Skip to main content

Solve crimes adorably when ‘Detective Pikachu’ launches this March

Detective Pikachu: Get Ready to Crack the Case! - Nintendo 3DS

The Nintendo Switch is the talk of the town, but we shouldn’t count out the 3DS quite yet. The aging handheld still has plenty of great games on the horizon, and perhaps none are more adorable than Detective Pikachu. The game is only a month away, and Nintendo has released a new trailer showing off the little Pokémon’s crime-solving skills.

“It’s been two months since my dad disappeared,” human sidekick Tim Goodman says in the trailer. “I came here to Ryme city to start looking for clues.”

Pikachu is more than up to the challenge of finding Tim’s father, Harry, as well as investigating the strange behavior of Pokémon — and whether or not it’s all linked to the powerful Mewtwo. His voice is much deeper than we’re used to, for comedic effect, and he speaks in full sentences. It’s surreal, but that’s exactly what we want out of a game with a premise this ridiculous.

Detective Pikachu combines adventure gameplay with puzzle solving, which we get a taste of in the trailer. Pikachu and Tim are tasked with finishing a mural of Charizard as well as reaching a high-up ledge. But the real fun comes when Pikachu begins questioning persons of interest. Both Pokémon and humans can be interrogated, but you might not like what you discover. In the trailer, Pikachu looks under the mysterious Mimikyu’s cloth shroud, only to scream in horror.

The Detective Pikachu game isn’t the only crime-solving Pokémon title in the works. It’s also being turned into a movie starring Ryan Reynolds, who will both voice and provide motion capture for the character. An online petition had been started to get veteran character actor Danny DeVito to play the role, but DeVito wasn’t interested and admitted he didn’t know what Pokémon was.

A full-fledged Pokémon role-playing game is also in the works for Nintendo Switch. Nintendo has kept fans in the dark about the project so far, but we expect to hear more at E3 this June.

Detective Pikachu launches exclusively for the Nintendo 3DS on March 23. An Amiibo figure is being released alongside the game, featuring Pikachu in his deerstalker cap. Using it will allow you to access special cutscenes more quickly.

Editors' Recommendations

Gabe Gurwin
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Gabe Gurwin has been playing games since 1997, beginning with the N64 and the Super Nintendo. He began his journalism career…
Nintendo’s Wii Shop Channel and DSi shops are back online
Nintendo 3DS close-up.

After months of service outages, Nintendo's Wii Shop Channel and DSi Shop are back online.

Nintendo's two virtual marketplace services went down in March of this year. In a statement to Kotaku on the outage, Nintendo acknowledged the downtime but had nothing to report other than that the shops were undergoing maintenance and that it would provide updates on them at a later date. It seems it completely skipped the update and simply put both back online instead.

Read more
The 25 best Nintendo 3DS games
Nintendo 3DS close-up.

If you're looking for the best Nintendo 3DS games, there's no shortage of titles to choose from, thanks to the console's long life cycle.

The 3DS has enjoyed several updates over the years, but each was compatible with its predecessor, and that translates to a large and diverse library. It's getting increasingly tough to find a 3DS, especially since Nintendo has officially discontinued the console and no longer supports it to focus on releasing Switch games. Even so, the legacy of the 3DS lives on with a long list of excellent, pocket-sized adventures. Here are our favorite ones.

Read more
Nintendo’s eShop closures are a necessary, but messy move
A Nintendo Wii U gamepad flat on a table.

Nintendo last week announced its intentions to shut down the Wii U and 3DS eShops, the systems' digital storefronts, in March 2023. This decision was disappointing for hardcore fans who stuck with Nintendo during that rocky era and extremely worrying as many of the games available on the platforms won't be preserved.
More significant Wii U games and a handful of 3DS titles were ported to Switch, but many titles are still stuck on those systems and can’t be ported. Once the digital storefront shutdowns, digital-only titles will be gone forever, and physical copies of these titles will get more expensive and harder to experience. Fans and game preservationists have not been pleased by this decision, with the Video Game History Foundation giving the most candid response.
https://twitter.com/GameHistoryOrg/status/1494398068346654720
Following this announcement, Digital Trends spoke to an industry analyst and game preservationists to get a better idea of what exactly caused Nintendo to shut down these stores and to learn how it could do a better job at preserving its legacy.
Why is Nintendo shutting down the 3DS and Wii eShops?
Officially, Nintendo’s FAQ on the eShop closures says “this is part of the natural life cycle for any product line as it becomes less used by consumers over time." The answer doesn’t get into specifics and might confuse those still playing games on the system or fans of games only available on Wii U or 3DS. Omdia Principal Analyst Matthew Bailey explains Nintendo’s user base argument in more detail, highlighting the massive gap between the number of people playing the Switch as opposed to the Wii U.
“While Omdia expects the number of Switch consoles in active use to exceed 90 million on a global basis this year, the Wii U’s global active installed base will drop under one million in 2022,” he explains. “Even when you include the more enduring 3DS family of consoles into the equation, the Switch still comfortably accounts for over 90% of Nintendo’s total active console install base.”
If one is going off just the numbers, it’s sensible that Nintendo would want to focus on the majority of its players. Bailey admits that “Switch users are already reaping the benefits of Nintendo’s singular first-party development focus on one platform.” Still, one might argue that Nintendo should just let the eShops remain up even if it isn’t actively updating or maintaining them.

Unfortunately, Nintendo doesn’t see that as possible due to cost and security issues. Game Over Thrity, a Twitter user with over 20 years of experience working on IT projects and infrastructure, shed some light on what might have influenced Nintendo’s decision-making in a thread.
“As these systems age, they require patches, security, special contracts, updates, and personnel that know how they were built (and maintained),” his Twitter thread explains. “As time goes on, there are security holes, servers, code, infrastructure, etc., that can’t be brought up to modern standards. It becomes a constant struggle between maintaining legacy systems, paying people to do so, and trying to keep up with global regulations. It’s not cheap by any means. They can’t just ‘leave the lights on’ and stop supporting them. What if someone hacked the payment processor?”
With every passing year, the Wii U and 3DS eShops likely became more expensive to maintain and an increased security risk for the video game publisher. Instead of investing the time and resources into pleasing a smaller amount of players, the easier option is to turn everything off entirely. While he isn’t affiliated with Nintendo, Game Over Thirty’s assessment aligns with what we’ve heard from Nintendo and Omdia.
"The Wii U’s global active installed base will drop under one million in 2022."

Read more