The Nintendo DS changed handheld gaming forever, but what’s a bit of a shame is that these games haven’t had the chance to change platforms and discover new players in all that time.
Elite Beat Agents
In 2005, a quirky rhythm game for the DS known as Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan was released, revolving around tapping and touching markers on the DS touch screen in beat with music. Fun! But what really elevated it was its absurd, light-hearted premise: the Ouendan are a Japanese cheer squad that shows up when someone’s in trouble, and encourages them to overcome their problems by using the power of song and dance.
Western gamers loved this concept, and Ouendan was a popular import title. This was enough to catch Nintendo’s and iNiS’s attention, and the two companies went to work on making an Americanized take: Elite Beat Agents.
Elite Beat Agents plays like Ouendan, and its primary appeal is the aesthetics and music used for western audiences. Ouendan’s manga-styled presentation was swapped for a western comic book style, the music was changed from J-Pop to popular western songs, and the Ouendan were replaced with government agents who had a similar role.
Elite Beat Agents was a critical darling in the west — and a popular import game in Japan — but sales were, in the Regginator’s words, “personally disappointing.”
While Ouendan itself received a direct sequel in Japan, the IP itself has since languished. At the very least, the franchise managed to inspire the creation of osu!, which went on to become its own rhythm behemoth in the PC space. Here’s another behemoth that’s somehow been forgotten.
Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Grimoire of the Rift
Final Fantasy Tactics on the PlayStation is one of the most beloved strategy RPGs of all time, boasting challenging tactical battles, as well as a mature plot filled with political intrigue. Obviously they’ve done nothing with the idea in years.
Square did have a winner on its hands, and followed up on it in 2003 with Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. Five years on from that, they would return to Ivalice once more with Final Fantasy Tactics A2.
Both Advance and A2 took the story in a rather different direction from the 1998 original, featuring children who are magically transported into the realm of Ivalice. Though Advance’s interpretation of Ivalice was actually a dream world, A2’s Ivalice was the real deal, with the story even being set just after the events of Final Fantasy XII, in a new region known as Jylland.
Tactics A2 retained much of the fundamentals of the subseries, with grid-based battles and an in-depth Job system. As with Tactics Advance, A2 included a law system governed by Judges, which would restrict certain actions in each battle. Failure to comply would lead to penalties like being unable to revive fallen units for the rest of the battle. Harsh, but it’s less severe than Tactics Advance, whose judges would literally send characters to jail mid-battle for breaking laws.
Though A2 didn’t quite reach the same critical heights as Advance, it remains a fantastic strategy game and one of the DS’s highlights, but again, it’s odd that Square are in no rush at all to do anything with it.
Sonic Rush
Even during the nadir of Sonic’s career in the mid to late 2000s, there were still notable bright spots, especially on handhelds. The Sonic Advance games don’t reach the same heights as the original Genesis games, but they were still solid, exciting 2D platformers in their own right. So it should be no surprise, then, that Dimps, the trilogy’s developer, returned for Sonic Rush on the Nintendo DS in 2005.
Sonic Rush retains the design philosophy of the Advance trilogy: an emphasis on exhilarating speed and visual spectacle. And as with the Advance trilogy, Rush features multiple playable characters — each with their own special abilities — as newcomer Blaze the Cat makes her debut here.
Rush’s biggest and most influential addition is the Boost mechanic. By pressing and holding Y, you’ll rocket forwards at blistering speeds, mowing down enemies in the way. Sonic games have always had ways to get bursts of speed on demand, but the boost took things to another level. It proved to be such a successful mechanic, in fact, that it formed the core of nearly every major 3D Sonic game since, starting with 2008’s Unleashed.
Sonic Rush is a bit overlooked nowadays, and it deserves a port or remaster to modern platforms — this game was far more influential to the series than time might remember.
Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time
Mario & Luigi as a sub-series has had a pretty interesting run, hasn’t it? While still being the turn-based RPG with action commands that made Superstar Saga beloved, Partners in Time gave combat some major shakeups, as your skills and spells basically come entirely from consumable items.
More importantly, and I probably should have led with this, the Bros. spend most of the game teamed up with their baby selves, who level up and have equipment just like their older counterparts.
