Okay, so I just had a very, very close shave. I'd beaten the main game of an eShop-downloaded Pokemon: Y Version about a week ago, and have since been working on making some competitive online battling teams while filling in the Pokedex as a side-project. I thought I was done for the night, but one of my friends needed something, so I went to open it up.
That's when I saw this before the intro cinematic even played:
"The save game data is corrupted.
Refer to the electronic manual for details."
Natrually I was very concerned. I had no desire to just lose 220+ hours of time and effort, so I opened the manual hoping for a way to recover my corrupted data, maybe by loading a backup of my SD Card data.
The manual plainly told me that loading a backup would not restore my save game data.
This nearly made me quite literally throw my 3DS out the window in rage, but I decided to channel that anger into proving the manual wrong and searched up some fixes. Only two possibilities turned up, found on these forums:
1) Having the SD Card read by an external source (i.e. copying data from it to your computer).
2) Constantly restarting the game and praying it would jostle the game data into suddenly working again.
Now, this time things worked out; the first solution worked for me. and Pokemon Y is working just fine now. But this was still a seriously close call that could happen again at any moment, and I've seen cases on these forums that weren't so easily fixed. So I have to ask this:
Why can't we preserve and backup our save game data of Pokemon X and Y?
I know the obvious answer I'm going to get is some vein of "because of hackers and piracy", but my impression was that these were already taken care of as best as possible, hackers by the "Bad Egg" error thing and piracy by the 3DS-eShop linking. I know there are always a myriad of people trying to break these games over their knees, but to be frank, these people deserve whatever errors or lawsuits they get. The rest of us who instead play the game legally have to deal with errors like this with no way of reversing the damage other than to completely restart, and it is not at all fair, nor does it seem worth the trade-off.
Before anyone asks, the corruption that happened in my game was an entirely random event. I save often, I've never recieved a "Bad Egg", I bought the game right off of the eShop on launch day, and the closest thing I've done to cheating is save scumming when breeding Pokemon and not getting a favorable result in order to save time. This random corruption was a major eye opener to what hundreds of other people must have had happen to them also, and I'm not about to turn a blind eye even if I did fix my data.
The point is: in this day and age where info and data can be stored on nearly anything with nearly any means, hacking and piracy notwithstanding, there needs to be a reliable way for the innocent consumers to backup and recover the save data for a mere video game. Is there any way to make this possible? I'd rather not lose 220+ hours of work again and not be able to get it back this time...