Easy Way To Make Your 3DS Region Free
Region lockouts make it so a Japanese 3DS game cannot be played in an American or European handheld. There are various legal reasons why they’re used, but it’s never stated publicly why, and to make things more confusing, they’re only applied about half the time. All the handhelds in the Game Boy line were region free. The DS line has been the opposite.
But not anymore! Someone’s discovered a way to make any 3DS game from any country play in an American system, and you don’t need special chips or a soldering iron. 3DS hacker Smea (who has done other things like make a Portal game for the DS from scratch) discovered the exploit and made a video detailing how to pull it off.
All you need to take advantage of the flaw is…..Cubic Ninja. Yes, that again. Remember Cubic Ninja, and its firmware-breaking powers that allowed homebrew to be installed on the 3DS? It didn’t take long for Nintendo to sew that loophole up (and remove Cubic Ninja from the eShop permanently), but there are still plenty of physical copies they can’t make disappear. For those who bought Cubic Ninja in the days of the exploit when it was a zillion dollars on eBay for that reason, you just got a second chance to sell it and make your money back.
Naturally, you have no guarantee Nintendo won’t patch this hole too, though a region-free exploit not that many people will see a use for probably holds less urgency than an exploit that could allow mass piracy, which is what Cubic Ninja previously did. In any case, if you’re in the rare scenario of having this game AND several imports you’ve always wanted to play (yet didn’t buy a Japanese 3DS to play them on), today’s your lucky day.