12 Best Nintendo 3DS Strategy Games

Dillon's Rolling Western got a sequel in Dead-Heat Breakers, and the Old West did not survive it. Vanpool moved the series to a post-apocalyptic world, and producer Kensuke Tanabe said it drew inspiration from Mad Max and was first planned as a racing game. You join the cast as your own Mii, turned into an Amiimal with animal features.

Your Mii and the hired guns shoot from the towers while Dillon dashes around the map to fight the Grocks one on one, and in a later phase the rock monsters turn into vehicles that race around the roads. Critics were mixed and mostly complained that it repeats itself. In North America it was download only. Players who love it tend to recommend the whole Dillon trilogy as one package.

Ubisoft's Shadow Wars, a turn-based tactics game, was one of the 3DS launch games, and it reached North American shops five days before the console itself. Its producer was Julian Gollop, the man known for X-COM, and you can tell. The battles look a lot like Advance Wars or Fire Emblem, but height and cover decide almost every fight, and the support fire system makes it play like nothing else on the list.

Players call it one of the most overlooked games on the system. The players who found it recommend it to anyone who wants Fire Emblem in a modern setting, or a pocket XCOM. Turning a Tom Clancy shooter into a board of squares worked better than anyone had a right to expect.

Lord of Magna is a simulation role-playing game from Marvelous, and it was nearly an orphan. Work on it started at Neverland, the studio behind Rune Factory, which went bankrupt after Rune Factory 4. Marvelous kept some key staff to finish it. Luchs, the hero, runs an inn on Étoile Isle that has no customers, until he digs a girl called Charlotte out of a crystal cave and her six sisters follow.

Turn-based battles in Lord of Magna go in order of each character's speed, but the controls have been compared to an action game. Special attacks unlock as the sisters come to trust Luchs, and the ending depends on which one he grows closest to. It usually comes up next to Stella Glow when players list late 3DS role-playing games.

Shibuya is locked down by paranormal events at the start of Project X Zone 2, the sequel from Monolith Soft. This time the crossover pulls in Nintendo too, next to Bandai Namco, Capcom and Sega, which is how Chrom and Lucina from Fire Emblem Awakening end up on the roster. The plot is a homage to Namco x Capcom, and the team said in an interview that it would fix the complaints about the first game, the story included.

Yuzo Koshiro, who wrote the theme for Namco x Capcom, came back for the songs. It came out in Japan in November 2015 and everywhere else in February 2016. Players talk about the two Project X Zone games as a pair of overlooked favourites. The bigger cast is the main upgrade over the first game.

Dillon, an armadillo, defends frontier villages from walking rock monsters in this eShop game from Vanpool and Nintendo. Vanpool was the studio that made the Tingle games, if you needed proof that this one would be odd. It blends tower defense with 3D exploration and action: the Grocks come for the villagers' livestock, called Scrogs, and there are always too many for one armadillo, so you buy guns for the village towers.

Official Nintendo Magazine gave it 87% and Destructoid gave it 4/10, which averaged out to mixed. Its fans love it for exactly that genre mix. He fights by rolling into a ball, and the rolling is the best part. Dillon later appeared as an Assist Trophy in Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U.

Code Name: S.T.E.A.M. is a turn-based strategy game from Intelligent Systems that you control like a third-person shooter. It is set in a steampunk alternate history, drawn like a Silver Age comic, with a cast taken from American literature and folklore. Abraham Lincoln pilots a giant mech called the A.B.E., and you fight next to John Henry and the Scarecrow.

In Japan it was subtitled Lincoln vs. Aliens, which tells you everything and nothing. The camera stays over your shoulder, so you only see what your soldier sees. Players call it criminally underrated, and they describe it as XCOM where you hold the gun yourself. Henry Fleming, one of the squad, later turned up as a Spirit in Super Smash Bros.

Captain Piper Faraday, a smuggler and occasional pirate, recruits a team of robots in SteamWorld Heist and takes them raiding enemy spaceships. Image & Form, the Swedish studio, made it as a turn-based tactics shooter and a sequel to SteamWorld Dig. The developers wanted to fix the oldest frustration in the genre, missing a shot with a 99% hit chance, so they made you aim every shot by hand. The real steampunk band Steam Powered Giraffe wrote and played the soundtrack.

It came out first on the 3DS eShop in December 2015 and got rave reviews, with critics singling out the manual aiming. Players who usually give up on strategy games say this is the one that clicked for them. Bouncing a bullet off a wall into an enemy never gets old. A sequel, SteamWorld Heist II, arrived in 2024.

Monolith Soft built Project X Zone as a follow-up to Namco x Capcom, a tactical role-playing game with characters from Namco Bandai, Capcom and Sega. Every unit on your side is two characters, called a Pair Unit, and you can add a Solo Unit for one assist per battle. The characters were built as 3D models first and then turned into small pixel art, and their big attacks stay in 2D to match the games they come from.

Reviews praised the cast and the combat, and complained about repetitive fights and a confusing story. It still sold more than ten times what Bandai Namco expected in the West. Players warn that it is repetitive fan service. For anyone who grew up on those companies, the cast is the reason to play.

Imageepoch's last game before the studio went bankrupt was Stella Glow, a role-playing game that Atlus published in North America. Imageepoch designed it to celebrate ten years of the company. Then the company went under. A young man has to unite four witches to save his home town. Yasunori Mitsuda, of Chrono Trigger fame, wrote the soundtrack with Shunsuke Tsuchiya.

Free time between battles goes to building relationships with the team, and that decides the ending as well as what each character can do in a fight. Critics gave it generally favorable reviews, and Nintendo Life went as high as 9/10. Players say it never got the attention it deserved, and it was a late arrival, reaching North America in November 2015. Under all the anime there is a proper grid tactics game.

Echoes remakes Fire Emblem Gaiden, a Famicom game that never left Japan. It follows Alm and Celica, who try to end the same war in opposite ways: Alm through battle, Celica through the guidance of the goddess Mila. It keeps Gaiden's odd rules, so mages pay with their own health to cast and you explore dungeons between battles. Free roaming had been built for Fates and then cut, so it found a home here.

English players waited a quarter of a century for this one, and it was worth the wait. This time the whole game is voiced. Players agree that the story and the presentation are among the best in the series, and that the maps are its weak spot. Four tracks from its soundtrack made it into Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.

Three versions of Fates came out, each telling a different story with the same characters. Birthright and Conquest were sold on cartridges, and Revelation came as downloadable content. Intelligent Systems split them because one cartridge with everything would have cost as much as two games. You play Corrin, a long-lost member of the Hoshidan royal family, and the English title comes from the choice at the heart of it: you shape your fate by picking a side.

Reviews called Birthright a good start for new players and praised Conquest for its challenge. Conquest is the hard one, and Birthright is the one that lets you grind. Plenty of players admit they burned out before they finished every route, which is what happens when one game is really three.

Intelligent Systems made Fire Emblem Awakening as a tactical role-playing game, and it was the first Fire Emblem built for the 3DS. You move your army across a grid-based battlefield, and the characters build relationships with each other that make them stronger. It was very nearly the last one. Sales had been falling, and Nintendo told the team that Awakening would be the end of the series if it failed to sell above 250,000 units.

It sold, and its success is credited with keeping Fire Emblem alive. Critics loved the story and the cast, and how easy it is for newcomers to get into. There are two modes, Casual and Classic, and in Classic your fallen soldiers stay dead. Players point newcomers to Awakening as the place to start the series.