10 Nintendo DS JRPGs That Are Fun from the Start

2 hours ago 2

Published Apr 3, 2026, 2:06 PM EDT

Daniel has been playing games for entirely too many years, with his Steam library currently numbering nearly 750 games and counting. When he's not working or watching anime, he's either playing or thinking about games, constantly on the lookout for fascinating new gameplay styles and stories to experience. Daniel has previously written lists for TheGamer, as well as guides for GamerJournalist, and he currently covers tech topics on SlashGear.

During the heyday of the Nintendo DS, the handheld served as a rather comfortable home for JRPGs. I had my fair share of long car and plane trips that were made slightly more bearable by the presence of such dense, engrossing games, of which the platform had no shortage. That said, while it’s great to have a dense game on a long trip, the first time you boot it up, you’d probably want to get to the meat of things sooner rather than later.

10 JRPGS With Short Runtimes

These games are for those who love JRPGs but don't want to spend months on the same playthrough.

JRPGs, by their nature, tend to be a little front-loaded with dialogue, cutscenes, and tutorials, so you’re almost never going to have fun from the moment you turn it on (the fun of enjoyable dialogue notwithstanding, of course). All that said, I like to think that the developers of the many DS JRPGs understood that, with a handheld console, should come comparatively more brisk introductions. These are the DS JRPGs that managed to get you into the thick of things in a relatively timely manner, all so you could promptly draw your attention away from your sibling jabbing you or the smelly fellow in the seat in front of yours.

The Professor Would Prefer You Not Ask Questions

As story is often one of the most vital components of a JRPG, many entries in the genre can take a little while to get through their introductory, expository cutscenes and dialogue sections to the actual gameplay. Contact, however, takes things in almost the complete opposite direction from this norm, rocketing through the intro to reach the game as quickly as possible.

When you first boot up Contact, you’re introduced to the mysterious Professor, who asks you a few personal questions, then gives you a very brief lowdown on what he needs you and your proxy Terry to do for him. The Professor’s explanation is intentionally a bit vague and disjointed; he’s clearly not giving you the full picture, and Terry even less. He even goes as far as asking you not to reveal yourself to Terry, hustling him out into the world and into fights in about 15 minutes.

Contact is a very strange, very meta game, preferring to gradually immerse you in the world as you go rather than front-ending you with set dressing. It’s a big component of what makes this forgotten DS classic so memorable.

9 Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker

Go to an Island, Get a Monster

Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker

Dragon Quest is the archetypal JRPG franchise, with the original all but having written the book on how to put one of these things together. Dragon Quest has never been particularly shy about chucking you right into the deep end of its combat systems, though on the DS specifically, the most quick-to-action entry is probably Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker.

Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker gives you some quick exposition on the concept of monster scouts and a big tournament for them, then swiftly sends our hero off to recruit his first monster and voyage to a nearby island to find more. Monsters: Joker’s combat system is similarly simple to that of the mainline series, with the only major difference being that you command monsters to fight for you, so the game doesn’t need to hit you too hard with the tutorial hammer at the start.

Side note, Monsters: Joker was one of the first 3D Dragon Quest games to have on-field enemy symbols rather than random encounters, so if you just want to progress the story, you don’t have to get sucked into a bunch of battles you don’t want to fight. Of course, then you won’t have any recruited monsters, so you kind of have to strike your own balance there.

8 Etrian Odyssey

There’s Dungeons to Explore

The best kind of JRPG is one that can show you what differentiates it from its contemporaries up front, rather than making you wade through a bunch of story before actually getting to see what you’ll be doing for the next thirty hours. Etrian Odyssey’s central gimmick, for example, is its mapped-out 3D dungeons, and it wants you to experience this gimmick pronto.

Etrian Odyssey kicks off pretty much right away, giving you a couple of text boxes’ worth of exposition before sending you to meet a few people around town and descending into the labyrinth. While there is some tutorializing to get through once you’re down there, you can at least get a good idea of what the game is going to be throwing at you, experiencing how movement in the labyrinth works, how to make your own maps, avoiding enemies, and so on.

Obviously, your mileage may vary, but at the very least, the first time I saw this 3D dungeon, I already knew I wanted to see where this was going. I’d certainly call that having fun, wouldn’t you?

7 Inazuma Eleven

This Ball was Made for Kicking

I don’t watch sports, soccer included, so I don’t really have a frame of reference for how long it takes a typical soccer match to start popping off. I would imagine a soccer-based JRPG like Inazuma Eleven to take longer than whatever that typical time would be, but in actuality, it gets going surprisingly quickly.

You get to play your first soccer match as early as the game’s prologue section. You don’t have a proper team together, so it’s going to be a little slapdash, but at the very least, you get to experience the bones of the game’s stat-based soccer system, which helps set some strong expectations for what’ll be coming a bit later.

Part of Inazuma Eleven’s strategy for keeping you engaged is peppering its dialogue and exploratory segments with full anime cutscenes, which have a surprisingly decent production level for a DS soccer JRPG. It all helps to really sizzle the story and give you a better idea of the characters, which in turn makes assembling and managing your team feel a little more impactful.

6 Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor

Another Day, Another Demon

Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor

A frequent plot theme you see throughout the Shin Megami Tensei franchise is the sudden departure from normal reality into the abject supernatural. People are just walking around in Tokyo one moment, and the next moment, boom, demons. The strategy JRPG spin-off, Devil Survivor, puts this jarring shift in a particularly stark contrast.

