FAQ
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Kid Icarus: Uprising is one of my favorite games on the Nintendo 3DS.Released in 2012 for the Nintendo 3DS, it is an on-rails shooter designed to revive the Kid Icarus franchise after 21 years without a new entry in the series.
However, while the game was widely praised, there was one major aspect that many players took issue with: its control scheme.
Primarily controlled using the stylus, Kid Icarus: Uprising requires players to dedicate one hand to aiming via the touch screen, while the other handles movement and firing.
The intention behind this control scheme was to allow for fast, precise aiming, something I personally think it achieved very well.
However, it also alienated a considerable number of players, and in some cases even led to hand cramps. This was something the developers were aware of, as the game shipped with a dedicated stand designed to support the Nintendo 3DS, rather than requiring players to hold the system throughout gameplay.
As a result, many players expressed a desire for an alternative control scheme, particularly one based around dual-stick or gyro aiming. This was a common request around the game's release and has continued to be raised in the years since.
In an effort to allow those players to experience this gem of a game in a way that feels more comfortable and familiar to them, I've created a fan-made patch that introduces these alternative control schemes.
NOTE: The reverse engineering efforts involved in creating this patch were AI-assisted, but all design decisions, feature implementations and graphics were made with very deliberate intent.
A considerable amount of time was spent developing, testing, and polishing this patch, as well as making any new graphics by hand with the aim of making these additions feel as natural and integrated into the original game as possible.
The patch is available for all officially-released languages, and I view it as an extension patch for the New Nintendo 3DS (though it works on the regular 3DS as well).
Here's what it contains:
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C-Stick Aiming:
C-Stick Aiming:
- C-Stick aiming, including New 3DS and Circle Pad Pro support.
There have been previous attempts by various people to rebind the ABXY buttons using third party tools to achieve this - this patch however allows for far more fluid motion than those methods, offering a full 360° of native movement.
Included with C-Stick support is C-Stick-specific aim assist, which works in a few different ways:
- Soft aim assist when not shooting, helping guide the reticle onto an enemy.
- Hard aim assist when firing, which locks the reticle onto an enemy you're actively engaged with and follows it across the screen. This tracking begins to taper off at greater distances and at certain movement speeds, allowing enemies to escape if they move too far away or too quickly.
Aim assist as a whole also scales with the distance of an enemy, gradually weakening until it drops off entirely at the maximum attack range. Where possible, it will also stop tracking an enemy once they become obscured by scenery.
Other C-Stick features include...
- Directional target hopping: If you're actively engaged with and firing at an enemy, and another enemy is within a reasonable distance, you can tap the C-Stick in that direction to hop from one target to another.
- Land Battle camera tracking: When actively attacking an enemy in Land Battles, the camera attempts to maintain focus on that enemy as you move around it, keeping it in the center of the screen. This allows Pit to strafe around an enemy while fighting.
- Faster camera turning: When turning the camera with the C-Stick in Land Battles, once the reticle reaches the edge of the bounds camera rotation receives a 50% speed boost to help keep up with stylus controls.
- Reticle recall: When using the C-Stick to look around in Land Battles, it can be difficult to keep track of where the the reticle once was when it fades out due to inactivity. To help combat this, pressing the attack button causes the reticle to reappear and fire from the current center of the screen.
- Air Battle reticle recentering: When using the C-Stick in Air Battles, the reticle returns to Pit when idle. This allows for quicker aiming, as you don't have to compensate for its previous position when attacking. It also feels like a natural extension of how the stick is physically positioned when you next interact with it.
- Air Battle reticle-edge assistance: In Air Battles, if the reticle is at the edge of the screen, it moves 20% faster, to allow for quicker reticle position recovery.
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Motion Control (Gyro Aiming):
- Motion control, colloquially known as "Gyro aiming", can optionally be used alongside C-Stick or +Control Pad configurations.
This is accessed through a remappable Motion Control toggle, allowing you to enable or disable it on the fly. The toggle replaces one of the game's many redundant additional Attack button mappings.
I've also added a custom texture for the button-mapping menu, as well as an on-screen notification that displays the Motion Control state whenever it's switched On or Off.
Gyro handling was inspired primarily by the bow-and-arrow controls in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D.
Other Motion Control features include...
- Motion Control persistence - whether Motion Contriol is set to On or Off remains set across game restarts.
- Gyro aiming utilizes the same aim assist available to touch controls.
- Gyro pause/resume and sleep/wake handling, preventing movements made while suspended from affecting your aim after resuming the game or waking the system.
- When Motion Control is enabled, the idle reticle return features used by the C-Stick are disabled. This ensures that your gyro positioning doesn't become off-center relative to the system's physical position.
Both C-Stick aiming and gyro aiming abide by the existing reticle sensitivity sliders in the Control Options menu.
