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Collection essentials #610: Ghost Trick (DS)

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I already talked not long ago about the greatness of the Ace Attorney series. After creating the original Ace Attorney trilogy, the creator of the series wanted to work on a different kind of project. This new game would still be very story-driven and all about mystery like Ace Attorney, but the gameplay would be entirely different, feeling much more like a video game than something akin to an interactive graphic novel like Ace Attorney. The result was Ghost Trick, which hit the DS in 2010 in Japan and 2011 in the rest of the world. At the start of the game, the main character narrates and introduces you to a rather distressing opening scene. You see, this main character has just died. They identify themselves as a corpse laying face-first on the ground, a guy wearing a red suit and shades with a spiky yellow hairdo. There’s also a criminal with a gun at the scene pointing at a helpless young woman. Though this main character has died, apparently in this universe the dead do not simply...
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Collection essentials #609: Freshly-Picked: Tingle’s Rosy Rupeeland (DS)

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Here we have one of the oddest Legend of Zelda spinoffs out there. Tingle debuted as a character in the Nintendo 64 hit The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, as a quirky map salesman who floats with a balloon that Link must pop in order to bring him down to earth to do business. Rather than keep him as a one-off Majora’s Mask character, he started appearing in more Zelda games in different forms, such as Wind Waker and Minish Cap. Nintendo eventually decided that Tingle had enough of a following to merit his own game, and this odd one was the result. The story starts with a main character who must be named by the player, a 35-year-old man who lives alone and doesn’t seem to have much of a life. He hears a mysterious voice calling out to him, which leads him to a well outside of his house. There he meets Uncle Rupee, who promises Tingle a better life in a magical place called Rupeeland if he can simply bring enough Rupees to the pool. Uncle Rupee casts some kind of spell on him, giving hi...
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Collection essentials #607-#608: Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon (DS) and Fire Emblem: Fire Emblem: Shin Monshou no Nazo - Hikari to Kage no Eiyuu (DS)

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After the success of Fire Emblem on the Game Boy Advance, it was to be expected that we’d get more Fire Emblem on the popular new DS. But instead of sequels, Nintendo and Intelligent Systems decided to go the route of remakes. They started by remaking the very first game in the series, the one that basically introduced the strategy RPG genre as we know it. One motivation for doing so was that the first game had never been released outside Japan before. And very many gamers around the world were already familiar with the main character, Marth, since he was featured in the extremely popular Super Smash Bros. series. It was perhaps an interesting choice, because the first Fire Emblem game had already been remade once before. This was well over a decade previously, as part of the package that included the third game, on the Super Nintendo. This DS remake is its own thing and does not really take that remake into consideration at all. It brings back all the characters and stages from the or...
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Collection essentials #606: Final Fantasy III (DS)

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This is a remake of Final Fantasy III on the Famicom (Japanese NES), which I’ve already written about. You can read my past post here . In the late ‘90s, when Final Fantasy was more popular than it had ever been, Square got into the habit of porting or remaking the earlier games in the series to various platforms. It started with the three SNES titles getting ported to PlayStation. Then, a handheld console exclusive to Japan called the WonderSwan (released by Bandai and designed with the help of Game Boy creator Gunpei Yokoi) was blessed with remakes of a few retro Final Fantasy games, including enhanced versions of Final Fantasy I and II and a downgraded version of Final Fantasy IV. A remake of III was planned, but never released. The remakes of the first two games were spruced up and released on the original PlayStation in the early 2000s, but III was still left out. As the middle of the 2000s decade drew near, Final Fantasy III oddly became somewhat of a neglected, mysterious entry ...
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Collection essentials #605: Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow (DS)

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The 2000s was the time when we got the most “Metroidvania” entries in the Castlevania series by far. The three of them on the Game Boy Advance over the span of just a few years saw enough commercial and critical success to keep the trend going into the Nintendo DS era.  For their first DS Castlevania, Konami decided to give us a direct sequel to the last one on GBA, Aria of Sorrow. A more explicitly anime-style look is used this time around. The story is…well, even telling you the basic story would involve spoilers for Aria of Sorrow, which you definitely should play, so I won’t even tell you what it is, other than the fact that it takes place a year after the previous game. The sequel also retains the main distinguishing gameplay feature of AoS, that being the “Tactical Soul” system, and that’s good news. Basically, the game’s enemies have a chance to drop their “soul” upon defeat, which permanently grants the player access to some kind of equippable ability. Eventually players wi...
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Collection essentials #604: Advance Wars: Days of Ruin (DS)

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The first Advance Wars on DS had changed things up more than Advance Wars 2 had. But there were some that perhaps felt it was a bit too similar to the previous entries. And it seems that Intelligent Systems may have had those players in mind when they came up with the next entry, Days of Ruin, which does keep most of the same basic gameplay elements intact but otherwise is quite a departure in various ways from its predecessors. Despite being about war, the previous Advance Wars games didn’t take themselves very seriously. The characters looked like something out of a cartoon, the music was often upbeat, and the story had very little to relate to any sort of real-life experience of warfare. Days of Ruin flips that on its head, which is extremely obvious from the get-go. The art style is completely different, the game takes place in a ruinous post-apocalyptic world, and the general tone and vibes are nothing but serious. No characters or story elements from the previous games appear in ...
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Collection essentials #603: Advance Wars: Dual Strike (DS)

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The two Advance Wars games were among the best offerings in the GBA library. The turn-based strategy gameplay perfectly towed the line between accessibility and complexity which can be very difficult for others in the genre. You can read more about those games and how the basics of gameplay work in my previous post about them. https://samsessentials.blogspot.com/2025/09/collection-essentials-513-514-advance.html There wasn’t a whole lot to criticize about Advance Wars 2, but some may have felt that it felt a bit too much like it didn’t have as many new gameplay elements as a sequel should have. Dual Strike still retains more or less the same basics, but introduces a lot more to the formula than 2 did. For example, there was only a single brand new unit type introduced in Advance Wars 2, whereas Dual Strikes ups the ante by introducing seven!  Perhaps the most notable new gameplay feature is the ability to have a “tag team” of commanding officers. When you have a tag team, only one ...
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