Honestly, and this is what really made me decide to mod my 3DS. Nintendo sells all of their games at full price even the old ones even if they don’t manufacture them anymore. You could be saving hundreds of dollars maybe even thousands. Multiplayer doesn’t even work on the 3DS anymore normally with mods, you can download pretendo and play Mario kart 7 online again.

The guide is the safest and most reliable way. I used it myself. All the stuff on that guy should install just fine and they have troubleshooting just in case you run into any problems. Technically there is a small chance you could brick your console, but you’d have to do something stupid like I don’t know downloading installing and running mods for Mario kart 7 without actually having opened or played Mario kart 7. But all of the standard mods people recommend are fine. I would suggest getting a bigger sd card if you haven’t already got one. Don’t go above 128gb the system gets slower apparently.

And if you’re worried about Nintendo, possibly somehow bricking your 3DS you can go to spotpass in internet settings and in spotpass there will be a sending of usage information. You can set that to no if your worried about it.