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Daily top 3

Best Nintendo 3DS games

Updated: 31.08.2026

This ranking comes from the answers players enter in the NintenDoku puzzle. The more often a game is chosen as a correct answer, the higher it ranks.

198 games in this category, 176 of them with entries.

1Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS+4 % vs. rank 2

The mix of Action and Fighting arrived on September 13, 2014 first in Japan for Nintendo 3DS. The title can also be played with others. On Metacritic it holds a Metascore of 92, with a user score of 8.8. Critics and community agree, rating it excellent. There is no fixed ending, the game is designed for endless play. At The Game Awards 2014 it was nominated for Best Fighting Game, plus one more category. It is played in a side view. Bandai Namco served as the primary developer. The game supports amiibo and offers optional in-game purchases. Approximately 9.65 million copies were sold worldwide, a commercially very successful title. Among NintenDoku players it tops the field among games for Nintendo 3DS and sits 4 percent ahead of #2.

2Fire Emblem: Awakening+11 % vs. rank 3

The mix of Strategy, RPG and Turn-Based was released on April 19, 2012 first in Japan for Nintendo 3DS. According to HowLongToBeat, the single-player main story takes around 30.7 hours on average, which makes it a long, meaty game. The game world is shown from a third-person perspective and in a top-down view. Critics awarded a Metascore of 92, the community a user score of 9.0. Critics and community agree, rating it excellent. Intelligent Systems served as the primary developer. Beyond the single player mode there is a multiplayer mode. The game offers optional in-game purchases. Approximately 2.37 million copies were sold worldwide, a strong sales result. Among NintenDoku players it takes second place among games for Nintendo 3DS and sits 11 percent ahead of #3.

3Fire Emblem Fates (Dual Paths)+85 % vs. rank 4

The mix of Strategy, RPG and Turn-Based launched on June 25, 2015 first in Japan for Nintendo 3DS. The game world is shown in a top-down view. It was primarily developed by Intelligent Systems. Beyond the single player mode there is a multiplayer mode. The main story takes around 26 hours on average according to HowLongToBeat (single-player), so a medium-length game. The title was released as a dual version in multiple parallel editions, supports amiibo and offers optional in-game purchases. About 3.05 million copies were sold worldwide, a strong sales result. At The Game Awards 2016 it was nominated for Best Mobile/Handheld Game, plus 2 more categories. On Metacritic it holds a Metascore of 88, with a user score of 7.7. Critically that counts as good, among players as mediocre. The press rates it noticeably higher than players. It rounds out the top 3 and sits 85 percent ahead of #4.

More rankings in the Platforms groupSee all rankings

The 3DS and the end of the dedicated handheld

The Nintendo 3DS launched badly in 2011. The price was too high, the launch line-up thin, and Nintendo cut the price sharply within months, something the company rarely does. What followed was one of the densest software libraries any Nintendo platform has had. Almost every major series got an entry, and a good number of them still rank among the best reviewed instalments in their line.

In hindsight the 3DS is above all a final chapter. It closed a separate handheld lineage that began with the Game Boy in 1989. From the Switch onwards there was no distinct portable library any more. Many series therefore have their last dedicated portable entry on 3DS, and a few design ideas built around short sessions and hardware you carry around simply stopped existing afterwards.

The feature the system was named for, glasses-free stereoscopic 3D, matters almost not at all to this ranking. Most of the best known titles work just as well with the effect switched off, and later hardware revisions dropped it entirely. Far more formative was StreetPass, the passive data exchange between devices carried past one another. It carried several titles, but it is hard to appreciate today, because it depended on a density of devices in motion that no longer exists.

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Where the Data Comes From

In the Nintendo puzzle NintenDoku, players enter game titles matching given categories every day. Every correct answer is counted. Only the top 3 and the percentage gaps are shown on purpose, no absolute numbers. This keeps the puzzle fair.