8 Best DS Visual Novels

Lux-Pain is a visual novel-type adventure game made by Killaware and published by Marvelous Entertainment. It came out in Japan on March 27, 2008, and took a year to reach English players. Ignition Entertainment put it out in North America on March 24, 2009, and Rising Star Games released it in Europe on March 27, 2009.

The story is told in episodes, and only after the first 10 do you face the first true Silent. Japan also got a CD with two vocal songs from the game, sung by Yoko Takahashi, a couple of weeks before the game itself was in shops. It is the deepest cut on this list, a game that came and went without much noise. If you have read everything above it and still want another mystery on the DS, this is where the trail leads.

Time Hollow is Konami's adventure visual novel about Ethan Kairos, a boy whose family disappears. The whole world has changed as if his parents had vanished 12 years ago, and the only way to fix it is the Hollow Pen, a strange green pen that opens portals to the past. You draw those portals with the stylus. Each one costs you some Time, which works like HP, and you win it back by finding Ethan's cat, Sox.

Using a cat as a health pack is about the most DS idea anyone ever put on a cartridge. The game reached North America on September 23, 2008, and then slipped out of most people's memory. The players who do remember it call it a forgotten game, and they light up when someone else brings it up. It is a sweet little time-travel story worth the effort to find.

Apollo Justice is the fourth Ace Attorney game and the first one without Phoenix Wright as the main character. Phoenix has been stripped of his attorney's badge, and an up-and-coming lawyer called Apollo Justice becomes his apprentice. The game is set in 2026, seven years after Trials and Tribulations, which means we are living in it right now and courts still do not let you shout at witnesses. It came out on the DS in Japan in 2007 and in the West in 2008.

Series creator Shu Takumi had wanted the series to end with the game before this one. Fans were glad it did not: Apollo Justice sold around 250,000 copies in its first week. Players who loved the first three cases of Phoenix's career tell newcomers to keep going straight into this one after the trilogy.

This time you play the prosecutor. The team first thought about making Ema Skye the lead, then picked Miles Edgeworth because he was so popular. You walk Edgeworth around crime scenes yourself, and the new Logic feature lets you join two of his thoughts into a conclusion. Connect two bullet holes with a gun that was only fired once, and Edgeworth works out that two guns must have been there.

It came out on the DS in Japan in 2009 and around the world in 2010. It was one of the best selling games of 2009 in Japan, while sales in the West were described as "poor at best". A sequel, Prosecutor's Gambit, came out in Japan in 2011, and both games were remastered for the Ace Attorney Investigations Collection in 2024. Series fans put it right next to the main games on their lists of DS favourites.

Kotaro Uchikoshi joined Chunsoft to write a visual novel that could reach a wider audience, and he suggested adding puzzles tied into the story. The result is a murder mystery that takes several playthroughs to figure out, with puzzle rooms and dialogue choices in between. The rules are cruel. Everyone who scans a bracelet at a Door has to check in again inside, or the bombs of everyone who went in explode. Kinu Nishimura designed the characters, with music by Shinji Hosoe.

Aksys nearly passed on it. Many people at the company did not believe it would sell and turned it down at first. It then sold better than expected for the genre in the United States, and its surprise success in North America is why the Zero Escape series exists. Players still call it one of the high points of the whole DS.

Last Window is the sequel to Hotel Dusk, set one year later. Kyle Hyde now lives in the Cape West Apartments in Los Angeles in 1980. The story is separate from the first game, with a few connections back to it, and it has the same look and sound. That is exactly what fans of the first one were hoping for.

It was also the last game Cing made before the company filed for bankruptcy on March 1, 2010, and unlike Hotel Dusk it was never released in North America. Players almost always recommend it in the same breath as Hotel Dusk, as if the two were one long case. If you finish Hotel Dusk and want one more evening with Kyle, this is the only one you get.

Phoenix Wright first came out on the Game Boy Advance in Japan in 2001. The 2005 DS version added an English option, and it was the first time the game reached North America and Europe. A team of seven made it in ten months. Writer and director Shu Takumi had first planned it as a Game Boy Color game about a private investigator. Instead you get a rookie defense lawyer who has to question witnesses and present the evidence that breaks their story.

The DS version also added a fifth case, in which Ema Skye hires Phoenix to defend her older sister Lana. North American sales beat expectations, and the game became hard to find in stores soon after release. Players put it near the top of their DS favourites, very often with Professor Layton right beside it.

Hotel Dusk takes place in a rural Nevada hotel and follows Kyle Hyde, a former NYPD detective now working as a salesman so he can find his missing police partner, Brian Bradley. You lead Kyle around a map of the hotel on the touch screen, or with the d-pad, while the other screen shows a first-person 3D view. The game copies all the critical story notes for you, which is very polite for a detective story.

The characters are animated with rotoscoping, and director Taisuke Kanasaki said the team wanted "an unprecedented visual expression not found in any other game". A team of 20 worked on it for about a year and a half, and it came out in North America on January 22, 2007. Ask players for the best DS games and Hotel Dusk keeps coming up, sometimes at number one.