Cynthia Whitty 
Why wiping save data? [top] There are many reasons why you’d want to delete all your in game saves, but mostly because of a corrupted save. Corruption is a very common issue with 3DS games and this also happens a lot in Pokemon X/Y. Sometimes while playing you’ll encounter freezes, weird behaviors or the game crashing. Sadly, while some of these issues can be fixed by hard modding your console, save data corruption cannot be reverted without deleting all your in-game progress. In this case, the only way to fix your corrupted save is by deleting it and starting a new game.
Why using a red card?
[top] Nintendo’s official site states that you should never use any accessory on your console except for an official one from Nintendo . But there are hardware addons like Action Replay out there that don’t void your warranty and can be used legally. Also, they’re a really helpful tool if you’re a cheater who just wants to go straight for the big guns right from the beginning of your adventure. Or maybe you want to find out if something is going on with your save data before spending hours upon hours playing only to find out that the game has become unbeatable. You can “wipe” your save data with a red card, but it will also wipe all your 3DS system settings files. But if you don’t care about those and just want to fix your corrupted save data you should follow these procedures below:
Procedure to wipe corrupt save data with a red card
[top] Requirements: – A Nintendo 3DS with Pokemon X/Y – An Action Replay DSi – A MicroSD card (you can buy one here )
– A computer or a laptop capable of running Windows XP or a more recent version of the operating system. Important note: If you have a Mac or Linux you will need to use VirtualBox and Windows XP/Vista/7 on it, but this is out of the scope of this article. Procedure:
- Download Action Replay DSi from Nintendo’s official site . You will end up with a file like an RAR archive that ends in “.zip” (a ZIP file). Extract the content of the archive into a folder on your PC. We will call this folder “ARPlus”.
- Download Pokemon X/Y from the eShop and launch it at least once in order to create a save file with some progress on it.
- Place your SD card into your computer and make sure you can see it in Windows Explorer (this usually happens automatically). Also make sure it has enough free space to hold an additional copy of your Pokemon save data. Mine has almost 50GB of free space and I still keep getting this error message , which means that you have more than enough space on your SD card for this procedure.
- Open a new file on your PC and paste all the content that you got by extracting the Action Replay archive into it. This will create a new folder called “ARPlus”, open it and then open another new file inside this one.
- Now, copy your Pokemon X/Y save data from your SD card to your computer.
Paste your save data inside the “ARPlus” folder. This will create a file called boot.dat, open it with Windows Explorer and copy its content. Important note: Keep track of where you place your Pokemon save data, you might need it later if something goes wrong.
Delete all the save files from your SD card that you got from launching Pokemon X/Y at least once. Also delete the save file from ARPlus on your PC. Remember to keep a backup of these files in case something goes wrong!
About Author