Outside of battle, while Mario and Luigi still explore vibrant areas filled with charm and humor, the world is far less interconnected. Instead, time portals scattered throughout Peach’s Castle each lead to different, self-contained areas in the past.
Partners in Time remains one of the few entries to remain trapped on its original platform (its Wii U Virtual Console release is now impossible to access legally). While its predecessor and successor received 3DS remakes, AlphaDream sadly went bankrupt soon after the release of Bowser’s Inside Story on 3DS. Thankfully, the series lives on, and hope remains that this game will one day return. It’s been longer than 358 days.
Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days
Released in 2009, Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days focuses on the life that Roxas — Sora’s Nobody — lived before he returned to Sora at the start of Kingdom Hearts II.
Most Kingdom Hearts games are relatively linear affairs, as the protagonists go from world to world, solving problems along the way. It’s a familiar gameplay and story loop for anyone with any JRPG experience. Days, on the other hand, is a mission-based game where Roxas is sent out by Organization XIII to Disney worlds for various operations, like eliminating Heartless, conducting recon, and even occasional stealth and espionage, but nothing quite as sneaky as this.
Accompanying this shakeup is a unique grid-based progression system, where everything, including equipment, items, and even levels, are panels that must be equipped and arranged in a limited space. Outside of Kingdom Hearts Re:coded, this is the hardest the series has ever leaned into the RPG side of “action RPG”, as the panel system opens up a level of character customization not seen in other entries.
Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days, along with Re:coded, were eventually “remade” and brought to modern audiences via cutscene compilations in HD 1.5 ReMIX and 2.5 ReMIX respectively. While this did the job helping newcomers catch up for Kingdom Hearts III, the unique core gameplay loop that defined Days remains trapped on the DS to this day. A strike out for preservation.
Advance Wars: Dual Strike and Days of Ruin
These days, Intelligent Systems are known primarily for Fire Emblem, which has been doing quite well for itself. But while the studio was able to save that series from the brink of death, Advance Wars hasn’t been so lucky, with only a remake of the first two games seeing a release in 2023 thanks to WayForward.
The last proper entries from Intelligent Systems were the DS entries Dual Strike and Days of Ruin. Dual Strike, the third mainline installment, builds off of prior entries, with its narrative being a direct sequel that sees the Black Hole Army return once more.
Days of Ruin, meanwhile, follows the trend of mid to late 2000s games undergoing dark and gritty reboots. Thankfully for Intelligent Systems, this worked out a lot better critically than others’ attempts, but Days of Ruin has overall been quite forgotten as a whole.
While both games iterated on past entries by introducing new unit types and terrain, one of Dual Strike’s biggest additions is the Dual Front mechanic, where players do battle on two fronts at once, each represented by one of the DS screens and headed up by different commanding officers. Meanwhile, Days of Ruin was the first entry in the series to add full-blown online multiplayer.
Unfortunately, despite all being fantastic strategy games, Advance Wars remains in relative obscurity compared to its younger and far more successful cousin. The unfortunate timing and subsequent delay for Reboot Camp didn’t help matters, and it’s likely that these two entries will never see the sun again.
Golden Sun: Dark Dawn
You gotta love a bit of Golden Sun if you grew up with the GBA, and maybe even the DS. Camelot Software’s Golden Sun is a beloved series known for iterating on traditional RPG class systems and turn-based combat, while also featuring a plethora of puzzles to give its overworld a Zelda-lite feel.
Set in the flat world of Weyard, the first entry in the series featured a young group of heroes struggling to stop the return of a dangerous power known as Alchemy, while its sequel The Lost Age flipped the narrative and put you in the shoes of an antagonist you spent the first game chasing after.
Golden Sun: Dark Dawn doesn’t change things up much, being a continuation of what made the previous entries great. Its story is set three decades after The Lost Age, and stars the children of the previous entries’ heroes as they investigate a new phenomena known as Psyenergy Vortexes.
While Dark Dawn is a fundamentally solid RPG, it also ended on a massive cliffhanger, one we’ve not seen a continuation for in the decade since. Given that Camelot is all-in on developing Mario sports games these days, a sequel sadly seems unlikely. Despite this, Golden Sun remains beloved by its fans, some of whom would take a sequel at all costs.
If a new entry were to happen, however, a re-release of past entries, especially Dark Dawn, on modern platforms would be practically mandatory to make this series a star again.
Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies
It’s a bit hard to keep up with Dragon Quest sometimes, as it’s spread over so many platforms. Dragon Quest IX on the DS, as with other entries, stars a silent protagonist, but for the first time in the series their appearance is customizable. Your hero is a Celestrian, an angel tasked with aiding mortals in order to collect energy to feed to Yggdrasil, a mighty tree that will allow the Celestrians to enter the Realm of the Almighty.
It’s not long, however, before your hero is attacked, causing them to lose their wings and fall to earth, along with the fruits of Yggdrasil, known as Fyggs. Your journey from there revolves around retrieving the Fyggs, which, in Dragon Quest tradition, means exploring an overworld, bashing monsters in turn-based battles, and solving every town’s problems.
Dragon Quest IX is famous for its incredibly expansive post-game, which revolves around the Grotto system. Throughout the game, players can find treasure maps that lead to optional, randomly generated dungeons, each housing monsters and loot of varying power. These maps could also be traded if the game was in Sleep Mode — a hugely popular mechanic for Japanese audiences that would go on to inspire Nintendo’s StreetPass and SpotPass for the 3DS.
At over 5 million units sold worldwide, Dragon Quest IX was the most successful entry in the series prior to XI, finally giving the series a financial foothold in the west. Unfortunately, despite this, Dragon Quest IX has yet to see any sort of re-release. Given that the Dragon Quest series is now more popular worldwide than it’s ever been, perhaps the hourglass for that to happen is already…ticking? Trickling?
The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass
Phantom Hourglass is a game that sounds like it should be a gimmicky disaster, but it’s actually an imaginative and charming adventure.
Though Phantom Hourglass’s perspective and gameplay lean towards the style of the 2D Zelda entries, it stands out from the pack by making extensive use of the touch screen. Nearly all of Link’s actions, abilities, and tools depend on different stylus motions and uses.
The Wind Waker’s sailing mechanic has also been adapted for touchscreen usage, with Link now plotting a course on a sea chart that the S.S. Linebeck will follow. And this time, the ship can also be upgraded with a variety of parts, which also changes its appearance.
The biggest new addition to Phantom Hourglass has to be the Temple of the Ocean King: a dungeon with time limit and stealth mechanics that sees Link sneaking to and from safe zones, avoiding the invincible Phantoms. The titular Phantom Hourglass dictates how much time you have outside of safe zones before your health starts draining, and gets filled with more sand as you progress the story.
Sure, the Temple of the Ocean King gets repetitive, but few other Zelda games were as creative with the hardware they launched on. Given that the Switch has a touchscreen (and presumably, so will the Switch 2), a remaster or remake of this game could work as a nice follow-up after they finally give us the Wind Waker and Twilight Princess ports that everyone’s been clamoring for. It’s a mystery what they’re waiting for with those.
Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time/Darkness/Sky
Pokémon spin-offs are usually much more creative than the main series — some of them are also Pokémon Rumble U, but that’s not really the point.
None are quite as beloved however, as the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games, particularly Explorers of Time, Darkness, and Sky. The Mystery Dungeon series are roguelike dungeon crawlers with players taking a small team of Pokémon into randomly generated caves, mountains, and hollows, braving the dangers within for loot, rescue missions, and potential new recruits.
The Mystery Dungeon series at large brings more mature plots to the table, with darker themes than you’d expect from the mainline series, such as amnesia, self-sacrifice, and even mob hysteria. Explorers of Time, Darkness, and Sky take things further with a time travel plot featuring incredibly high stakes and stronger character development.
The Explorers games don’t innovate much on the gameplay front, simply expanding the dungeon crawling loop with more content, polish, and new Pokémon. It’s really the story that got the most love from developers and fans alike, filled with charming, well-developed characters and heart wrenching moments. The obligatory third version upgrade that improved on Time and Darkness, Explorers of Sky, even gave its supporting characters time in the limelight with new episodes depicting their backstories.
Outside of the remake of the Rescue Team games for the Switch, the Mystery Dungeon games seem to have been mostly forgotten by Nintendo and The Pokémon Company. A shame, as these spin-offs are among Pokémon’s best, and Explorers of Sky is regarded as the peak of the sub-series. Remake time? Or maybe they should explore a new one?
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