Folks, here if the thread for the games you didn't beat this year. For whatever reason you couldn't finish the game. Maybe it had a fatal technical flaw, or you got yourself stuck in an unwinnable, or at least unreasonably challenging, situation. Or maybe the game just lost its shine. Whatever the reason, here's the place to lament.
This year I finally had to abandon Dragon Quest VIII for 3DS. I really like this game. The localization is sound, the graphics are good, the animations are quite fantastic, and the plot feels pretty on-the-move. It's not perfect. The music can feel very PC MIDI in places and the casual Horii sexism is rampant as always. But on the whole I was having a good time playing the game and had put several months and 60 hours into the game. That was when disaster struck.
People, with the eShop closing this month (March), make sure any downloaded content on your 3DS is on a reliable SD card, and back that data up somewhere safe. My SD card died mid-save and I had to force reboot the 3DS with an error. And then everything was gone.
I really enjoy DQ8, but not enough to put in another 60 hours to get to where I was in the game. That's a bridge too far. Now I have to figure out what I'm playing next, and figure out if all my data is secure. I am adrift in a sea of gaming.
As for keeping your 3DS data safe, I've read you can just copy the data folder over to a PC, and I intend to do that. But I've also paid a little extra to get a very reliable, 5-year warrantied SD card intended for use in security systems, so it has very high write tolerance.