25 Most Unique Nintendo 3DS Games

Tomodachi Life is a communication game. You turn your Miis into islanders, or make new ones, and put them in situations that run from charming to utterly ridiculous. Tomodachi Life is nonlinear, and your only goal is keeping your Miis happy. Its big trick is text-to-speech: whatever you type, your Miis say out loud in a computer voice. American and Japanese developers spent several years improving that part for the release outside Japan, because the first game, Tomodachi Collection, never left Japan.

Critics liked the humor and found it repetitive. It still sold over 6.73 million copies by March 2025, and it gained a cult following through viral posts of Miis doing outlandish things. Players name it as a unique pick, a game to check in on once a day. A Switch sequel, Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream, was released on April 16, 2026.

Planet Robobot puts Kirby inside a mech. Invaders are turning his home world into machines, and the Robobot Armor fights back by scanning enemies to change into new Modes, like Jet Mode. It is strong enough to lift heavy objects, and Kirby can still copy abilities the old way by inhaling them. The game was planned as a direct successor to Kirby: Triple Deluxe, and after the story you can team up with three friends in Team Kirby Clash, a small brawl with RPG rules.

Reviews praised the soundtrack and the armour, and the low difficulty got the usual complaint. Team Kirby Clash grew into its own eShop game, Team Kirby Clash Deluxe, in April 2017. Players praise its 3D and how it adds depth to the levels. Few Kirby stages look as good with the slider all the way up.

Shin Megami Tensei IV is the fourth mainline game in the series, with no direct story link to the earlier ones. You are a newly appointed Samurai, sworn to protect the Eastern Kingdom of Mikado from rival factions and a growing army of demons. Your choices along the way decide whether you end up on the Law, Chaos or Neutral path. The Samurai's battle stances and the handles of their katanas were inspired by the Jedi of Star Wars, and the Press Turn battle system from Nocturne got an overhaul.

It debuted to strong sales in Japan, and reviews were positive in Japan and the West. Players count it among the 3DS games you can't get anywhere else. One fan put the look best: the flat demon sprites against the backgrounds make it "seem like a horror pop up book".

BoxBoy! is a puzzle platformer from HAL Laboratory about Qbby, a box-shaped hero who can spawn boxes out of his body. He can carry the boxes or throw them, and he uses them to cross gaps and to block deadly lasers. If he hooks a row of boxes onto a ledge while he is still attached, he pulls himself up after them. Each level has crowns, and they disappear if you use too many boxes, which is where the hard thinking starts.

Everything is in black and white, and IGN praised exactly that, along with the level of complexity, when it gave the first game 8.2/10. Two more 3DS games followed, BoxBoxBoy! and Bye-Bye BoxBoy!. Players put the series next to Pushmo when they talk about the puzzle games that belong to the 3DS.

Kirby: Triple Deluxe is the Kirby game built around the 3D screen. Kirby moves left and right as usual, but he can also hop from the foreground to the background, and stages are designed to use that depth. A new "inhale everything" ability, the Hypernova, lets him swallow whatever blocks his path in certain parts of a stage. There are collectibles everywhere, from hidden 8-bit keychains to Sun Stones, and StreetPass delivers bonus items.

Reviews praised the level design and the use of 3D. The main complaint was the low difficulty level. If you want a hard Kirby, keep walking. Players name it for its 3D, which makes the stages pop, and some like it even more than Planet Robobot.

This was the first portable Smash Bros. Up to four players fight locally or online with Nintendo's best-known characters, on stages taken from its handheld games. Masahiro Sakurai directed it, and the solo Classic mode has an intensity setting borrowed from his previous game, Kid Icarus: Uprising. You spend in-game money to make the fight harder and earn better rewards. The Ice Climbers were planned for the roster and then removed due to the technical limitations of the 3DS.

Critics liked the fine-tuning of the fighting and criticized some issues with online play. The 3DS version sold over nine million copies worldwide by September 2022. Players name it among the games where the 3D effect works, which says a lot for a fighting game where four people are flying around a tiny screen.

Luigi goes back to ghost hunting, this time across several mansions, with Professor E. Gadd handing out missions. His Poltergust 5000 still sucks up ghosts. The big change is the Strobulb: you charge it and release a burst of light that works like a flashbang, and certain switches and locks react only to that flash. Next Level Games, the Canadian studio behind Punch-Out!! on the Wii, made it, with Shigeru Miyamoto supervising.

Critics praised the graphics and complained about the mission structure and the lack of checkpoints. It sold 6.44 million copies as of December 2020, one of the best sellers on the system. Players name it as one of the most visually impressive games on the 3DS. A remaster, Luigi's Mansion 2 HD, came to the Switch in June 2024.

New Leaf is the fourth main game in the Animal Crossing series, and the one that makes you head of the village. You decide how the town develops, and you can install items like benches and lamp posts, which had only been in the Japanese GameCube game Dōbutsu no Mori e+. StreetPass lets you look around the homes of other players you passed while out with the console.

Critics praised the improvements on earlier games. In November 2016 a free update added amiibo support and new features, and a retail version, Welcome amiibo, followed in late 2016. Players still recommend it on the 3DS, some for how good the town looks in 3D.

