What game should I play next???

One of the things that I really want to try to do more of in the new year is play more video games, but I’m kind of stuck right now in that I’m not really sure what I want to pick-up next. The last game that I finished was Dragon Quest VIII (PS2), which I ended up really getting into, so I’d love to find another game that follows in that same spirit. I’d almost liken it to Final Fantasy 2 (SNES) in that even though it was a pretty long game, by the time I had finally finished it, I was so attached to the characters that I almost wish there was a sequel that I could just pick up and keep right on going!

Unfortunately for the most part, both of those series’ tend to start fresh with each new game, but here are a couple that I’ve been thinking about so far…

Dragon Quest Swords: The Masked Queen and the Tower of Mirrors (Wii)
My big concern with this one (as with a lot of Wii games) is that I really want a turn-based RPG – I’m just not a fan of the Kingdom Hearts-style fighting where you have to mash buttons like an action game to attack (Zelda is one of my few exceptions to this rule), and my concern is that the Wii controller is going to make this mechanism even worse if I have to wave the Wii-mote in the air to swing my sword!

Final Fantasy IV: The After-Years (Wii / Virtual Console)
I geeked out about the concept of this game earlier this spring, but never actually got around to playing it. The game is supposed to pick up with a number of characters from my beloved FF2 and take them on new adventures. This could be really cool, or it could kinda ruin my favorite game of all time if the graphics and voice actors that they came up with for my pixelated party aren’t actually all that good…

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers (Wii)
I’m not a huge fan of mixing technology with magic in the RPGs that I play – the airships and chainsaw from FF2 and FF3 respectively were ok, but the dude with the machine gun arm in FF7 was pushing it a bit for me! So I definitely have concerns when the first bullet point on Amazon describes this as “…where technology has advanced to its peak and magic is considered taboo.”

Older Final Fantasy Games That I Never Got Around to Playing… (PSX)
I guess I also have a number of other games that I picked up in the moment and then never actually played – FFII (Final Fantasy Origins), FF5 (Final Fantasy Anthology), Final Fantasy Tactics, as well as either FF8 or FF9, and also FF10 for the PS2. A lot of these I held off on for one reason or another – either I didn’t care for the battle system or for the collections, I bought it for one of the other games on the disc … but ultimately I suppose these are all worth a consideration, too.

Also, having just bought Sara a Nintendo DS for Christmas, I can’t help but notice how many games from these series’ ended up on the portable platform, too! So far I do like it from what little I’ve played around with it, but I just don’t know if I can stare at that tiny screen for the amount of time that I’d typically put into an RPG…

Still, that’s a lot of games!

Any suggestions? It looks like right now it’s a toss up between something old and something new…

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