Nintendo Badge Arcade Receives Last Update

Nintendo Badge Arcade has rolled out its final update June 22, according to the announcement on the Nintendo Badge Arcade official Reddit.

The last update of the Nintendo Badge Arcade includes a new Warioware badge set, five new Nintendo Badge Arcade sets, 15 new Pokémon sets and nine new Pokémon Pixels sets. These will all be released on the day of the update. Later this week, one Pokémon Special Selection set and 13 Pokémon Pixel sets will be made available.

Nintendo is also offering players a special promotion of two free plays every day starting next week. Normally, players can buy plays for $1 for five plays.

The official Nintendo of America Twitter account tweeted that the Nintendo Badge Arcade has reached its maximum amount of badges. Over 8,800 badges were created during the Nintendo Badge Arcade‘s lifespan according to USgamer.

Nintendo Badge Arcade was initially released in December of 2014 in Japan and November of 2015 in North America and the PAL region. Players would try to get badges through a crane machine, the same way you would get stuffed animals from a crane machine in real life. Badges collected could be used to decorate the Nintendo 3DS HOME menu and accompany a theme that can be bought in the Theme Shop, which can be found in the Change Theme menu.

Some of the badges that can be found in Nintendo Badge Arcade come from game franchises such as the Animal Crossing franchise, the Mario franchise, The Legend of Zelda franchise, the Pokémon franchise and the Splatoon franchise. The crane games rotate every day, so if players want to try to get a certain badge they would have to wait for that badge set to be rotated in.

This update came to the Japanese version of Nintendo Badge Arcade (translated to Collectible Badge Center) on May 26 of this year according to Nintendo Life. 

Nintendo Wire said that they think the North American and PAL version of the game could possibly still receive new badges until these versions would also announce the last update, after news that the Nintendo Badge Center would receive its last update in Japan. It seems as if they were correct, since it took Nintendo another month to roll out the last update.

It seems that players will still be able to download the Nintendo Badge Arcade app from the Nintendo eShop for now, according to the Nintendo Badge Arcade‘s official website. If players are new to the app, they will receive five free plays before they’re asked to purchase more. Also, during special occasions, Nintendo will offer players several plays for free.

It always sucks to see a collector franchise end its run. Although I didn’t use the application much, other players may have taken the time to try to collect each badge from each set and devoting a lot of time and money to the process. Also, they could potentially make your Nintendo 3DS HOME menu a lot cooler than the plain background Nintendo already offers (though it seems that Nintendo will continue to make themes for the Nintendo 3DS, so players don’t have too much to worry about in terms of customization).

The Nintendo Badge Arcade will release its final set of badges and the special two free plays promotion next week. This is the end of a small (the app lasted two and a half years in Japan, one and a half years in North America and the PAL region) era for the Nintendo 3DS system. I wonder if Nintendo will plan to have some sort of customization for the Nintendo Switch to the extent of the Nintendo Badge Arcade for the Nintendo 3DS.