Ever Oasis comes from Grezzo, the team behind The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask 3D, and it was directed by Koichi Ishii, known for his work on the Final Fantasy and Mana series. You play a Seedling building an oasis in the desert of Vistrahda. Villagers from other tribes move in and open shops, and the shops earn dewadems, which you spend on new Bloom Booths. Out in the desert you fight in real time and switch between the three members of your party.

Some critics found the opening slow and the story shallow. IGN's Brendan Graeber felt the design made even necessary maintenance tasks feel worthwhile rather than chores. Players bring it up as a 3DS exclusive worth finding.

Grezzo remade Majora's Mask, first released for the Nintendo 64 in 2000, with sharper textures and the frame rate raised from 20 to 30 FPS. It also smoothed over the moments that pushed people away. One developer kept what became known as the "what in the world" list of things that felt unreasonable, and Grezzo added to it from their own playthroughs. The Song of Double Time now skips to any hour of the day, and the save system was completely revamped.

The moon still falls in three days, but now you can save without starting the clock over. A special edition came with a Skull Kid figurine. Players name it next to The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D when they talk about 3D done well.

Intelligent Systems made Awakening as the possible last entry in the Fire Emblem series, because sales had been falling, so it gathered elements from all the previous games. You command Chrom's army on grid maps, and the Pair Up system lets a nearby ally support an attack. Relationships matter in battle, since certain pairings grant bonuses like extra movement or an automatic guard. In Classic Mode, characters defeated in battle are permanently dead.

It got critical acclaim and strong sales worldwide. Its success is credited with boosting sales for the 3DS and ensuring the continuation of the Fire Emblem series. Players keep naming it among the 3DS games to play. It is also the game here most likely to swallow a whole summer.

Radiant Historia first came out on the DS, in Japan in 2010. The 3DS got an expanded remake, Perfect Chronology, in Japan in 2017 and in North America and Europe the following year. You play Stocke, an intelligence agent who receives the White Chronicle, a book that lets him travel between timelines. He moves back and forth through key events and an entire alternate timeline to find the one true history. The team came from Atlus' Megami Tensei series and from tri-Ace's Radiata Stories.

The remake added redrawn artwork, voice acting, an extra story path and an animated opening produced by A-1 Pictures. Yoko Shimomura composed the music. Several critics compared it favourably to role-playing games from the 16-bit era. Players recommend Perfect Chronology as one of the RPGs worth owning a 3DS for.

Pushmo is set in a park full of climbing toys. A trickster has trapped kids inside them, and Mallo has to push and pull blocks out of each wall to climb up and rescue them. There are more than 250 puzzles. Once you clear enough of them, Pushmo Studio lets you create puzzles of your own and share them. In Europe and Australia it is called Pullblox.

It started a series. Crashmo followed on the 3DS in 2012, Pushmo World went to the Wii U, and Stretchmo came back to the 3DS in May 2015. Mallo even reappears as a Spirit in Smash Ultimate. Players recommend it whenever the talk turns to puzzle games on the 3DS, usually with its sequels attached.

Mario Kart 7 added hang-gliding attachments, which gave the tracks aerial sections for the first time in the series, and karts can drive underwater too. You can customize your kart's build, a screen producer Hideki Konno compared to a slot machine. You can also race in first person and steer with gyro controls by tilting the console. Konno said finishing the game was an "act of emergency", because 3DS sales were low and very few staff worked on it.

Critics praised its innovations and the gyro option. It became the best-selling game on the Nintendo 3DS, with nearly 19 million copies sold. Players name it among the best uses of the 3D effect, and racing is where a sense of depth helps you most.

Samus Returns is a remake of Metroid II, Samus's 1991 Game Boy adventure. MercurySteam first pitched a remake of Metroid Fusion, and producer Yoshio Sakamoto suggested Metroid II instead. In the original, Samus could only fire at fixed angles; here she can fire freely in any direction. She also gains new Aeion abilities, which use an energy gauge. The camera stays side-on and zooms in for cutscenes.

It won Best Handheld Game at The Game Awards 2017, and many reviewers called it a return to form, though some criticized the controls and the counterattack. The music was directed by Kenji Yamamoto, who co-composed the music for Super Metroid. Players count it among the 3DS games that stand apart, and it was available only on the 3DS family when it came out.

Nintendo remade Star Fox 64 with a complete graphical update, and the 3D was the selling point: it gives a clearer grasp of distance and position, so you can focus on the action. Europe and Australia knew the original as Lylat Wars, but the remake uses the Star Fox 64 name in all regions. The directional pad handles somersaults and U-turns, and it zooms in and out from the Arwing in All-Range Mode.

Critics praised the upgrades and the attention to detail in a full recreation of the original. In October 2015 it joined the Nintendo Selects range in Europe, which meant global sales of over a million. Players say it looks amazing in 3D. A second remake, simply titled Star Fox, came out on June 25, 2026.

Bravely Default started out as an action RPG sequel to Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light and became its own thing. You play Tiz, a shepherd and the lone survivor of a disaster, out to restore balance to the world. The battles are the hook. Brave lets a character take extra actions in one turn, and Default stores actions for later, so every fight becomes a small gamble. Revo of Sound Horizon wrote the music to evoke Dragon Quest and SaGa.

