The original DS had a lot of cool games that I missed out on in the system's heyday. Recently I decided I'd like to catch up on some of those games, and so here we are! These posts aren't gonna be fancy "reviews" or anything, just a roughly-organized collection of the thoughts I have on the games I play.
The first game I decided to play in this little personal project is one that I've been curious about for a long time - The Wizard of Oz: Beyond the Yellow Brick Road. It was developed by Media.Vision (whose name you'll recognize as the studio behind the Wild ARMs series, and more recently the Digimon Story games), who chose to use the original Oz novel as the template, rather than the MGM movie. Even still, it's fairly different from both; you still play as Dorothy, who gets swept up by a tornado and transported to the Land of Oz, trying to get back home with the help of her new friends, but here you're doing that by going to each seasonally-themed kingdom and beating up the local ruling witch, so you can take their magical eggs and give them to the Wizard in exchange for his assistance.
The game is a turn-based RPG, played entirely with the stylus; you can't even use the face buttons and d-pad for menu navigation, and you move around the various dungeons by spinning a track ball on the touch screen. It actually works pretty well, and if you get the ball spinning fast enough you can sprint straight past enemies on wider paths. There's no in-game map, but you do come across signposts periodically that you can mark with a few different icons to help keep track of where you've been, and you're softly encouraged to make multiple excursions into the various levels to refill your resources (as the Castle of Oz is the only place where you can heal your party for free or purchase new items and equipment).
Instead of the usual dungeon crawler fare of caves and crypts, the "dungeons" are things like sun-lit beaches, flower gardens, and quiet forests, all of which are lovingly rendered to the best of the DS's capabilities (although it should be noted that there are some pretty noticeable graphical glitches in a few of the early levels if you're playing on emulator, and you probably are, because the used game market sucks and it's difficult to find copies of this game that don't run you $300 for a loose cartridge). The music is equally lovely; Michiko Naruke, the regular Wild ARMs composer, wrote the excellent opening and ending themes, and the rest of the soundtrack was written by Hitoshi Sakimoto and his cohorts at Basiscape, Masaharu Iwata and Kimihiro Abe. Some of the tracks here would fit right at home in something like Final Fantasy XII, but there's plenty of whimsy and playfulness here to match the setting, as well; you can check out the rest of the soundtrack here if you want, and I'd heartily recommend it.
This game does some neat things with its combat, too. There's an affinity system where each of your party members does bonus damage against certain enemy types (Dorothy does more damage to ghost enemies, for example). You get four action points per turn to spend however you want; Dorothy and the Scarecrow take up one point per action, the Cowardly Lion takes up two, and the Tin Man takes three. Whoever isn't in the active party in a given turn is safe from all incoming damage but can still be affected by buffs and items, so there's some strategy in considering who acts when, especially during boss fights, which are genuinely pretty challenging. Each character also has their own strengths beyond enemy affinities - Dorothy gets your only healing spell, and can also buff the active party's speed and double a single ally's attack power; the Scarecrow can erase any active buffs or debuffs for both allies and enemies (borderline necessary to weather some particularly nasty attacks), and he can also steal items from enemies, which is just useful enough to be worth doing while still failing frustratingly often; the Cowardly Lion can self-buff and raise the party's defense against elemental damage; and the Tin Man is there to tank hits and use pulverizing group- and multi-hitting attacks. You learn these skills by finding dragon priests in a few select dungeons and beating them in combat, and you'll want to prioritize seeking them out as soon as you're strong enough to take them on.
It's not without its frustrations - in particular there are a few late-game bosses that can erase your buffs at any time, although thankfully the final boss is not one of them - but overall I quite liked this game! It's nice and lean at around 19/20 hours if you want to give it a shot, and it has pretty solid fundamentals.
Some miscellaneous details I couldn't really fit anywhere else:
-When you're not facing an object you can interact with, that button on the touch screen instead lets you pet Toto. If you do this enough times, he'll learn a new trick, which you can see if you sit still for long enough. Not sure how many tricks there are, but it's a cute mechanic.
