Nintendo 3DS consoles are a lot more popular in Japan.

I bought a Nintendo 3DS pocket-sized game console in Vancouvr around Christmas of last year to play some of the study games that I had bought on my last trip to Japan. This was my first Nintendo console and I ended up playing a lot more games than studying. Such is life. I brought it with me on my trip.

One of the 3DS features called Streetpass is the ability for the console to automatically detect and exchange information with other nearby 3DS consoles via WiFi. As part of the setup for the console you create a persona which you name, dress up and set up other characteristics for. When you come within range of another person’s 3DS your character information gets passed to their console and their character informations is in turn passed to yours. The visiting character becomes a wandering hero that you can use as canon fodder in various games.

In spite of Nintendo selling over 30 million 3DS systems wordwide I have only exchanged info with 45 other 3DS consoles during the last year in Vancouver which in large part is likely due to where I spend my time. The largest ever number in single day was 6 when I went to a Christmas festival at my Japanese school. On my commute from Narita through Tokyo today I met 9, on Monday 10 and 10 again on Tuesday. However on Tuesday night I discovered that the maximum number of people you could meet at one time was 10 after which others were ignored! I tried emptying the queue a few times on Wednesday and met 33. There are a lot of 3DSes in Tokyo! It will be interesting to see if this trend continues.

Streetpass also shows you the last game that the person you met was playing. In Japan a large percentage of people are playing the newly released Monster Hunter 4 which at this time is only available in Japan. Unfortunately the 3DS has a “feature” called region locking that only allows you to play 3DS games that are sold in the same region as your 3DS so you can’t play any Japanese games on a 3DS bought in North America as these countries are in different regions. I may have to break down and buy a Japanese version.