Hey, I've never really used this site before, but whatever. I thought it would be a good place to get questions answered.
I live in NA, and I prefer the N3DS over the XL, much much more. My question is, what is the best way to order a JP N3DS and play all my games on it? I know Region "Unlocking" is a thing, but I'm not sure how to go at it the most cost-effective way. I have a couple of different ways to go about this, but I feel as if you people know more about what you're doing than me. Any help/suggestions would be highly appreciated!
I did this, I live in NA and got a used Japanese regular N3DS for very cheap off of ebay. For the price I paid I'm happy with the decision just because of the smaller N3DS form factor and customizable cover plates, but even with region unlocking there are lots of limitations and to me it becomes more of a novelty rather than something practical. Keep in mind my 3DS is 9.7 firmware so I only use sky3ds and cubic ninja with regionfour for region unlocking, but so far some of my NA games still only have Japanese text in-game even with region unlocking (Luigi's Mansion, Yoshi's New Island, and Rayman Origins so far suffer from this). Yoshi's New Island and Rayman Origins are 3rd party so I'm not too worried about those but the fact that Luigi's Mansion, a first party Nintendo title, can only be played in Japanese makes me a little wary of any big future titles that might only be in Japanese, such as maybe Hyrule Warriors or Fire Emblem. You never know unfortunately.
Also there's other little issues as well. Majora's Mask doesn't work with regionfour so it's unplayable. Fire Emblem Awakening's soft reset resets what regionfour does, so any time you try to soft reset the game crashes. If you play Fire Emblem the 'classic' way where you soft reset any time a unit dies, it is basically unplayable since you don't have the option of soft resetting. Also sky3ds can't play eshop titles and if you want to keep your firmware low you can't access the eshop, so there will be no way to play eshop titles like Shovel Knight, Azure Striker Gunvolt, etc etc
As far as online goes, if you're N3DS is above 9.2 and you have to use sky3ds, you're risking getting banned if you play any games online because of public headers (I'm not sure what the chances are of getting banned if you use your own private headers though). However if you are at 9.2 or under, you can use .cia instead of sky3ds and play online with no worries of getting banned since .cia are headerless.
Sorry about the wall of text, but just wanted to tell you what I didn't know before purchasing. Like I said, I still don't regret it and the white regular N3DS is absolutely beautiful and awesome to play on (especially with those cover plates!), but I wouldn't be able to have it as my only 3DS unfortunately because of all of the limitations. I can only speak for sky3ds and regionfour, but it's not as simple as 'use regionfour to break region lock, now my 3DS is basically NA region!'
