Mine has to be Dragon Quest: Rocket Slime, a DS spin off of the Dragon Quest series that sees you playing as a slime operating a tank and rescuing the people from your town. You run around the overworld, collecting items to use as ammunition and saving money to upgrade your tank. The art and music are just as great as you’d expect from the Dragon Quest series. It made fantastic use of the DS’s dual screens. It’s also written for a younger audience, so a lot of it is just really silly and fun! Try it out for sure, I’m so sad there’s no sequel :(
Just a heads up there is a GBA and 3DS game in the Slime series, but the 2nd game on DS is the only one that made it to America. No idea if there are fan translations, but might be worth looking into.
There’s a 3ds version??? Thank you for telling me about this. I just looked up footage and it looks absolutely amazing. The Slime series has such unique gameplay, I really can’t think of any other game that comes even close to scratching that itch. One of the only games I’ve ever played where I can’t even compare it to other games, other than calling it a mishmash of all of the best Nintendo ideas
Yep! Loved the gameplay on DS and was excited at the time for the sequel coming. Must have slipped my mind over the years because I never did look into it after it released in Japan.
I googled it and there is an English translation available for it if you ever wanna emulate it!
Fan Translation of the third game:
https://fantranslators.info/projects/rocket-slime-3ds/