Eric Dunlap

The Nintendo DS turns 20 today. I never owned the original model when I was younger, but a few friends of mine did. I was always fascinated by the hardware, but very few of the games my friends were playing like Mario, Pokémon, and Nintendogs actually interested me. I was busy playing Halo and Call of Duty on my Xbox in the mid-00’s. I was completely unaware of the all-time RPG greats like Dragon Quest, Chrono Trigger (yes, I know it’s a re-release of the SNES original; I think the DS version adds some unique features to make it worth playing on DS), Radiant Historia, and anything Final Fantasy. I’d like to think that in some alternate universe, a younger me got to play all of these games when they came out.

I haven’t played much lately on Nintendo’s more “modern” consoles (they clearly don’t want me as a customer any more, but that’s a different subject altogether) so I decided to take a look at some of the games that I missed over the last couple decades. Just this week I picked up a pre-owned DSi XL from a local shop. Sure, the DSi is a later iteration of the DS line that’s only 15 years old, but it feels like a perfection of the formula.

I love how simplistic it is; just a folding rectangular block with two screens, a D-pad, and a few other face buttons. The screens are very low-resolution by today’s standard, but the pixels there have aged very well. Yes, the Nintendo DS absolutely holds up as a worthwhile gaming experience even now in 2024, 20 years later.