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RPGs have been bountiful on the DS and PSP as of late. We've seen plenty of turn-based RPGs: Suikoden Tierkreis (DS), Brave Story: New Traveler (PSP), The Legend of Heroes series (PSP), and some Square Enix remakes. There have been just as many tactical RPGs: Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions (PSP), the Luminous Arc series (DS), Drone Tactics (DS), and Jeanne d'Arc (PSP). Along with those titles, we have had lots of original and hybrid titles: Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor (DS), Knights in the Nightmare (DS), and The World Ends With You (DS). There are lots of dungeon crawlers and hack-and-slash RPGs as well, so it looks like everything is covered, but what's missing? We have a severe lack of western RPGs on portable systems.
We have no portable Elder Scrolls games, nothing like Mass Effect, nor do we have any sight of anything like them. There was talk of The Elder Scrolls Travels: Oblivion making a PSP debut, but that is most likely vaporware since it has been at least two years since there was any news on it. We've seen nothing from BioWare in this realm either, so why not? I can understand that the DS is not a graphical powerhouse, but who says a game has to be graphically impressive to be good? The PSP is a much more likely candidate for a game like this, as it has had first and third person hack-and-slash RPGs, but still even this system remains lacking. So why are they missing?
I honestly don't know the answer. I can say that most of the time games like Oblivion, Fallout 3, or Mass Effect have lots of exploration in huge worlds and that kind of experience isn't always wanted on a smaller system, but why not? I think the market is there. RPGamers are playing dungeon crawlers, tactical RPGs, and action RPGs on these two little systems, so why not an open world exploration RPG? I think we have an untapped market here, and I doubt I'm alone in this. I'm not calling for a Dragon Quest IX-style move of a main series to a portable console, but a portable side story would be ideal and could help to bide the time between major releases. So the only question for companies like Bethesda and BioWare is, why not?
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