As I wrote a day or so ago, save data in Resident Evil: The Mercenaries for the 3DS cannot be deleted. This has caused a significant bit of stirring among gamers as the game is rather worthless for trade-in reasons.
Retailers like HMV have stated plainly they will not accept trade-ins of The Mercenaries. Gamestop had a policy of not accepting them but declined to continue and revoked the policy. EB Games Australia which has a seven-day return policy has decided to simply not stock the game at all to avoid having to deal with any problems down the line.
On Gamasutra, a quote by a Capcom rep goes as follows.
“In Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D, all mission progress is saved directly to the Nintendo 3DS cartridge, where it cannot be reset. The nature of the game invites high levels of replayability in order to improve mission scores. In addition, this feature does not remove any content available for users. Secondhand game sales were not a factor in this development decision, so we hope that all our consumers will be able to enjoy the entirety of the survival-action experiences that the game does offer.”
What a lot of crap.
Since the NES era, we have had games that could save and be reset. In the Genesis era, we had savefiles. In the PSX era, we had external memory cards that data could be saved to and erased on a whim. In these modern times, we use both on-cartridge memory, and hard drives in consoles. Saying that the data cannot be reset is a complete and utter lie, unless it was intentional. Looking at my games, I know that I can erase my save data whenever I really want to. There is zero reason to make someone unable to erase the save data. The technical issue is a deliberate one.
Capcom’s rep simply made a generic, meaningless, useless response that doesn’t answer the question everyone is asking, “Why would you do this?”. More like they deliberately avoided it. I’m fairly certain people will do everything in their power to circumvent this with homebrew, cheats, and turning off the power while it saves. As soon as a legit way crosses my screen, it’ll be right here on this site.
Rian Quenlin
This is like me posting an article as an image and saying “The text was put directly onto an image in paint.net, where it cannot be changed. I made a typo and it cannot be fixed.”
I find it very dodgy that the data can be changed but not reset. If you can change it, you can delete it. End of story.