One of my favorite features of the 3DS was “StreetPass”, which let your 3DS check in with any nearby 3DS systems and exchange a little greeting which included your Mii, what you’d been playing lately, and a little greeting.  Some games also used this to great effect – my favorite example being Dead or Alive Dimensions, which let you fight against CPU-controlled versions of other people.  I never met the other person who played DoA:D at one of my workplaces, but we had a daily rivalry going between my Kasumi and their Lei Fang.

I was also trying very hard to collect StreetPasses from all US states/territories and Japanese prefectures, but didn’t quite manage to get a full set.  I’m still missing six prefectures and nine states.

It wasn’t a feature that worked very well in the US.  People are spread out, we don’t take public transit much, and local multiplayer events just never seemed to happen much.  In Japan, on the other hand, people are jammed together and just taking a morning train or walking near a Pokémon Center would light up your green LED with a handful of passes.

Sadly, Nintendo did not bring StreetPass forward to the Switch, and corona broke my streak of travel to Japan.  So it’s been six years since I’ve been there and I didn’t have huge hopes for any connections, but I still brought my 3DS along.  It gave me an excuse to play Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia, which is just an awkward name when I type it out like that.

For the TL;DR, I got 21 StreetPasses.  One of them was from a Floridian in the airport on the way to Japan, and the other 20 were from Japanese locals.  I was a bit surprised by this – the last time I was in Japan I got a ton of hits from other tourists.

Some of the greeting messages were from 3DS diehards.

3DS Forever!!

I’m going to keep using my 3DS!

Hopefully they enjoyed the reciprocal ping from my system.

Most of the other greetings were polite hellos.  Most people still rocking their 3DS seemed to be playing games like Animal Crossing or Tomodachi Collection, which make sense for low key relaxing games.

I didn’t pick up any new prefectures for my collection, unfortunately.  Most of the ones I’m missing are pretty out of the way, so that’s not too much of a shock.

As for where I picked them up?  Well, our first week was spent going to tourist destinations in and around Kyoto.  Nara, Fushimi Inari, the Arashiyama Bamboo forest, Kinkakuji, that sort of place.  I picked up a grand total of 5 StreetPasses going to all of these places, including all of the time spent on transit.

Our second week was in Tokyo, where we mostly went to fanboy areas.  This was much more lucrative for StreetPass collecting.  I had 5 in a day of roaming Otome Road and the Ikebukuro Animate, 3 from a very short trip to Nakano Broadway, and 6 from spending an entire day shopping in Akihabara.  I also got one when we took a side trip to Yokohama to see the Gundam Factory, though I’m not sure if that was at the Gundam itself or somewhere in transit.

Of course, since the 3DS was released during the time when Nintendo went all-in on region locking, I didn’t actually buy any new software for the thing.  I did re-buy a couple of DS games I’d had at one time and sold.

Total cost for these two was Y1160, or a little under eight dollars US.

I bought entirely too many Switch games and a throughly geeky controller.  Probably put up a post about that at some point.

So that was fun, kind of a last hurrah for the feature.  It’s quite diminished from the days when I needed to buy the StreetPass plaza expansion that let me have 100 guests at a time at my Plaza Gate, but it was a good feeling to see the indicator light flash on occasionally.