[Hayato213]

You need to inject a NA save into that cart I guess. You need to have access to homebrew, and a NA save.

 

[1B51004]

I'll get working on that now. Thank you both!