It makes for a familiar but still unique experience. Most are updated versions of classics, with Dragon Quest V being the pick of the bunch, but Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies stands out as not only was it created specifically for the Nintendo DS but it also adds a multiplayer twist to the series.
Whether played with three other friends or solo, Dragon Quest IX is a charming epic that tells the comforting tale of good overcoming evil. Boasting an untouchable soundtrack and an art style that oozes personality from its Shibuya environments and likable characters, The World Ends With You follows Neku, a loner who finds himself having to compete in a life or death game.
The World Ends With You's combat system takes some getting used to but makes fantastic use of the DS's dual screens and, more importantly, complements the story's themes. Mark Sammut grew up on the PlayStation 1 and has been playing games ever since, although he is no longer limited to just Sony consoles.
Be it RPGs, shooters, platformers, or racing games, Mark's area of expertise covers a wide range of genres and topics. That goes beyond video games as well, extending to mediums like anime and western cinema. Share Share Tweet Email. Related Topics Lists Final Fantasy nintendo ds.
Mark Sammut Articles Published. Read Next in gaming. Ni no Kuni: Dominion of the Dark Djinn released in This is a bit of a cheat, but is too cool of a concept to pass up. In this case this game came first and was remade into the PS3 edition.
The biggest difference between the two is the magic book. Both the game and book have been translated by fans. Tristan Jurkovich began his career as a journalist in Secretly he enjoys the Just Dance series a little too much.
No matter what games women play, we get told to play something else. Share Share Tweet Email. Related Topics Lists Nintendo nintendo ds.
Tristan Jurkovich Articles Published. In addition, the massive world of Brimthule and its unique inhabitants are rendered in detailed 3D graphics that help bring the adventure to life. User Score: tbd. The latest iteration of Yu-Gi-Oh! Players now have 3, cards, including cards from the Absolute Powerforce series, to compete against friends or players worldwide via Wi-Fi connection.
New features allow players to battle for the ultimate bragging rights by viewing leaderboards including their last 20 battles or using the new Wi-Fi ranking system to track win percentages against other duelists worldwide by elevating and decreasing their ranking based on the strength of opponents.
With 3, cards, players can utilize the new Duelist Calculator to help quickly and accurately calculate attack and defense points while battling opponents! In addition, the Turbo Dueling, race mechanics have been enhanced to include obstacles, puzzles, hidden pathways and increased collection points.
Once upon a time, there was a lazy girl named Annie. To straighten her up, her Grandfather sent her over to an island where a development project was beginning. Annie must participate by using alchemy, which she's never tried before.
What kind of life will she face on Sera Island!? User Score: 6. The Story So Far: When a strange girl hands Ernesto, the young prince of Valencia, a mysterious sword and tells him to save his friends, he thinks nothing of using the magical blade to fight off an undead attack.
Little does he know that such a small choice will spark a war that will rage across the continent of Yulamecca and beyond. Command your forces into one of several formations, each with its own strengths and weaknesses.
Harness The Power of The Einherjar! Ad-Hoc Goodness! Using the power of ad-hoc wireless connectivity you can trade items with your friends, rent out your heroes to aid friends in need, or battle them for fame and glory. Create An Unstoppable Army. Equip different weapons to change the class, abilities, and appearance of your soldiers! Choose wisely to unlock the legendary secret class. Choose from several modes and get ready for battle.
While the rules are simple, strategy is the key to victory. Broadband Internet access is required for online play.
User Score: 5. In this exclusive storyline, exciting details are revealed about the BLEACH universe from before the start of the anime series. The story highlights the close partnership between two fraternal twin Soul Reapers, Matsuri Kudo and her brother Fujimaru. In fierce battles.
For the first time, players create and command their own team of eight Soul Reapers. Developed exclusively for the Nintendo DS. Gamers choose between two playable lead characters for two unique gameplay experiences with over 30 hours of gameplay in Story mode alone.
Team-based Gameplay. For the first time in the series players create and command their own team of eight Soul Reapers. Tactical Turn-based Campaigns. There are over 50 characters that can be selected to join in battles, each with their own special attacks and some with Bankai. The game also contains a wireless multiplayer mode for two players. User Score: 7. Tokyo is in full lockdown, the government's swift, coldblooded response to a surprise demon invasion.