-The Yellow Brick Road is both the tutorial area and the final dungeon, and the latter instance reprises the opening for its field theme.
-After you learn every skill from the dragon priests, you can go back to fight them in their true form as optional superbosses. The only reward you get for doing this is a badge acting as proof of the endeavor. (I did not bother.) You can watch those boss fights in action here if you want.
-I quite like the designs for the main party. Look how cute they made the Cowardly Lion!
Recommended listening:
Castle of Oz
Flower Palace
Retrieve the Egg!
Sandy Beach of Star Fragments
A Red-Colored Final Decisive Battle
I've played a couple other games besides this one, and I'll make posts about them soon, but in the meantime, if you have suggestions for a cool DS game I might want to play - or want to talk about cool DS games in general - feel free! I'm open to a lot of genres as long as it isn't a sports game. However, I will note that, unless I get lucky and find a copy of a given game for cheap or already own it, I'll be playing it on my phone* with an Xbox controller plugged in, so anything with a complex or high-effort control scheme is probably out of the cards, sadly.
Games I have played so far:
The Wizard of Oz: Beyond the Yellow Brick Road
Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky
Dragon Ball Z: Attack of the Saiyans
New Super Mario Bros.
Electroplankton
The Legendary Starfy
Retro Game Challenge
Games I want to take a look at at some point (no particular order):
Radiant Historia
Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light
Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey (putting this one off for now because I already know it's gonna be long as hell)
Games I already own or have played in some capacity (that I can think of at this moment):
The DS Castlevania trilogy
The mainline Pokemon games
Trace Memory
Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume (maybe this thread will get me to finally play the copy I bought ~two years ago~ lol)
The World Ends With You (I love this game but my hands would shatter trying to play it on my phone)
Kirby Super Star Ultra
Mega Man ZX/ZX Advent
*Shoutout to DraStic, it's genuinely a pretty good emulator, and also to the youtube channel Toaster Williams, without which I might not have heard of it in the first place
The first game I decided to play in this little personal project is one that I've been curious about for a long time - The Wizard of Oz: Beyond the Yellow Brick Road. It was developed by Media.Vision (whose name you'll recognize as the studio behind the Wild ARMs series, and more recently the Digimon Story games), who chose to use the original Oz novel as the template, rather than the MGM movie. Even still, it's fairly different from both; you still play as Dorothy, who gets swept up by a tornado and transported to the Land of Oz, trying to get back home with the help of her new friends, but here you're doing that by going to each seasonally-themed kingdom and beating up the local ruling witch, so you can take their magical eggs and give them to the Wizard in exchange for his assistance.
The game is a turn-based RPG, played entirely with the stylus; you can't even use the face buttons and d-pad for menu navigation, and you move around the various dungeons by spinning a track ball on the touch screen. It actually works pretty well, and if you get the ball spinning fast enough you can sprint straight past enemies on wider paths. There's no in-game map, but you do come across signposts periodically that you can mark with a few different icons to help keep track of where you've been, and you're softly encouraged to make multiple excursions into the various levels to refill your resources (as the Castle of Oz is the only place where you can heal your party for free or purchase new items and equipment).
Instead of the usual dungeon crawler fare of caves and crypts, the "dungeons" are things like sun-lit beaches, flower gardens, and quiet forests, all of which are lovingly rendered to the best of the DS's capabilities (although it should be noted that there are some pretty noticeable graphical glitches in a few of the early levels if you're playing on emulator, and you probably are, because the used game market sucks and it's difficult to find copies of this game that don't run you $300 for a loose cartridge). The music is equally lovely; Michiko Naruke, the regular Wild ARMs composer, wrote the excellent opening and ending themes, and the rest of the soundtrack was written by Hitoshi Sakimoto and his cohorts at Basiscape, Masaharu Iwata and Kimihiro Abe. Some of the tracks here would fit right at home in something like Final Fantasy XII, but there's plenty of whimsy and playfulness here to match the setting, as well; you can check out the rest of the soundtrack here if you want, and I'd heartily recommend it.
