Jim Sterling of Destructoid infamy rants about the need for developers to cut it out with their crappy, tacked-on multiplayer and just make some damn good single-player games. A man after my own heart, he is. He doesn’t necessarily address any of the issues I was having with only liking single-player and etc., but perhaps if there were more shining examples of solid stories and amazingly well crafted worlds, it wouldn’t be such an issue.

Truth be told, simply for sheer volume alone, my collection of amazing PS2 games is where almost all of my amazing single-player games are. It was cheaper to make games for the PS2, and so it was much easier to make a game that would only appeal to a small group of people and that wouldn’t have much long-term replay value, either through an open-ended story or what have you or through multiplayer. Most of those games have since migrated to the DS, or the Wii. A lot of jRPGs that come out for the PS3 and 360 get bogged down by $1 DLC costumes and bullcrap like that, and the games end up sucking anyway so they try to capitalize on the customers they do have. It’s too bad I have such a hard time being motivated to go out and buy random Wii jRPG X, because there are plenty. I am all over the DS though. For good reason - the first main instalments in years of beloved jRPGs such as Dragon Quest and Shin Megami Tensei are being released on the DS instead of next gen consoles. Hell, a “new” Monster Rancher game was just released in english for the DS, and it doesn’t suck! You create monsters by drawing, writing, or speaking into the DS microphone. Pretty cool, right? Too bad nobody knows it exists, so it’s doomed to be appreciated only by people like me who think to check wikipedia for a release date every once in a while.

There are DS games that I would honestly recommend emulating on PC, if you don’t own one. They’re just that good. I’m hoping the 3DS can continue the same level of cheap success, because someone, somewhere has to make me video games.