UPDATE ON WASABI:

Fans of Wasabi can breathe easy.  It seems that Wasabi is no longer in imminent danger of being destroyed!  I did a bit of research on my game loading slowly, and saw that I wasn’t the only one experiencing similar problems.  I was reading some different forums, and many suggested that perhaps the SD card was to blame.  I investigated this a bit, by playing some of the other apps and software that I have stored on my JP3DS’ SD card.  Every other game I tried ran fine, and there were no more issues regarding the A button acting strange.  I determined that it couldn’t be the SD card.  (For the record, I’m using a Lexar 4GB SD Card.)

More research turned up this forum thread, which was very interesting.  The original thread creator describes that he is facing a problem that is almost identical to mine, only my game wasn’t crashing, just taking a long time to load.  This poster describes how it could be a digital software issue, an SD card issue, and then there was one more factor that he described in his thread:

Wow, just wow… My town crashed for the sixth time today, 3 days after I formatted that SD card into FAT32. When it happened, I was playing online with two other players in my town with the “Best Friends” function activated and my town has quite a lot of bushes, flowers, trees, and whatnot… Most of the other towns I visited are usually less jam-packed than I do. It might be due of the complexity of my town for raising the crash rate over time.

This post got me thinking about Wasabi.  What was different about Wasabi as of late that would cause it to act differently than it had in the past year?  Ohhh right… Wasabi was completely overrun with bamboo at this time.  Then I started thinking about how Animal Crossing save files have been notoriously large (remember how you needed an entire dedicated save cart to run AC: Game Cube?) and maybe all that bamboo (plus everything that comes with bamboo, such as new spawned shoots/cracks every few days, loads of rotten shoots that didn’t have the room to grow into real bamboo, which I hadn’t been shoveling up) was causing the load time to slow.  Think about it, the game has to render all of the townies, houses, flowers, bushes, public works, your full catalog… and now I was forcing it to render hundreds of bamboo stalks, shoots, cracks and rotten shoots all over my town.  It sounded like a VERY plausible cause.

So I did what any reasonable person would do.  I grabbed my golden axe and went on a rampage chopping down all the bamboo!  I left all of the bamboo stumps because they look pretty cool, like wierd mini warp pipes or something.  Guess what?  It seems to have done the trick!  As soon as I saved Wasabi with it’s new “bamboo stump” style, the game loaded up much more quickly!  What a relief!

My advice: While it’s awesome and fun to decorate your town with all of these new features like shrubs and bamboo and public works, remember that aesthetically (and apparently from a coding perspective) less is more.  You don’t need to have something in every single square inch of your town.  In fact, doing so seems to kill your game!  I don’t know if anyone had the same issues with a cartridge, but at least if you have a digital download, use caution!  But personally I think it was the living bamboo with all of the spawning and rotten shoots that was the main issue in my game.

Having said all of that, the good news is that the Setsubun Festival is ON!  If you are still interested in participating in the festival, which I will have open in Wasabi on Monday 2/3 from 9PM-11PM EST, please visit the event page here:

https://www.facebook.com/events/1461491234064525/

The main reason I ask you to RSVP on the event page is so that I know how many to expect.  If I don’t have it already, please comment on the event page with your friend code so that I can add you to my system.  I will also be trying out a new format for this JP event.  Using the StreetPass Long Island Twitch Channel, I will be streaming this event live on the internet.  Hopefully this will make it easier for people to see who is coming and going, and when they should pop in.  Our Twitch channel also has a chat room, so hopefully the power combo of a live stream AND a chat room will make the experience a little smoother for everyone.  Keep in mind that the chat room on Twitch is not compatible with iOS, so you’ll want to be on a real computer to participate in that way.

Hope to see you all there!  Fingers crossed that we won’t have any more loading problems in Wasabi!