Ten games and a prayer
The Nintendo DS library and I have a complicated relationship. There aren’t enough games on it I’d want to die having played. SquareEnix is methodically dismantling everything that made the Mana series worth caring about. Brain training does nothing for me. I never wanted to be a virtual lawyer, surgeon, or fisherman. So the handheld mostly sits there, waiting for something to justify carrying it on the daily subway commutes that eat my evenings.
2008 was supposed to change that. I went through the upcoming release schedule and pulled out ten titles that actually looked promising. Tales of Innocence was there—a proper JRPG with that particular brand of melodrama I have no immunity to. Dragon Quest IX, obviously, the kind of entry in a series where you already know it’s going to be good before you’ve seen anything. Final Fantasy IV was getting a full remake, which felt almost presumptuous—that game is so locked in memory that touching it is a risk—but the footage looked right. Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings was a strategy spin-off, looser, weirder, enough to be interesting.
Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon made the list because the concept shouldn’t work—farming sim crossed with dungeon crawling—and yet. Ninja Town and Teenage Zombies were the wild cards, low-budget and strange in ways that might be charming or might be a waste of a cartridge slot. Space Invaders Extreme made it on nostalgia credit: the original is buried somewhere in my earliest gaming memories, and whatever Taito was doing with it looked loud and neon enough to earn thirty minutes of attention. Dragon Tamer Sound Spirit and Mizuiro Blood were both Japanese imports with no confirmed Western dates—meaning I’d probably be waiting another year while localization teams argued about fonts.
One of those trailers got to me more than the others. I’ll keep which one as a private embarrassment.