17 Best Nintendo DS Open World Games

Rune Factory 2 is set several years after the first game, with the evil Sechs Empire defeated and the Kingdom of Norad at peace. You arrive in Alvarna Village as Kyle, an amnesiac, and a girl named Mana hands him a farm and some tools. In a first for the series, the story is multigenerational: Kyle marries, has a child, and that child takes over as the hero for the rest of the game.

Between harvests you head into caves to fight monsters, and the ones you befriend can work as livestock, farmhands or battle companions. It only just made the list, while the first and third Rune Factory sit far higher. When players do name it, the third game is usually right beside it.

Spore Creatures is a spin-off of Spore where you control and evolve a creature of your own making. The PC game had several stages, but this one keeps only the creature stage and draws it in 2D. Every part you add changes what your creature can do, down to what kind of food it can eat. The plot is pure Saturday morning cartoon: an alien called Gar'skuther kidnaps Little Oogie, and you chase him through the galaxy in a ship you rebuilt from his wreckage.

It borrows from Nintendogs and Drawn to Life as much as from Spore itself. Players slip it onto their hidden gem lists and their personal top tens, and for some it has been the favourite DS game since they were kids. It edges out Rune Factory 2 for this spot.

On the DS, MySims Kingdom drops you on an island where a mysterious person is making trees and houses vanish, and you travel the whole kingdom to stop him. You get the island town back to its former glory with minigames like Kayaking and Stargazing, and as you improve the town, clues are revealed that point to the culprit.

It came out in October 2008 as the follow-up to MySims, and the DS version tells its own story rather than shrinking the Wii one. It is the one fans suggest for a slow, cozy evening, with a clothing store where you design your own outfits. MySims, its older sibling, gets named twice as often.

The DS MySims puts you in a vacation resort with the job of luring tourists. You do tasks for the locals, earn stars, and the stars unlock other parts of the city as the town grows. The DS cast is smaller than the Wii one, 30 characters against 80, but it is virtually an all new game in design, not a port.

Reviews of its controls went every which way, and MySims sold over 4 million units by 2008 all the same. Players who loved it recommend the DS run as one set, with Kingdom and Agents after it. It sits one place below C.O.P. The Recruit, a game where the tasks involve a lot more car chases.

C.O.P. The Recruit started life as a Driver game, called Driver: The Recruit, before it was retooled into a standalone series. VD-dev made it as a third-person shooter and driving game set in an open world New York City, with the map of Driver: Parallel Lines minus the Bronx, which did not fit in the memory. You play Dan Miles, a former street racer pulled into the Criminal Overturn Program, who goes undercover when his mentor is falsely arrested.

Reviews were mixed or average, but it won two Best of E3 2009 awards, one of them for graphics technology. When players talk about the most impressive-looking DS games, it is one of the first names to come up. Of the two crime games on this list, it is the smaller one, far below Chinatown Wars.

The DS Sims 2 takes place in Strangetown with some of the same faces as the console games, and it makes you the manager of the only hotel in town. Your job is to improve the hotel by adding extensions and keeping the place clean. Darby McDevitt wrote it with a dark plot and absurdist humor, and the town keeps getting attacked by aliens who think the desert is perfect for a colony because they are afraid of water.

The developers even wanted you to steer your Sim as a parasitic amoeba living in its brain. EA said no, which is the most reasonable thing EA has ever said. Players agree it plays nothing like a normal Sims game, and that is exactly why they recommend it. It ranks just below Harvest Moon DS.

Harvest Moon DS was the first game of the farm simulation series on the DS. The Witch Princess tries to cast a spell to silence the Harvest Goddess, petrifies her instead, and then sends her to another world by accident. To bring her back you rescue all 101 Harvest Sprites by working hard as a farmer. It is also the first game in the series without creator Yasuhiro Wada heavily involved.

Japan got it on March 17, 2005, and North America waited until September 12, 2006. You start with only a dog and a cat on the farm. Fans still count it among their favourite cozy DS games. The two Rune Factory spin-offs both outrank it here.

The Urbz was supposed to start a whole new spin-off series for EA, the way The Sims had grown out of SimCity. On the DS it has its own storyline, a sequel to the handheld version of The Sims Bustin' Out, and it plays as an adventure game. On the console versions, The Black Eyed Peas appear as guest Urbz, and their songs were translated into Simlish.

It did not sell the way EA wanted, so the PC port was cancelled and the planned sequel was reworked into a console version of The Sims 2. Players remember it fondly anyway. For a lot of them it was the favourite when they were kids. It is the oldest game on the list, and it still outranks both MySims games put together.

Lost in Blue strands two teenagers, Keith and Skye, on a deserted island. Skye has lost her glasses, and Keith accidentally steps on them while helping her look, so for most of the game he leads her around the island by the hand. While planning their escape, the two learn to hunt and build tools. To light a fire you rub the sticks with the L and R buttons, then blow into the microphone.

Finish it and Skye Mode lets you play the entire game from her side, free to wander but unable to climb the way Keith can. Too few copies shipped, so it was hard to find after its North American release. As survival games go it is the real thing, with a mystery to dig into, and that is how fans pitch it. It ranks between Rune Factory 3 and The Urbz.