The West got the expanded For the Sequel version in 2014, published by Nintendo with no subtitle. Critics praised the mix of old mechanics and new ideas and complained about repetitive late-game stages. Players recommend it as one of the RPGs that make the 3DS worth having, and some still prefer it to the sequel on Switch.

Yacht Club Games, founded by former WayForward staff, crowdfunded Shovel Knight and released it in June 2014, with the 3DS among its first platforms. You play a small knight with a Shovel Blade who fights the Order of No Quarter on the way to the Enchantress. Jake Kaufman wrote the chiptune music in FamiTracker, with two tracks by Mega Man composer Manami Matsumae. The checkpoint design took ideas from Dark Souls.

Critics consider it one of the greatest video games ever made. The 3DS version has something the others don't: players say the 3D effect makes it the best version available, and they miss the depth when they play it on Switch. The main layer stays flat, and the backgrounds stretch away behind it.

A boy gets a watch that lets him see Yo-kai, ghosts from Japanese folklore who cause mischief in daily life, and befriend them. They look like anything from inanimate objects to mythical creatures. You help people with everyday problems, like a Yo-kai that makes your parents argue about dinner, and you summon your Yo-kai friends to fight.

It came out in Japan on July 11, 2013, and sold over a million copies there by November 2014. It grew into a franchise with a toy line and an anime series. The West had to wait until 2015. Players name it both as one of the weirder 3DS games and as a series that started on the system. If a game about a ghost who makes people grumpy sounds normal to you, you may already be playing it.

Revelations brought Resident Evil back toward survival horror after the action of Resident Evil 5. Most of it takes place on a cruise ship, chosen for its claustrophobic corridors and its isolation in the middle of the ocean. The story runs in episodes with puzzles and fights, and a multiplayer mode lets you fight your way through altered versions of the campaign. It was also the first game to support the Circle Pad Pro outside Japan.

Critics praised the spooky setting and the sound direction and criticized the uneven gameplay between episodes. An HD version reached home consoles in 2013, and it was criticized for dated graphics. Players still recommend playing it on the 3DS, where it started.

Fantasy Life was written and produced by Akihiro Hino, with music by Nobuo Uematsu. You live in the world of Reveria and choose from 12 Life paths, and depending on which one you take you might craft, fish, mine or fight. The game came out in Japan in 2012, and Nintendo brought it to the rest of the world in 2014. The Origin Island DLC adds a new top rank called Creator, or God in Europe.

A sequel, Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time, was released in 2025. Players keep recommending the original as one of the 3DS games worth owning the console for.

Ocarina of Time 3D remade the Nintendo 64 classic with far more detailed textures, a streamlined interface and a frame rate raised from 20 to 30 FPS. It added the mirrored Master Quest dungeons and a new Boss Challenge mode. Music is still how you progress: you learn songs and play them on the ocarina to open the way forward.

It came out in June 2011, and in Japan it helped the 3DS take the top spot on the hardware chart after 12 weeks. Eurogamer gave it a perfect score, and Retro Gamer gave it 98%. It sold over 6.44 million units worldwide as of December 2022. Players name it when they talk about the 3D effect done well.

Satoru Iwata asked Masahiro Sakurai to make a launch title for the 3DS, and Sakurai was the first person outside the company to learn the console existed. The result brought back Pit, missing since Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters in 1991. Palutena grants him flight for limited stretches, so chapters open with shooting in the sky and then land for ground battles against Medusa's army. You pick a weapon before every battle, and Claws play nothing like an Orbitar.

Motoi Sakuraba and Yuzo Koshiro were among the composers. It sold over a million copies, and reviews praised the story and dialogue while the control scheme was frequently criticized. It was the only game Project Sora made before the studio shut down in mid-2012. Players keep recommending it as a game made for the 3DS.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds is the first Zelda made exclusively for the 3DS. At Shigeru Miyamoto's request it is set in the Hyrule of A Link to the Past, with many areas reworked. A villain named Yuga turns people into paintings, and Link gets a new power of his own to chase him. Many areas are open from the start, and the dungeons can be done in any order. Some puzzles revolve around the 3D effect.

Ryo Nagamatsu arranged Koji Kondo's music from A Link to the Past and played the flute you hear in the milk bar. The game sold over 4.26 million copies worldwide by 2022. Players call it unlike any other Zelda, and they praise how its puzzles use the 3D.

Super Mario 3D Land was the first Mario game on the 3DS, released worldwide in November 2011. It combines elements from the traditional 2D Mario games with the free-roaming 3D ones, and it adds new power-ups and mechanics of its own. Critics praised its level design and its use of stereoscopic 3D. Nintendo also sold it as an eShop download from 2012.

It sold 12.88 million copies, the seventh best-selling game for the 3DS, and it was the first 3DS game to sell over five million copies. A sequel, Super Mario 3D World, followed on the Wii U in November 2013. Players call it the best use of 3D on the system, and they name it more often than any other game on this list. Turn the slider up for this one.