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First-Person Mode:
First-Person Mode:
Before implementing motion control support, there was one requirement I felt I needed to satisfy to make it a feature worth including: adapting the game's first-person mode to better accommodate C-Stick and gyro aiming.
But before getting into what I've changed, it's worth explaining how Change View, or first-person mode, originally worked.
In the base game, the Change View button allows you to switch from third-person to first-person mode in Land Battles, letting you view the world through Pit's eyes. However, this doesn't behave too differently from third-person mode, other than being slightly more zoomed in and without Pit in the foreground. Holding the Change View button allows you to zoom in a little further.
To better accommodate the new control schemes, I've made a small change to how this feature behaves: "True" first-person mode.
What this means is that when Change View is activated, rather than the reticle being independently movable, it now stays in the center of the screen as the camera moves, as you'd expect from most first-person shooters. The button can still be held down to zoom in further.
However, that's only half of the change.
The Change View button now also works in Air Battles, allowing you to switch to first-person mode there too, something that wasn't possible before.
To accommodate this, the full range of camera movement in first-person mode had to be adapted to match the movement range available in the normal third-person perspective.
In practice modes, they also spawn further out than they did before, preventing you from seeing them spawn in.
Additionally, the movement speed of the reticle in first-person mode is relative to the distance travelled, so it matches expectations/doesn't give an advantage - just like in Land Battles.
To me, this felt necessary to implement, as I think gyro aiming is best enjoyed in first-person mode, and I couldn't shake the feeling that gyro controls for the 3DS should present a Face Raiders-like experience.
However the game remains on rails, so be sure you can keep up!
First-Person Mode Persistence
- First-Person Mode now persists between Game Restarts, Chapters, Sub-Chapters and Cutscenes (sometimes the camera will temporarily pan out to show cutscenes and then zoom back in) when active, to make it feel like a fully fleshed out game mode.
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Other Changes:
Pause Functionality Additions
- Added "Press START to pause" functionality to the Reticle/Camera Options test modes (both Air Battle and Land Battle), as well as the Idols Vault.
Pausing within these screens freezes any gameplay or animation on the top screen and shifts focus to the bottom screen, allowing you to use the +Control Pad or Circle Pad to select or modify options, making gameplay fully accessible without a stylus.
SELECT-to-back button mapping
- Pressing SELECT inside of all menus will automatically select the 'back' arrow, or a similar relative option - another addition made to allow for full stylus-free gameplay.
Mapping Motion Control/the C-Stick and 'Use Power' to Vehicles
- The C-Stick and Motion Control can now be used to move the camera when inside a vehicle, and the button mapped to 'Use Power' (by default its D-Pad Down) can be used to exit a vehicle - this makes sense when you consider 'Select Powers (Left)' and 'Select Powers (Right)' behave as vehicle ability use when Pit is inside a vehicle (which is otherwise normally only available via a touch screen button).
Align Camera now affects the reticle
- Pressing the button mapped to 'Align Camera' now also centers the reticle in the direction Pit is facing as well the camera. This change was made to accommodate gyro aiming, allowing players to regain the reticle should it become misaligned.
New Nintendo 3DS ZL and ZR button support
- The ZL and ZR buttons which are exclusive to the New Nintendo 3DS hardware line now mimic the same actions mapped to D-Pad Left and D-Pad Right respectively.
- If ZL and ZR are pressed together simultaneously they act as if D-Pad Down is pressed.
Aim Assist Default Settings
- Aim Assist is now enabled by default when starting a new save file.
This was to ensure a positive default experience when using the C-Stick.
Aim Assist in Online Play
- To allow for a fair experience, Aim Assist has now been allowed in 'Together Mode' for all types of aim control.
This addition was primarily for the sake of allowing C-Stick users to compete reasonably with those using stylus or gyro aiming.
Default aim assist percentages have been very carefully selected for the sake of a fair gameplay experience.
Together Mode is playable today via unofficial third party online services such as Pretendo.
Battery Icon Display
- The 'remaining battery' icon used to appear at all times in the top right corner of the screen. This remains the case while in menus, however, when engaging in active gameplay, it is now only displayed when battery percentage changes enough to change the appearance of the icon (around 25%) in which it flashes in/out for a few seconds to notify you, or if it is on its lowest percentage rate (<=25%) it is visible at all times.
Menu Changes
- Various menu strings have been updated to make the text more accurate with the addition of C-Stick and Motion Controls.
- The control options menu visuals have been updated to include the C-Stick.
Code Optimization
- Code optimizations to various parts of the code intended to increase hardware performance.
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Optional Widescreen Support:
- Optional widescreen patches that can be applied over the top of the base patch.
These add support for both Widescreen (16:9) and Ultrawide (21:9) display configurations.
The reticle bounds on the bottom screen are adjusted to become relative to the size of the screen.
The widescreen patches are not intended for use on real hardware.
