Found my old R4 card for my DS and booted up a slate of old RPGs:
-Golden Sun Dark Dawn - Simple but fun game, gorgeous graphics and flashy combats with tons of beautiful spells, summons, and special attacks going off left and right. I enjoyed how the story featured children of the previous game's heroes, I wish more games would do this. Djinn collecting is fun as a way to power up your team and with eight characters there are tons of ways to customize everyone.
Game's biggest problem is it is way too easy, you barely need to even try. It's like they balanced the game for players who somehow miss every single djinn, so if you optimize your team at all the game turns into a joke. Could really use a hard mode. Series seems to have died here, too bad, if Nintendo announced a Golden Sun game for the Switch I'd probably buy one.
-Sands of Destruction - I seem to be stuck on a boss here. The game is saved right before a mandatory boss fight with a dude who turns into giant boar. I can't beat him and I can't go back to level anywhere. I remember this being fun but with a lot of unintuitive character customization options. I'd probably have to start it over.
-Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2 - I didn't get far in this and I think I remember why. The Bazaar system from FF12 is used here as the only way to unlock new items, which you need to unlock new abilities for your characters and new classes. This combined with the RNG drop system (four different items per enemy) and the semi-randomized missions makes it really hard to get the one piece of goblin anus or chocobo taint you need to get the sword you want to get the next skill. I miss the original FF Tactics JP shop.
-SaGa 3 - Fan translation of a remake of the old GB game, which I also owned. I must have installed and played this a bit more recently because I think it's only been available for a few years. The one black sheep of the SaGa franchise, remade as a 'proper' entry without levels and with techs and such. Keeps the original game's mutation system; when you kill enemies you can eat their meat (heh) to transform into a monster or install robot parts to become a cyborg. Music is all the same too. I got 3-4 hours into this and seemed to be progressing, dunno why I quit.
-Infinite Space - I loved this game. Its kind of a VN/Space RPG. The plot is standard space opera mixed with ancient alien mysteries but goddamn is it ever epic. It also does something really cool--a ten year time skip in the middle of the story. All the characters grow and change, often dramatically. Half the people from the first part of the game die so you have to rebuild most of your crew. Tons of branching story paths and consequential decisions.
Combat is pretty simple. You can field a fleet of five ships but they all act together. It's a little disappointing that you can't manually control each ship individually, that would have been a more complex and tactical combat system. Instead the game puts you in the role of a fleet commander, you only make broad decisions and let your crew handle the rest. It works though and battles are quite fast. You have an ATB gauge that fills up, at 1/3 you can do a single volley with all ships' weapons or take evasive maneuvers, at 2/3 full you can do a barrage of three volleys at reduced accuracy. Dodging will avoid a barrage most of the time and enemies will often queue a dodge while waiting for their own ATB, so its a risk-reward thing. You can also close in on enemy ships and board them but this is almost never useful as it takes way longer and gives no greater rewards. Partway through the game you get fighters, these will intercept and battle enemy fighters; whichever group wins will go on to harass the enemy fleet for small damage over time.
That's the idea anyway, in practice its easy to build a fleet of battleships/carriers and deploy more fighters than the AI can ever deal with, ripping their fleets to shreds while you twiddle your thumbs. It makes the game a complete joke, but no one ever said war was fair! There are a few other special moves depending on crew but none of them really matter. Speaking of crew, there are tons of crew members to acquire, all unique, all with their own skills, and all of them can level up. You have a couple dozen crew spots to fill and knowing who to put where isn't easy. The game's mechanics are really obtuse and guides online don't help. It took me awhile to figure out having all Control positions filled with the best crew was ideal since that has the biggest affect on ATB speed.
The last thing is the game's presentation is fantastic, especially in combat. There are these sweeping, dramatic scenes whenever you launch a barrage accompanied by wonderful and varied 'bridge babble' from the crew, which really plays up the anime/star trek feel of the game. You can skip all these to speed up battles and they do get repetitive, but they always made me smile whenever I watched them. Overall this game just feels way too huge for the tiny platform it is on, if it got a remake or sequel on a proper platform with accompanying gfx and tech I think it would be spectacular.