Rune Factory 3 opens with a golden sheep-like monster falling out of the sky. That sheep is Micah, a Wooly, and the next day he turns into a human: you are an adventurer with an unusual secret, half human and half monster. The people of Sharance and their horned Univir neighbours are stuck in an age-old hatred between humans and monsters, and the Univir detest humans, so Micah only visits them as a sheep.

Natsume brought it to North America in 2010 and Rising Star Games took it to Europe in 2011. A remaster, Rune Factory 3 Special, came to Switch in Japan in March 2023 and worldwide that September, so it is easy to play today. It gets named exactly as often as the first Rune Factory, and they keep pairing it with Radiant Historia.

Spectrobes was Disney Interactive's first original IP, a game not based on any film or TV show from Disney. You play Rallen, a patrol officer in the Nanairo star system, and the job is training creatures called Spectrobes to fight the Krawl, a horde that eats planets.

It was a hit. More than 700,000 copies shipped worldwide in the first month, and it was the best-selling third-party game for March 2007. Players sum it up as space Pokémon, with one big twist: you do not catch your monsters, you dig their fossils out of the ground. More players name it than the first Rune Factory, though their picks carry less weight.

Rune Factory took the farm game and handed it a sword. You wake up in the village of Kardia with no memory of who you are, and a young woman named Mist offers you a house on her land if you work the farm. You till the land and raise animals, then go out and battle monsters, which have been summoned from the Forest of Beginnings. The trouble turns out to come from the Sechs Empire, which wants a powerful monster called the Grimoire.

Your hero, Raguna, turns out to be an Earthmate, a being with special abilities. Players recommend it to anyone who likes Harvest Moon and wants it in a fantasy setting with some light combat. It is the highest-ranked farm on the list, a place above Spectrobes.

Infinite Space is a role-playing game developed by Nude Maker and PlatinumGames and published by Sega, in the West right after MadWorld and Bayonetta. The story follows Yuri across the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds, first against the expanding Lugovalian Empire and then against a far bigger alien threat. You can build, outfit and customise more than 150 spaceships, and battles play out in real-time with up to five ships a side.

Critics praised the story and complained about its high difficulty. The players who found it often call it their favourite DS game, and say they have never played anything like it since. One of them called it "a space opera with too many big ideas". There is a big gap above it: Infinite Space has less than half the support of Chinatown Wars.

Chinatown Wars was developed by Rockstar Leeds with Rockstar North and released for the DS in March 2009, months before the PSP got it in October. Huang Lee comes to Liberty City to deliver a family sword, gets left for dead, and is slowly drawn into the Triad power struggle. The city is a scaled-down version of the one in Grand Theft Auto IV, with cel-shaded, comic book art that was a first for the series.

It was designed around the touch screen. You draw tattoos and unscrew car panels with the stylus, and you can whistle for a taxi by blowing into the microphone. A Grand Theft Auto that wants you to poke things? Somehow it works. It won Best Handheld Game at the 2009 Spike Video Game Awards, and players call it one of the best GTA games ever made.

Wild World is the sequel to the GameCube Animal Crossing, and it is synced to the console's clock and calendar, so night falls in your village when it falls outside and snow comes in the cold months. You and up to three friends can hang out in the same village in real time, and visit a friend's village from thousands of miles away. You can even draw your own constellations in the night sky.

Nintendo switched off Wi-Fi Connection on May 20, 2014, so the long distance visits are gone, but the village still runs on the clock. On lists of DS essentials it turns up in the same breath as Mario Kart DS. Wild World only just edges out Chinatown Wars, while the two adventures above it pull clear.

Phantom Hourglass is the first Zelda game for the DS and a direct sequel to The Wind Waker, in the same cel-shaded style seen from a top-down view. You control Link entirely with the stylus, and you plot your sailing course by drawing on a sea chart. At the centre of the story is one large dungeon, the Temple of the Ocean King, where the Sand of Hours lets you explore without the temple draining your life force.

The first prototype put the action on the top screen with a flat map below, but it felt too disconnected, so the team swapped the screens. It went on to win DS Game of the Year from GameSpot and IGN, among others. Players put it on nearly every list of DS must-haves, right next to the Mario and Pokémon games. It finished second by a margin so thin it barely counts.

Dragon Quest IX is the ninth mainline entry in the Dragon Quest series, published by Square Enix in Japan in July 2009 and by Nintendo overseas the following year. You begin as a city guardian sent to retrieve the fruit of a sacred tree, which has the power to grant wishes, and it is the first Dragon Quest with a customizable player character. Series creator Yuji Horii designed it, with Akira Toriyama and Koichi Sugiyama back on art and music.

It was a smash. It sold over five million copies worldwide by 2011, and its anonymous communication mode was so popular in Japan that it inspired StreetPass on the 3DS. Players rave about how far you can customise your party, and plenty call it a DS masterpiece. It is the open world game DS players recommend most, only just ahead of Phantom Hourglass.