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Installation Guide:
Installation Guide:
Before installing, make sure you're using the package that matches your intended setup and the region of your copy of Kid Icarus: Uprising.
The corresponding Title IDs for each region are:
| | Region | Title ID | ------------------------------------------- | USA | 0004000000030100 | | Europe | 0004000000030200 | | Japan | 0004000000030000 | |
Method 1: Nintendo 3DS (Luma3DS)
- Turn off your Nintendo 3DS/New Nintendo 3DS and access its SD card.
- Extract the downloaded ZIP file.
- Open Nintendo 3DS, then choose USA, Europe, or Japan, matching your game's region.
- Back up your save and any existing mod files before making changes.
- If an older patch is installed, move its folder out of SD:/luma/titles/<title ID>/ to prevent conflicting executable patches from remaining active.
- Copy the luma folder from your selected region folder to the root of your SD card, merging it with the existing luma folder.
Once everything is in place, your SD card should have the following folder structure:
| SD:/luma/titles/<title ID>/ ├── code.bin ├── exheader.bin └── romfs/ └── (Included mod assets) |
NOTE: code.bin belongs directly inside the Title ID folder, not inside an exefs folder. Don't copy the outer USA, Europe, or Japan folder onto your SD card. No additional code.ips file is needed for Luma3DS.
- Safely eject the SD card and put it back into your console.
- Hold SELECT while turning on your Nintendo 3DS to access the Luma3DS configuration menu.
- Enable "Enable game patching", save your settings, and boot into the HOME Menu.
- Launch Kid Icarus: Uprising normally.
Method 2: Emulators
For emulator use, open the Emulator folder. Install '1 - Install First - Base Patch' first, then apply an optional widescreen overlay if you'd like.
Install the base patch
- Make sure the game is closed before proceeding.
- Extract the downloaded ZIP file.
- Right-click Kid Icarus: Uprising in your emulator's game list and select "Open Mods Location" (the exact wording may vary between emulators).
- Back up your save and existing mod folder before making changes.
- If an older patch is installed, move its contents outside the active mod location to prevent conflicting executable patches from remaining.
- Open Emulator → 1 - Install First - Base Patch.
- Choose USA, Europe, or Japan, matching your game's region.
- Inside that region folder, open load/mods/<title ID>/.
- Copy its contents—the exefs folder, exheader.bin, and romfs folder—directly into the mod location opened by your emulator.
Once everything is in place, your mod folder should have the following structure:
| <Game's mod location>/ ├── exefs/ │ ├── code.bin │ └── code.ips ├── exheader.bin └── romfs/ └── (Included mod assets) |
NOTE: Don't create another load/mods or Title ID folder inside the location opened by your emulator. Copy the contents directly into that folder.
If you don't want widescreen, installation is complete. Launch the game normally.
Apply widescreen (optional)
- Close the game.
- Open Emulator → 2 - Optional - Widescreen.
- Choose 16-9 - Widescreen or 21-9 - Ultrawide.
- Open the same region folder you used for the base patch.
- Inside that region folder, open load/mods/<title ID>/.
- Copy the exefs folder and exheader.bin into the same mod location where you installed the base patch.
- Merge the exefs folder and replace code.bin and exheader.bin when prompted.
- Keep the base patch's existing romfs folder and code.ips file intact.
- Select the corresponding 16:9 or 21:9 top-screen aspect ratio in your emulator's display settings.
- Launch the game normally, without loading a previous save state.
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Disclaimer:
Disclaimer:
Kid Icarus: Uprising and all associated characters, names, trademarks, artwork, and other intellectual property are the property of Nintendo and their respective rights holders.
This project is an unofficial, fan-made modification and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or supported by Nintendo or any other rights holder.
No ownership of the original game or its associated intellectual property is claimed. All rights remain with their respective owners.
This modification is provided for non-commercial purposes and is intended for use with a legally obtained copy of the original game.
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I hope this patch helps others to enjoy this game as much as I do.
Special thanks to Sey for extensive hardware tests.
Download can be found attached below.
If you find any issues please report them here, preferably with a crash dump if applicable.
I hope this patch helps others to enjoy this game as much as I do.
Special thanks to Sey for extensive hardware tests.
Download can be found attached below.
If you find any issues please report them here, preferably with a crash dump if applicable.
| Kid Icarus Uprising - C-Stick & Gyro Patch.zip - 643817506 bytes |
| MD5: 41d92846784d08c63078f4cb941fd496 SHA1: 274f8f0adc936e4b52d9ea14d2b15f87aa88cdd3 SHA256: 295cbe43ee361308f6f6255edb52966f78f37f3fd4a7d04f259f172e5f579955 SHA512: 6daf21ef98da9da0692ddc88ccf2ed8fd45070137f6efa58b4c9690bbe3a76c25f6022f80156f58f4cb350095ce805e62f98f51ac465f40dfe949f1be466f144 |
Last edited by Darkshade,
