There are much better DS games out there, go with Advance Wars or MKDS or wait for Pokemon Diamond. This is total crap.

User Rating: 2.2 | Lost Magic DS
At the time of writing this, I have played up to level 8 and my play time is 1 hr 16 min, which IMO is long enough. I stupidly believed the Gamespot review and bought this one from EBay, so I’m glad to say I didn’t lose too much money on this. The problem I have with this game is that it feels totally like a GBA game with the exception of the touch-screen spell-casting. Everything feels so unimpressive. It totally under-utilizes the powerful, better-than-N64 DS hardware. The graphics could have been done on the SNES. In fact at times it reminded me of Secret of Mana, because most of the enemies look like they have been ripped off from that game. The gameplay is basically travel to the next battlefield in the route, fight some monsters, level up, watch some crap cutscene with stupid, childish dialogue, repeat. It doesn’t have any towns to wander around in like FF or CT. It’s more like HOMM except the fighting is a bit more real-time.

Most people will buy this one for the single-player, so the multiplayer probably isn’t going to be the focus here, but I think they missed out on having a co-op mode. All you get is duel. Not very original.

Does it have any good points? The battle system is okay. Not amazing, just okay. Its 1/2 RTS, 1/2 RPG. You fight by clicking on your kid and your pokemon-type monsters and moving them around, and attack the enemies with your spells while your pokemon fight with their bare hands. Your kid doesn’t even have any melee attack. Lame. The only decent aspect of the presentation is the music, but even that gets dull after you hear it for the 30th time because they only really use one tune, apart from the battle theme.

To be honest I wouldn’t even recommend you waste your time renting this one. I feel like I totally wasted my time and money and from now on I will be more careful about believing the Gamespot score. Poor effort, Taito. We’re on DS now, the GBA was last generation. (Marking it down because they ripped off SoM, one of my favourite SNES games)