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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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Collection essentials #596-602: Ace Attorney series (DS)

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A new record for most games covered in a single post! The reason why I’m lumping so many of them together is because these posts are spoiler-free, so I can only talk about these story-heavy games at a surface level. Made by the legendary developer Capcom, the Ace Attorney games are often described as “visual novel adventure” titles, somewhat related to the old-school “point and click adventure” genre that was popular among ‘90s computer games. In these games, there’s no fast-paced actions to speak of and reflexes of the player are never tested. In fact, gameplay is arguably not the main focus, as the story and characters are the biggest selling points. As these games involve solving mysteries, players must choose where to go, who to talk to and what to examine in the environment in order to advance the story. And then, there are courtroom scenes in which players must effectively use the evidence they have as well as witness testimonies to prove their case in court. The first three Ace ...
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Collection essentials #592-595: Nintendo DS, Nintendo DS Lite, Nintendo DSi & Nintendo DSi XL

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Nintendo’s Game Boy utterly dominated the handheld gaming scene for well over a decade, starting in 1989. Perhaps because of its success, and also perhaps for the sake of low prices, in the latter part of that time Game Boy devices were able to get away with being rather underpowered. The original Game Boy launched with roughly comparable specs to Nintendo’s primary home console at the time, the NES. But as home console technology rapidly improved, the power of Game Boy machines increased at a much slower rate. NES and Game Boy were both 8-bit machines, but 1998’s Game Boy Color (despite some improvements) was still only 8 bits while Nintendo’s current console had jumped all the way up to 64. The Game Boy Advance in 2001 was noticeably more powerful, but it was still more or less comparable to the power of a Super Nintendo, which was a machine that was only really a year older than the original Game Boy.  A big change was due for the handheld market. 2004 is the year when it would ...
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