Eek, Pokémon Sword And Shield Could Be Corrupting Micro SD Card Data

Literally fake news: https://www.resetera.com/threads/psa-pokemon-sword-shield-eshop-version-glitch-might-wipe-your-switchs-sd-card-up-not-actually-a-game-related-problem.153239/

This is an issue with people using hacked switches & exFAT format, has nothing to do with the game.

Whoa, this sucks. I'm tempted to hold playing it now till a patch is out.

So you can say something bad about the game here.

Another one in the pile I suppose

This game is just as lazy as Nintendo Life's reporting.

https://www.resetera.com/threads/psa-pokemon-sword-shield-eshop-version-glitch-might-wipe-your-switchs-sd-card-up-not-actually-a-game-related-problem.153239/

ONE person reported their SD Card failed and decided to blame it on the game and you run a report like this, goodbye forever.

@YourGoodFriendly I love how commenters are convinced that NL is both a paid shill for Nintendo pushing a terrible game AND trolls looking for any excuse to trash it.

Well, now I'm scared to play it.
I have the Digital copy of Shield, and use the sdcard with the format the Switch use by default since it's a 128Gb one (asume exFAT). So, i don't know what to do by now. I have a lot of games in my SD, and if the solution is to format it in FAT32, i will still have to download all my games again

@cmlobue they use affiliate links and describe criticisms as fake reviews.

I'm not trolling, and you're not a shill. Don't take my dislike of a product as an attack against you.

SSD cards fail and go corrupt all the time, what's the chances that somewhere sometime it's going to happen while someone plays Pokémon.

Hopefully the update will fix it ASAP. 🤟

@Rika_Yoshitake Just read the link you posted, it seems to imply that the issue could occur with any SD card above 32gb, since they could be formatted as exFAT, to support higher file sizes. In other words, it's not limited to hacked Switches, but could also affect Switches with large SD cards.

@ijortegar Allegedly, you could also disable autosave, but this seems like just enough of a hassle/risk, that I'm definitely waiting for a patch before buying.

God Pokemon you're such an a**hole these days.

probably an obvious question but how does it not affect the systems storage also?

@NotoriousWhiz there is also reports saying this occurs even with the autosave off. Other says that is an issue affecting hacked consoles. Others says that is just hate for the game. I will probably wait for an update or an official pronouncement. There is a lot of confusion for now.

There was too much data anyway, stop being entitled.

@ijortegar That's probably the smart thing to do.

This is such a clickbait-ey article.

@cmlobue What has NL done to gain any trust from it's userbase? The fact that their website is so inconsistent (as you just pointed out) should really hit it home what their motives really are.

After having kept my save data backup feature set on manual for months after Piranha Plant's Super Smash Bros. Ultimate debut, I'm all the more glad to sit this one out.

Don't worry.
It's the protection against hacking in action.
If you don't try hack, this not happen.

@Rika_Yoshitake It absolutely has to do with the game, since it's the only one known to be causing this.
To quote a poster from your link, in hopes that people won't fall for your harmful fake news:
"I'd argue saying «not a game related problem» in the thread title when Sword and Shield are specifically triggering this problem is just going to lead some people to ignore the warning and not format their SD card via a safer method. They aren't the direct cause, but something with the way these games interact with the SD card is making it happen, and it doesn't affect other Switch games. The warning needs to get out there, and people playing Sword and Shield need to know most urgently."

Is this just for the digital version or also for the cartridge version???

@Barbara001 The cartridge version doesn't use the SD card. Also it's a problem where the Switch can't handle exFAT properly.

@Barbara001 the issue has been reported with both versions, though there are more reports of it happening with the digital version.

@Dayshader wregh, ANOTHER game with which I have to wait for a patch... Hope they don't take as long as Bloodstained for it to come out (but glad I waited with that game tho, cause it's so goooooood).

Gamefreak and Nintendo paid you well for entering fake news and fake review bombardment news to protect them ha Nintendolife?I wonder what comes next.You don't have much value in people's eyes anymore, with poor quality and ridiculous reviews.Poor you.

Game Freak: We have the last laugh! Muwahahaha.

@KitChan Well. I guess i'll do that. I have 120 Gb of games in there and this looks a faster way to avoid the issue.

Hold on, let me find my surprised and shocked face

You read other video game sites about Pokemon and everything seems festive. You read Nintendo Life's articles about pokemon and you think that we are at war.

They should really teach people the difference between correlation and causation in schools.

@jump Should do that anyway, games a mess.