Not long after the story begins, you and your crew of ostensibly normal teenagers are suddenly beset by a gaggle of demons and forced to defend yourself. After you defeat these demons, they’re recruited to your side and become your first partners. Badda-bing, badda-boom, you’ve got demons at your beck and call, not even 20 minutes in.

Following this initial battle, many plot elements are established in rapid succession, setting the overall stage for the demon outbreak quarantine, the emerging vigilante groups, and the little numbers over everyone’s heads showing when they’ll die. The game actually hits you with quite a bit of both plot and gameplay almost immediately, but if it’s trying to get you invested quickly, it definitely works.

5 Chrono Trigger

It’s a Classic for a Reason

One of the most legendary JRPGs of all time is, without question, Chrono Trigger, originally on the SNES. It’s got a great story, great characters, great combat, just great all around. You could imagine, when they released an upgraded port of it to the DS, how excited everyone who had already played it was to go around again, but even if you hadn’t played the game before, it was still a milestone experience.

The game starts by literally kicking you out of bed and telling you to go to a fair, where there’s not only all kinds of fun minigames to play and characters to meet like Marle, but you even get a quick taste of the game’s combat system by fighting Gato, while also hearing his awesome theme song. Even if you disregard the fair entirely and run right into the past, you’ll be fighting goblins in the forest inside of five to ten minutes, so no matter how you play, the game will inevitably get its hooks into you.

Honestly, the DS version of Chrono Trigger is so good, it’s kind of irritating that all the current ports we have are based on the original instead. Yeah, the original’s great, I just wish we could play the optimized version instead.

4 Mega Man Star Force

Light-Speed Connections

Mega Man Star Force: Pegasus

The Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS were the definitive turf of Mega Man and his many spin-offs back in the day. Whether you wanted platforms or JRPGs, Mega Man had both in spades. In fact, the DS was home to an entire trilogy of Mega Man JRPGs, the Star Force series, starting with the first Star Force three-pack, Dragon, Pegasus, and Leo.

Compared to some of the other games on this list, Star Force takes a teensy bit longer to get going, as it needs some time to set up how miserable and lonely Geo Stellar is. Once he meets Omega-Xis and needs to stop a runaway train, though, then you get to transform into Mega Man for the first time and bust some viruses in 3D, really feeling the difference from the Battle Network games in the process.

Following this initial setup, the game settles into a straightforward episodic format, presenting various EM monsters of the week and their companion, virus-filled dungeons. I don’t know about you, but I like monster-of-the-week shows, so it grabbed me right quick.

3 The World Ends with You

Style Waits for No One

In the modern age, fads move extremely quickly. What was trendy one moment will be passé the next. It kind of tracks, then, that a game with such a big foot in the trendy vibe of Shibuya like The World Ends with You wouldn’t want to waste any time beating around the bush.

As a big part of the game’s story is Neku’s apparent amnesia before getting roped into the Reaper’s Game, it doesn’t really bother with establishing any sort of mundane status quo before things start getting weird. In less than ten minutes, you’re reading pedestrians’ minds and fighting off evil frogs in the street while awesome music plays in the background, teaming up with Shiki and learning how to draw patterns to use pins.

The whole point of the game, or at least its initial main story arc, is figuring out what the Reaper’s Game even is and why Neku is participating in it. It’s thematically appropriate to get chucked into the deep end, because it’s exactly what Neku himself is going through with this whole situation.

2 Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story

Five Minutes In and We’re Already Fighting Bowser

Mario and Luigi Bowser's Inside Story Bowser fight

Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story

The various Mario JRPGs, compared to their contemporaries, have always been a bit on the lighter side. The games’ mechanics are generally pretty simple and accessible, so that helps to get you into the action a little faster. One of the best examples of this out of all the Mario JRPGs, and arguably one of the best JRPGs on the DS, is Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story.

Bowser’s Inside Story launches into its main plot conceit almost immediately: Toads are blowing up into big balls, Peach holds a meeting to find a solution, Mario and Luigi show up, Bowser shows up, beatings ensue. The game’s tutorials can be a little more comprehensive than really necessary, but in a rarity for this genre, you can actually skip most of the tutorials wholesale, which definitely speeds things up.

More importantly, it doesn’t take long before Mario and Luigi are consumed by Bowser and you start fighting little Goomba-shaped bacteria in his gut with little interruption, followed by meandering around as Bowser himself and slugging people. The game knows what you want, and is more than happy to give it to you.

1 Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days

About as Brisk as Kingdom Hearts Can Be

Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days

Anyone who’s been with the Kingdom Hearts franchise since the beginning can probably agree that “fast” isn’t really its forte. The original game has a good hour of miscellany before you get to Traverse Town, and that’s assuming you find all the raft supplies quickly. Thankfully, the DS interquel, Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days, gets things started at least a little bit faster.

Barring its opening cutscene, there are only a few scenes’ worth of dialogue and a handful of tutorials to get through in Twilight Town before you get to start properly pummeling Heartless, eventually leading to your first proper mission about 30 minutes in. Honestly, for this series, getting to regular gameplay in 30 minutes is downright breakneck.

Said gameplay is remarkably similar to that of the mainline games, which is pretty impressive considering the DS is nowhere near as powerful a console as the PlayStation 2. It’s not a perfect 1:1 due to the console’s inherent limitations, but I can definitely say with confidence that smacking Heartless is just as fun as it always is, and that’s what matters in this case.