Sequels We Want to See on 3DS

We offer the industry our ideas for 12 amazing portable 3D games, free of charge.

By: Jeremy Parish

Nintendo’s next system, the hotly anticipated 3DS, is a mere three months away! In traditional Nintendo style, they’ve said pretty much jack-squat about what we can expect to see by way of launch titles or a release schedule in general. That’s OK, though. Between the games we saw back at E3 and the various third-party announcements that followed, we’re confident that the 3DS will launch strong and feature plenty of great games right away.

That being said, the absence of hard 3DS news has left our minds free to fill in the blanks with wonderful fantasies of sequels to favorite franchises that would be a perfect fit for the upcoming handheld, all of which we’ve neatly assembled in this feature. This isn’t just a blanket “sequels we’d love to see” list, though (hence the lack of Vagrant Story 2). Instead, we’ve come up with sequels to a dozen franchises that actually belong on 3DS — either games that would benefit from true 3D visuals, or else series with a strong portable legacy that deserve to benefit from the added horsepower offered by Nintendo’s new hardware.

• Castlevania: Triad of Sorrow

  Sequel to: Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow (DS, 2006)
  

  MercurySteam is carrying the Castlevania banner at the moment with its Lords of Shadow reboot, but there’s still life in the old-fashioned Castlevania approach, an itch that the quirky Harmony of Despair didn’t quite scratch. The new technology of the 3DS has plenty of potential to freshen up traditional games, and Castlevania could definitely use some of that freshening up. That said, we’re fond of the series’ future-based Sorrow chapters, with their free exploration and expansive soul-based skill systems, and we’d love to see Koji Igarashi’s team present the next chapter in the tale of Soma “Secretly Dracula” Cruz. No fancy 3D effects with this one, please; IGA doesn’t have the best track record when it comes to breaking from the second dimension. Nah, we just want to see some insanely detailed sprite-based monsters and awesome visual effects… and, hopefully, some level designs that break out of the “box full of monsters” rut the DS games fell into.

• Chrono Break

  Sequel to: Chrono Trigger (DS, 2008)
  

  Chrono Trigger hasn’t seen a sequel in more than a decade, with the divisive Chrono Cross. Square Enix took a tentative step toward reviving the series with a DS remake of Trigger a few years ago, so now we’d like to see the next logical step: the release of the long-awaited “Chrono Break,” a title the company trademarked years ago. Between Trigger’s time-traveling and Cross’s alternate realities, there are plenty of interesting possibilities for further stories set in that universe. And, while we’re contemplating the unlikely, we might as well go all out and wish for the Trigger dream team of Hironobu Sakaguchi and Yujii Horii to reassemble for this one. Our three demands: Give us a convoluted (but not overly complicated) story that builds on the ideas laid down in both of the Chrono games, a cool combo-driven battle system, and half a dozen well-developed characters rather than 40 half-baked ones.

• Final Fantasy Tactics II

  Sequel to: Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions (PSP, 2008)
  

  Technically, Final Fantasy Tactics has had a few portable sequels (one Game Boy Advance, one on DS). The problem is that both were Final Fantasy Advance titles, which makes them but faint shadows of the original Tactics. Now is the time for Square to put things right with a true Tactics follow-up, one rife with political intrigue, complex characters, and dense mechanics that don’t parcel out player progression with oblique systems and a high reliance on random drops. No, Tactics II would be a game worthy of its Ivalice peers, sophisticated and intricate. And we’d love to see it take advantage of the 3DS hardware’s built-in networking features to passively swap active custom parties between systems to give players a chance to battle the deadliest teams that random passersby have to offer.

• Gargoyle’s Quest III

  Sequel to: Demon’s Crest (SNES, 1994)
  

  All but forgotten two decades on, Gargoyle’s Quest was one of the first truly great original creations for Game Boy. A spin-off of the Ghosts ‘N Goblins series, it put players in control of the infamous Red Arremer, Firebrand, on a quest to liberate the demon world from even worse bad guys. Enhancing innovative platforming action with a splash of RPG depth, Gargoyle’s Quest was an excellent portable game followed up by both a direct NES sequel and a brilliant Super NES successor, Demon’s Crest. Nothing has been heard of the series since, and it’s high time for Capcom to change that by bringing the challenging open-world design of that last, grim, 16-bit masterpiece back to handhelds where it all began. The series’ core play — tough platforming through dangerous territory crammed with vicious foes — is timeless, and the Mode 7 flight sequences from Demon’s Crest are perfect candidates for a true 3D facelift.

• Geograph Seal 2: Totally Not Jumping Flash 4, Nope

  Sequel to: Geograph Seal (X68000, 1994)
  

  Few series would benefit more from an upgrade to immersive 3D than the Jumping Flash! games… though, of course, as a Sony franchise (and a forgotten one at that), it will never appear on a Nintendo system. Don’t despair, though! Before Sony entered the hardware market, Jumping Flash! developers Exact laid the groundwork for their PlayStation series with a game called Geograph Seal. Don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of it. Geograph Seal was only released for Japanese PCs. Despite its obscurity, it’s reputed to be, essentially, a pre-polygonal Jumping Flash! — which is to say, quality stuff. We’re not sure if Exact is still around (though we do know they changed their name to Sugar and Rockets somewhere along the way), but we’d like to suggest a Geograph Seal sequel as a back door for the creators of one of Sony’s first great franchises to sneak their way over to 3DS, where their talent for creating games about height, depth, and judging massive bounding leaps would be a perfect match for the 3D visual capabilities of Nintendo’s upcoming handheld.

• Henry Hatsworth 2

  Sequel to: Henry Hatsworth and the Amazing Adventure (DS, 2009)
  

  Great portable games from western developers — especially great portable games that aren’t just tepid spinoffs of existing console franchises — are a tragically rare thing. So, Electronic Arts’ Tiburon studio definitely did us a solid when they created the quirky and addictive Henry Hatsworth, which combined tough-as-nails platforming action with equally tricky puzzle mechanics. (That’s “puzzle” in the “matching blocks” sense, by the way, not the “complex Zelda dungeons” sense.) A 3DS sequel is just the thing this cult hit needs — not to shift the platforming into 3D, because that would just be unwieldy. Rather, we’d like to see the puzzle aspect shift into the third dimension while complementing the basic 2D action. Sure, it’s a tall order, but we have faith in Mr. Hatsworth’s creators.