@ijortegar just copy everything from the sd card to your pc, format as fat32, then copy it back. make sure to show all hidden files etc

I had a similar problem across two switches with Smash (digital copy) last year and everyone thought I was crazy. I know some above said this had to do with hacks, but I'm not so sure since I've had something similar happen with another Nintendo A-list game. That's actually the reason I never touched Smash again after that...I don't want to go through another corrupt card!

Edit: Huh, that's interesting, some of the posts on that linked redit indicate you have to format the card on PC to get it out of exFAT with the issue....which sucks because I went out of my way to follow Nintendo's guidelines of frustratingly formatting in the Switch itself and NOT on the PC......

This has happened multiple times, but not specifically with one game. I just boot up the Switch and am greeted with a "The SD card has been removed, pls restart" message even though I have never removed the SD card. It's probably because of the awful Switch hardware and / or Switch OS.

@Barbara001 You really shouldn't pre-order or day 1 buy with modern games, there are ao many with problems like this and also have many bugs until they realise that it will get more sales when they fix the steaming wreckage.

@Bustacap Yes, I'm on it right now. Hope this prevent the issue from manifesting.

I only buy digital on eshop exclusive titles and have necer ran into a problem with my SD cards or data.

@cmlobue I love how commenters are convinced that NL is both a paid shill for Nintendo pushing a terrible game AND trolls looking for any excuse to trash it.

Kinda like how some people love a game (or movie) and some people hate it. Happens every day. Not unusual at all.

@Jayofmaya I remember the old days when games couldn't get updates and they needed to FINISH a game and have test team and bug report team and everything before they put it out there.... Aaah the good old days (still wounded up with trash games, but, they were finished 😝)

@Barbara001 That is true. I wonder if the technology and advancements that are available now, if it's easier to code or harder than back then.

Piranha Plant Part 2

I put the game in my Switch and hit play and my Switch exploded! I am fine though because my fur is blast resistant but my poor Switch is brokeadid. Hehe

I clicked on the hello kitty review so I thought I click here

"So I hacked the game and got corrupted data, lemme blame it on the game itself." - this person apparently

@Xylnox it's both. Coding in general has evolved and become more accessible. However, we don't really settle for simple stuff, consumer products and gaming software get consistently more advanced and complex.

In terms of older games, those still shipped with bugs and errors. The big difference is that back then you either had to ignore them or replace every cartridge.

I don't think it's an exFat issue as my 400gb microSD card is currently in exFat and I had download and play tons of games using my 400gb card not to mention also playing with physical copy as well and I had never seen a game ever crashing or completely wipe my micro SD Card clean. My version of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and Doom 2016 (two games I play the most) are completely digital (even though I also bought physical copy of those) and I play those two to this day and had not encounter a single crash or data wipe from the microSD card with my Switch.

My theory on this problem is either the game came buggy or whoever was playing it used a hacked Switch. It could also be that the game wasn't suppose to be play before the launch day yet and Nintendo is preventing people from playing it too early except the critic reviewers. Anyways I had no money to get Pokemon games this year anyways as I'm still going through the Witcher III and Dragon Quest XI S. I may eventually pick them up (alongside Trials of Mana and Doom Eternal) sometime next year using my refund money which I will get from the IRS.

This site has more bait than a Wurmple orgy.

@Eel That's good to know. I was going to say it was harder nowadays because of all graphic enhancements etc but I wasn't sure if coding was easier. My dad used to play around with basic and assembly and said it was complicated.

@retro_player_22 It's both. ExFAT will break if software does some buggy stuff. Up til now, only Homebrew made those mistakes, but Pokemon is now retail software that will trigger the firmware glitch

its happens to be only digital only though

I booted up my switch, turned on Pokemon and my tv blew up, my dog died, and I grew a beard. It’s Microsoft’s fault.

@link3710 It's not that homebrew applications made mistakes that led to corruption, it's that Nintendo's exfat driver is unbelievably bad that it causes corruption on the tiniest error, and they haven't bothered fixing it yet because until now there hadn't been any official incidents of it causing problems:
https://github.com/switchbrew/libnx/issues/161#issuecomment-419854684

@nintendoknife I mean, I was trying to simplify it down for the non-technically inclined, but yeah that.

@DFaceG_Rebooted I guess you didn't read what the first comment shared:

https://www.resetera.com/threads/psa-pokemon-sword-shield-eshop-version-glitch-might-wipe-your-switchs-sd-card-up-not-actually-a-game-related-problem.153239/

exFAT formatted cards (any card above 64GB is in exFAT format by default) are to blame. And the game bought digitally from the eShop has caused this. Without any form of hacking there. It has happened to official digital copies.

