Wii U and 3DS eShops are GONE, but now you can See the Story of Rusty's Real Deal Baseball for Free

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - No more micro-transactions! Or macro-transactions, either.

Well over a year ago, I explained and warned about how the Nintendo Wii U and Nintendo 3DS eShops would be obliterated on March 27, 2023. I didn't buy anything on the Wii U or 3DS in 2022 or 2023, since I'm not a procrastinator, and if I had wanted something, I would've gotten it a long, long time ago.

Apparently, the world is full of procrastinators and it was a scramble in March 2023 for many people to buy things they could've gotten in March 2022. To be fair, if you did wait until March 2023, in certain circumstances, you could get some big savings in sales. But now if you try to access a Nintendo 3DS game page on nintendo.com, it'll redirect to the support page for Service Discontinuation: Nintendo eShop for Nintendo 3DS. And if you try to access a page on the Wii U or 3DS eShop, it'll say it's unavailable for purchase. If you try to access a game's in-product online store, depending on the game it'll say it couldn't find any products or no products are available for purchase. Even the “My Nintendo 3DS & Wii U Memories” website no longer exists, despite it featuring on Nintendo's question and answer page on this topic.

Maybe I can still get Kirby Triple Deluxe physically.
Or never and I can be satisfied with that, since I had nine years to get it but chose not to.

It's not all bad news with no silver lining. At least one free-to-play game, Rusty's Real Deal Baseball, lets you get to the game's story ending after the 3DS eShop has shut down. This assumes you downloaded the game before it shut down, since you can't download it now. The plot of the game is that Rusty, a married father of ten pups, runs a baseball-themed sports shop of minigames, but his wife has apparently left him and his shop is falling apart. You could pay a maximum of $40 on his ten games, but you could haggle him and get discounts down to a total price of $16 for the games. That's real money for his in-game wares.

While I can't play the games, I can at least advance the story. (Which is spoiled if you keep reading.)

Rusty's Real Deal Baseball doesn't have a good story, and I can't tell you if it has good gameplay because I never actually bought the games. But today I did get to the “end” of the game after having never bought anything for the past many years. It turns out that Rusty's wife isn't gone forever and is coming back, but the kids destroy the shop by ramming his truck into the building. He rents out the sports store to someone else, who turns out to be his wife, who cleans up the shop to sell snacks, and it's all happily ever after. It makes as much sense as I made it out to be, which is that it doesn't make sense.

I didn't (and couldn't) pay for the minigames, but I can still advance through the story.
You're supposed to use this wig when haggling with Rusty to get him to lower his price on a game, but I didn't bother.
That said, the haggling process is where a lot of the game's dialogue and lore(?) comes into play, but I wanted to pump Rusty with as much fake money as I could.
He's shocked by me actually “paying” him full price.

It's thanks to my repeated purchases (as their best and arguably only customer) that Rusty and his family could make a living and come back from the brink of calamity. Back when the 3DS eShop was around, this “gameplay” (of spending your real money) and story were integrated, but now that the eShop has shut down and I can do this for free, the storyline has a much more twisted interpretation. It's basically the equivalent of if I bought everything in Rusty's shop on a credit card and then charged it back (without returning anything), but Rusty had already made his own purchases and renovations based on that credit exchange. Since he didn't operate on a cash basis, his whole world is going to come crashing down. Fortunately for my conscience, I don't plan to turn on Rusty's Real Deal Baseball and encounter Rusty ever again. He ultimately admitted to running out of things to talk about with me, anyway.

Rusty funded the golden statue by me not actually buying anything he sold.
Is this really a happy ending?

If you happened to buy Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon on the 3DS, Ludwig would love to rescue you if you get in trouble. And if you downloaded Team Kirby Clash Deluxe, you can't buy Gem Apples anymore, so you should read this guide on how to use the ones you can get efficiently.