before i do that wappy dog minigames thread: this is the japan-only wappy dog 3ds app! i had no idea this existed until i started looking into the history of wappy dog in more depth... let's go into a little detail about how i found it and what it does. no video embeds here so you can rest easy on your bandwidth this time lmao
i was looking into the history of sega toys, who are responsible for creating the toy, and saw this timeline graphic, which is on this sega toys page:
its a list of all the awards sega toys have won for their, well, sega toys. the main thing of note here is that it has a picture of wappy dog in the section for 2014, even though the toy was released in the us in 2011, and it's called "heart energy poochi"? hmm, i thought. searching that pointed me toward a reddit thread that mentions this as "the 3ds sequel to wappy dog" which is interesting! but it's also a lie lmao. the comments of that thread, though, mention a google doc by desktopdog01 on twitter aka segatoys on tumblr which is a fantastic resource on the toy, not just in how it works, but promotional material and the like. you should read it, it's really good! link below:
according to that document it turns out that they were distributing blue AND pink "heart energy poochi" toys (which we know in the west as wappy dog) at tokyo toy show 2014, with a download code for a 3ds app that contains the game instead of giving away a nintendo ds cart. that's what that app is! i already knew about the pink wappy dog toy but assumed it was just an option that you could get when you bought the game for the ds in japan back in 2011. i didn't realise that this was how it was distributed. interesting stuff!
anyway i went and found the cia for the app and installed it on my 3ds. i couldnt find a jp rom to check it against, which is kind of bizarre, because i couldnt find it on no intro, or any indication of it being a known to them as a missing rom, even though usa and europe wappy dog roms are in their list. do they just not know that a jp version exists? im legitimately surprised that i could find the wappy dog 3ds cia but not the jp nds rom. strange!
either way i assume it's the same as the nds jp rom since it seems very similar to the eng rom (just in japanese, obviously). below is the title screen, which looks similar to the english one but with kana instead of the latin alphabet:
from my quick look at the game it seems like most of the japanese if not all of it just uses kana instead of kanji, which makes sense given that kids are meant to be playing this thing!
though it does have one change: it has a button on the main menu that takes you to a manual, i assume since it didnt come with a physical one. the next 3 images are the wappy dog main menu with an extra button for the menu ("setsunei" in hiragana if im not mistaken), along with a photo of the manual's menu and a manual page for what i believe is travel mode (google translate says it translates to "outing mode" but obviously i dont trust it):
i wonder if this means that the toy didn't come with stickers either... there is still more to look into if i can even find that out hehe. either way this makes it one of the 7 or 8 dsiware games that are exclusive to the 3ds! what a weird little accolade for this to have. it's also weird that they were releasing new wappy dogs in 2014, 3 years after the initial toy. i wonder why they did that...
next up im gonna try to get shitty camera footage of all of the minigames over the next few days, and then after that ill be doing smaller updates since i think i will have covered most stuff by then... stay tuned!