What is said in there is that some hackers found that this (problemas with exFAT formatted cards) could be the issue. Not that it has happened only to hacked games.

The defense force will blame everything on hackers, soon ExFAT will be labeled as the filesystem of hackers despite being very common as the default for high capacity SD cards.

@Barbara001 Same! I think the worst one I had as a kid was Spyro Enter the Dragonfly. Perfectly fine for the most part but I did fall through the floor 2 or 3 times. I'm sure there are a lot worse but no major games had any flaws that you could find in a normal 100% run. (Trying to find bugs and glitches is different, there are many of those from the first era of consoles)

I'm woefully uninformed. How would I know if my sd card was formatted with this exFAT file system? I've got a Sandisk 256gb.

I hate internet panics so much... it's just about impossible to figure out how big a threat any given issue actually is. It sounds like physical copy with autosave off is the best bet, but somebody will still come along and put fear in your head regardless.

@nannybuckles If you've never explicitly formatted it as FAT32 yourself, it's formatted as exFAT.

Lol beware missingno. Downloading star fox 3ds fried my sd card amd lost my data. Works now but scary stuff.

@SalvorHardin Well ExFAT is really known for being easier to corrupt than some other formats. It doesn't do any journaling so any interruptions could result in potential data loss.

I'm glad I'm not a huge fan of the series, otherwise I might have bought this game already and run into some problems. There's a lot of stuff on the SD cars I use with my Switch I don't want to lose.

Could be be using one of those faked SD Cards?

@link3710 So this is just a firmware glitch that is for some reason triggered by this game? Has this never happened with any other game?

@JayJ Not that I'm aware of. There's been a number of homebrew releases that have triggered it in the past, but this is the first retail release that's managed it based on the reports coming in. It still requires the rare combination of:

1. Your MicroSD being formatted in ExFAT
2. A digital release (presumably, though maybe a physical could if you're taking screenshots? Some people are claiming physical too but...)
and 3. The game crashing while it's messing with the SD Card.

to happen, so it's not exactly likely, or even easily replicable. Hence why there's so much confusion going around, since no one can do it on purpose.

That said, there were reports of the same thing happening in Smash with Pirahnha Plant in classic mode when it was released, but I'm not sure if it's the same glitch or not.

@link3710 Well thanks for clearing that up for me, I know how most Micro SD cards are pre-formatted in exFat these days so that had me worried, but if it's reliant upon messing with the SD card I have a hard time understanding how a physical copy could effect that. If it is that hard to replicate though it sounds like the kind of rare occurrence that isn't really worth worrying about. Hopefully they come out with a patch soon to completely remove the possibility of this happening, but knowing more about this gives me some peace of mind.

@Rika_Yoshitake This is the kind of reporting we sadly get from NL these. Over the last few years this place has gone down hill fast. The content and reporting were top quality, but now it's just clickbait after clickbait along with a billion ads on each page, and sites wonder why people block AD's.

Well, after thinking a lot, several panic attacks, being upset with Game Freak and Nintendo, and thinking a little more, I decided to free up space in the internal memory by transferring some games to the SD and download Sword again but to the internal memory, which We know it is FAT32.
In any case my hype is gone.

@JayJ @link3710 Even with a physical copy you could be affected as when you have a microSD card in the Switch, game updates automatically download to the microSD card.

@Hughesy You do know the post Rika made got debunked, right? NL's story is the correct one.

It's sad when the hate for a game is so strong, you can't even believe stuff like this. Has this happened to people? Probably, but how many? And how many will lie about so they have another reason to bash these games?

Speaking of lies, Ive played some Shield, and have yet to experience all of the bugs and technical issues people were talking about. Like Pokemon supposedly popping in and out and day/night cycles not registering.

@Grumblevolcano Well if it had an update I imagine that would be relieving as it would probably fix the issues.

@JayJ I was meaning if there was a day 1 update.

@Rika_Yoshitake exactly I knew soon as I saw exfat. this only affects hacked switches they aren’t formatted to fat32

@cmlobue this is my go to Nintendo site they gave the game an 8 while everyone publication praised it.

If users aren't following the Nintendo instructions on how to format their sd then it's the user fault. And if hacked or homebrew Switch then they the user is at fault. So unless that can be independently verified this is not trust worthy. AFAIK it is fat32 to work properly with the Switch. Also before launching the game Update it first.

Very bad news! I hope it is solved soon. By the way: The Japanese person sees the humor of it. I personally would lose my mind!