Trapped within the sprawling metropolis is the city's helpless populace, forced to turn on each other in order to survive. A mysterious piece of technology, the COMP, falls into the hands of you and your peers. This device allows you to form contracts, forcing demons to serve you in battle against the otherworldly creatures. There are others with COMPs, so-called demon tamers, who seek to use the demons to satisfy their own whims-be they for justice, peace, or power-in the chaos that was once downtown Tokyo.
Where did the demons come from? Why did they appear? Who created the COMPs, and what is their purpose? These questions must soon be answered, for if you fail to solve the mystery, much more is at stake than your own lives.
Jagged Alliance is an explosive fusion of role-playing game and turn-based tactical combat, allowing players to become fully immersed in their characters.
A new generation of gamers is be charged with liberating the Island of Metavira through the nonlinear gameplay that made the original so popular amongst gamers. In Yu-Gi-Oh! The title features multiple gameplay modes including Story Mode, where players journey from Satellite to Neo Domino City and duel with characters from the animated series in various situations.
Offering more playable cards than any other Yu-Gi-Oh! World Championship title, Yu-Gi-Oh! Take on the role of an Emperor, and guide your fledgling nation to greatness. You are destined to become the ruler of the known world, but you'll have to employ subtle diplomacy, economic might, and the sword to topple competing governments and tribes. Capture cities, build buildings, and collect resources strategically to raise the strongest army.
Oversee battles with hundreds of troops, like the famed legionairres. This game of strategic action developed by Abylight is taking us to control Unit 77,? The mysterious disappearance of some celebrities and politicians around the world is only the tip of an iceberg of a terrible terrorist threat.
Only Unit 77 seems to be capable to stop the conspiracy. Now, the destiny of millions of people is relies on them. The third entry in the Valkyrie Profile series. Wylfred was but a boy when the valkyrie claimed his father's soul and sealed his family's fate. It's a detailed RPG, with a deep sword fighting system, hunger and thirst systems, crafting and more than a dozen equipment slots to fill with meticulously modeled gear inspired by the raiments of the time.
It's also surprisingly open-ended. If you want to wander into the woods and pick mushrooms for meagre coin then off you go, just be careful of bandits as you explore the pretty rural locales. It's by no means perfect—there are plenty of bugs and wonky moments—but this is an RPG in the Elder Scrolls vein. A few bugs can be excused when the wider experience is this atmospheric. Grim Dawn is a gritty, well-made action RPG with strong classes and a pretty world full of monsters to slay in their droves.
Like its cousin, Grim Dawn lets you pick two classes and share your upgrade points between two skill trees. This hybrid progression system creates plenty of scope for theorycrafting, and the skills are exciting to use—an essential prerequisite for games that rely so heavily on combat encounters. The local demons and warlords that terrorize each portion of the world are well sketched out in the scrolling text NPC dialogue and found journals.
Release date: Developer: Square Enix Steam. The smartest Final Fantasy game finally got a PC port in The game can't render the sort of streaming open worlds we're used to these days, but the art still looks great, and the gambit system is still one of the most fun party development systems in RPG history.
Gambits let you program party members with a hierarchy of commands that they automatically follow in fights. You're free to build any character in any direction you wish. You can turn the street urchin Vaan into a broadsword-wielding combat specialist or a elemental wizard. The port even includes a fast-forward mode that make the grinding painless.
We loved the original Legend of Grimrock and the way it embraced the old Dungeon Master model of making your party—mostly a collection of stats—explore the world one square at a time.
The one drawback is that it was too literal of a dungeon crawler. The enemies might change, but for the most part you kept trudging down what seemed like the same series of corridors until the game's end. The sequel, though, focuses on both the dank dungeons and the bright, open world above, resulting in a nostalgic romp that's immensely enjoyable and filled with even deadlier enemies and more challenging puzzles.
As with the first outing, much of its power springs from the element of surprise. One moment you'll be merrily hacking through enemies with ease, and the next you might find yourself face-to-face with an unkillable demon. And then you'll run, and you discover that there are sometimes almost as many thrills in flight as in the fight.
