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After the Game Boy’s legendary reign as the top handheld gaming device of its time, Nintendo had to think big for its successor. It did just that with the Nintendo DS, a handheld with a dual-screen design, touchscreen controls, and a major increase in graphical power. However, the best Nintendo DS games were the ones that took advantage of the new hardware to deliver unique experiences to players, and there was no shortage of these titles during Nintendo’s second handheld era.
It didn’t take too long for the unique new clamshell handheld to garner a legion of fans when it first hit the scene in 2024. We’ve rounded up these all-time classics below–a list of what we feel are the 25 best DS games, assembled in alphabetical order. This includes numerous Nintendo DS exclusives like the gripping mystery game Hotel Dusk: Room 215, the superb Pokemon HeartGold and SoulSilver, and the trippy time-travel RPG Radiant Historia.
Longtime Game Boy fans were perhaps a bit skeptical of the Nintendo DS initially, and we’re sure that the handheld’s backwards compatibility with GBA games helped convert hesitant buyers. But the Nintendo DS had a remarkable six-plus-year run thanks to a steady stream of great games and multiple clever revisions to the hardware–DS Lite, DSi, and DSi XL.
Games that took advantage of its touchscreen and microphone were capable of creating unique gaming experiences, the first-party lineup was a showcase of imagination, and later models of the console streamlined the design to make the DS a pocket-friendly entertainment device to carry around town in your pocket.
Nintendo would follow up the DS console with the Nintendo 3DS in 2011, upgrading the dual-screen approach to handheld gaming with a glasses-free 3D screen on the top. Thanks to the 2DS successor offering many of the same features as its predecessor, the Nintendo 3DS was backwards compatible with DS games, allowing users to bring their favorite games from that generation into the new Nintendo handheld gaming era. Sadly, the Nintendo Switch doesn’t offer any form of backwards compatibility with the Nintendo DS games library, and nothing has been announced for the Switch 2 console yet, though it will support GameCube games through Switch 2’s Online service.
It’s worth noting that the Nintendo DS family became the best-selling line of handhelds of all time–although it might soon have to give up this position to the Nintendo Switch. Thousands of games were published on the DS, but out of all of them, we’ve rounded up 25 of the best that deserve to be in any Nintendo hall of fame thanks to the imaginative design and gripping gameplay that they brought to the table.
