The community of dedicated Nintendo 3DS Street Pass fans have finally found the rarest puzzle in Puzzle Swap, ANAでDS, after weeks of searching. This means that StreetPass Mii Plaza: Puzzle Swap has officially reached 100% completion for the first time since its launch 13 years ago.
Last week, we covered the group’s hunt, as for months now, the compact community of Puzzle Swap enthusiasts has been hunting down every single puzzle ever released for the Street Pass app. This includes several time- and region-limited puzzles that have become quite sporadic over the years.
By June, they had found all but one of the puzzles: a sporadic aviation-themed puzzle that had only been available at select airports in Japan for several months. The group exhausted all possible connections to find even one person who had received the puzzle back then, at which point a uncomplicated file upload allowed the group to share it with the world.
Yesterday, July 3, 2024, someone finally showed up. Community leader Benny received an email from someone containing a friend code and a zip file with the text: “I hope the information below is exactly what you’re looking for.” The community immediately got to work. While the file itself looked promising, the person who sent it first had to accept a friend request for the transfer to work. The data also had to be decrypted and saved in a usable format, which was helped out by many members of the Discord community.
Then at 4:45pm Pacific time the following entry appeared:
And a moment later:
Discord erupted. The stranger who had contacted them about their puzzle arrived on the scene, and eventually all 63 Puzzle Swap puzzles were found and archived. Over the next few hours, the group worked together to make the puzzle available to anyone on Discord who wanted it, before discussing plans to combine all 63 puzzles into one file so anyone who wanted access to them in the future could enjoy them.
Here it is, in all its glory:
If you want to solve all the puzzles yourself, you’ll need to be willing to modify your 3DS. For facilitate, we recommend finding the community behind the hunt, which has Twitter, email, and Discord everything is fine here and can facilitate. But even if access to the puzzle is only possible via mod, it remains a triumph for the preservation and archiving of the game. This is, to the group’s knowledge, the first time all 63 Puzzle Swap puzzles have been collected in one place.
What’s next? It’s challenging to say. The community first wants to make sure all the puzzles are easily accessible to anyone willing to put in the work to mod them. Then there’s been some discussion within the group about finding ways to add custom puzzles to Puzzle Swap or trying other modding feats with what the group has learned. But many are cheerful with just finishing the puzzle hunt.
“I just want to thank the team for their hard work and everyone else who has shared and promoted the search!” Benny said when asked for comment. “We are grateful for everyone’s support.”
IGN reached out to the kind stranger who sent Benny the ANA file to try to get the story behind how they picked up the puzzle and found the hunter years later, but we’ve yet to hear back. Thanks, mysterious stranger, whoever you are.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Have a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