Release date: Developer: tobyfox Humble Store , Steam. Play only the first 20 minutes, and Undertale might seem like yet another JRPG tribute game, all inside jokes about Earthbound and Final Fantasy coated with bright sugary humor and endearingly ugly graphics.
But take it as a whole and find out that it isn't all bright and sugary after all , and it's an inventive, heartfelt game. It's a little unsettling how slyly it watches us, remembering little things and using our preconceptions about RPGs to surprise and mortify and comfort. Undertale certainly sticks out among all these cRPGs, but looking past its bullet hell-style combat and disregard for things like leveling and skill trees, it's got what counts: great storytelling and respect for player decisions.
It isn't quite the accomplishment of its cousin, Pillars of Eternity, but Tyranny's premise sets it apart from other RPGs.
Playing as an agent of evil could've been expressed with pure, bland sadism, but instead Tyranny focuses on the coldness of bureaucracy and ideological positioning. As a 'Fatebinder' faithful to conqueror Kyros the Overlord—yep, sounds evil—you're tasked with mediating talks between her bickering armies and engaging with rebels who fight despite obvious doom, choosing when to sympathize with them and when to eradicate them, most of the time striking a nasty compromise that balances cruelty and political positioning.
The latter is achieved through a complex reputation system that, unlike many other morality meters, allows fear and loyalty to coexist with companions and factions. As with Pillars, Tyranny's pauseable realtime combat and isometric fantasy world are a throwback to classic cRPGs, but not as a vehicle for nostalgia—it feels more like the genre had simply been hibernating, waiting for the right time to reemerge with all the creativity it had before.
This excellent free-to-play action RPG is heaven for players that enjoy stewing over builds to construct the most effective killing machine possible. As you plough through enemies and level up, you travel across this huge board, tailoring your character a little with each upgrade. Gear customization is equally detailed.
Every piece of armor has an arrangement of slots that take magic gems. These gems confer stat bonuses and bonus adjacency effects when set in the right formations. You might begin Darkest Dungeon as you would an XCOM campaign: assembling a team of warriors that you've thoughtfully named, decorated, and upgraded for battle.
How naive! Inevitably, your favorite highwayman gets syphilis. Your healer turns masochistic, and actually begins damaging herself each turn. Your plague doctor gets greedy, and begins siphoning loot during each dungeon run. A few hours into the campaign, your precious heroes become deeply flawed tools that you either need to learn how to work with, or use until they break, and replace like disposable batteries.
With Lovecraft's hell as your workplace, Darkest Dungeon is about learning how to become a brutal and effective middle manager. Your heroes will be slaughtered by fishmen, cultists, demons, and foul pigmen as you push through decaying halls, but more will return to camp with tortured minds or other maladies.
Do you spend piles of gold to care for them, or put those resources toward your ultimate goal? Darkest Dungeon is a brilliant cohesion of art, sound, writing, and design. The colorful, hand-drawn horrors pop from the screen, showing their influence but never feeling derivative.
It's a hard game, but once you understand that everyone is expendable—even the vestal with kleptomania you love so much—Darkest Dungeon's brutality becomes a fantastic story-generator more than a frustration. Get those horses looking nice and crisp with the best gaming monitors available today.
There are few games that get medieval combat right, and fewer still that add a strategic, army-building component. The metagame of alliance-making, marriage, looting, and economics underpinning these battles makes Warband a satisfying game of gathering goods, enemies, and friendship. We loved BioWare's original Neverwinter Nights from and especially its expansions , but as a single-player experience, Neverwinter Nights 2 was in a class all of its own.
Whereas the original had a fairly weak main campaign that mainly seemed aimed at showing what the DM kit was capable of, Obsidian Entertainment managed to equal and arguably outdo BioWare's storytelling prowess in the sequel when it took over the helm. The whole affair brimmed with humor, and companions such as the raucous dwarf Khelgar Ironfist still have few rivals in personality nine years later. And the quality just kept coming.
Shades of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past reveal themselves in the masterful Shadow of the Betrayer expansion's focus on two halves of the same world, but Obsidian skillfully uses that familiar framework to deliver an unforgettable commentary on religion. Few games are as staunchly open-world—and unforgiving—as Gothic 2. The first time we played it, we left town in the wrong direction and immediately met monsters many levels higher than us, and died horribly.
Lesson learned.
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