This game does some neat things with its combat, too. There's an affinity system where each of your party members does bonus damage against certain enemy types (Dorothy does more damage to ghost enemies, for example). You get four action points per turn to spend however you want; Dorothy and the Scarecrow take up one point per action, the Cowardly Lion takes up two, and the Tin Man takes three. Whoever isn't in the active party in a given turn is safe from all incoming damage but can still be affected by buffs and items, so there's some strategy in considering who acts when, especially during boss fights, which are genuinely pretty challenging. Each character also has their own strengths beyond enemy affinities - Dorothy gets your only healing spell, and can also buff the active party's speed and double a single ally's attack power; the Scarecrow can erase any active buffs or debuffs for both allies and enemies (borderline necessary to weather some particularly nasty attacks), and he can also steal items from enemies, which is just useful enough to be worth doing while still failing frustratingly often; the Cowardly Lion can self-buff and raise the party's defense against elemental damage; and the Tin Man is there to tank hits and use pulverizing group- and multi-hitting attacks. You learn these skills by finding dragon priests in a few select dungeons and beating them in combat, and you'll want to prioritize seeking them out as soon as you're strong enough to take them on.
It's not without its frustrations - in particular there are a few late-game bosses that can erase your buffs at any time, although thankfully the final boss is not one of them - but overall I quite liked this game! It's nice and lean at around 19/20 hours if you want to give it a shot, and it has pretty solid fundamentals.
Some miscellaneous details I couldn't really fit anywhere else:
-When you're not facing an object you can interact with, that button on the touch screen instead lets you pet Toto. If you do this enough times, he'll learn a new trick, which you can see if you sit still for long enough. Not sure how many tricks there are, but it's a cute mechanic.
-The Yellow Brick Road is both the tutorial area and the final dungeon, and the latter instance reprises the opening for its field theme.
-After you learn every skill from the dragon priests, you can go back to fight them in their true form as optional superbosses. The only reward you get for doing this is a badge acting as proof of the endeavor. (I did not bother.) You can watch those boss fights in action here if you want.
-I quite like the designs for the main party. Look how cute they made the Cowardly Lion!
Recommended listening:
Castle of Oz
Flower Palace
Retrieve the Egg!
Sandy Beach of Star Fragments
A Red-Colored Final Decisive Battle
I've played a couple other games besides this one, and I'll make posts about them soon, but in the meantime, if you have suggestions for a cool DS game I might want to play - or want to talk about cool DS games in general - feel free! I'm open to a lot of genres as long as it isn't a sports game. However, I will note that, unless I get lucky and find a copy of a given game for cheap or already own it, I'll be playing it on my phone* with an Xbox controller plugged in, so anything with a complex or high-effort control scheme is probably out of the cards, sadly.
Games I have played so far:
The Wizard of Oz: Beyond the Yellow Brick Road
Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky
Dragon Ball Z: Attack of the Saiyans
New Super Mario Bros.
Electroplankton
The Legendary Starfy
Retro Game Challenge
Games I want to take a look at at some point (no particular order):
Radiant Historia
Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light
Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey (putting this one off for now because I already know it's gonna be long as hell)
Games I already own or have played in some capacity (that I can think of at this moment):
The DS Castlevania trilogy
The mainline Pokemon games
Trace Memory
Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume (maybe this thread will get me to finally play the copy I bought ~two years ago~ lol)
The World Ends With You (I love this game but my hands would shatter trying to play it on my phone)
Kirby Super Star Ultra
Mega Man ZX/ZX Advent
*Shoutout to DraStic, it's genuinely a pretty good emulator, and also to the youtube channel Toaster Williams, without which I might not have heard of it in the first place
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