Er... Cooking Mama is a hack&slash? Haha.

What ?! Whaaat !?

You said it was a hack&slash in your post.

I'm in a mood for some DS games again. I'm having hard time finding The Dark Spire + soundtracks at a decent price. Dammit.

I'm also interested in a Pokemon game, Etrian Odyssey and Advance wars.

Oh, has anybody played Emily the Strange ?

If you haven't played Pokemon Black (or White) they are both outstanding. As well, Pokemon Ranger: Guardian Signs was very well done (though I'm only half way through it).

I'm also working on Okami-den, which is awesome.

I keep getting the temptation to get Soulsliver or the other one of the remakes of gold and sliver from the golden area of pokemon on the DS (the chance to play without having to have my spine contorted into horrible positions to get good light ;)).

Black and White are tempting ish - kinda...

HeartGold and SoulSilver are enormous, even by Pokemon game standards.

This, this, a thousand times this. I still haven't finished Kanto and I have ~110 hours on my file.

Ghost Trick is an amzing game.

Agreed. This and 999 are the two best DS games I've played.

I just bought a used copy of The Dark Spire today. I waited many months just to see if I could get a good deal on the game + OST version. Well, think again. The prices are outrageous, even for the regular version.

Never, EVER leave an Atlus game to buy later. They always have small print runs so more often than not they run out and you have to buy them used at horrid prices. Some games lately have ran the luck of Atlus ordering new print runs after they sell out (Radiant Historia and Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor Overclocked) but the rest tend to last very little time on the shelves, particularly rpgs.

If u haven't played it already - try Suikoden Tierkreis. It's great.
Gamplay is your standard turnbased JRPG, but the story is quite intriguing and motivated me even more than DQ9 to play it through.

And u have the feature of all Suikoden games - the 108 playable characters - only downside though with that many characters the most of them don't get any more background-story than the initial recruiting and maybe one or two character specific quests.

That's good to know, thank you. I looked at their catalog, and I saw a bunch of games that I'd like to have.

Radiant Historia is one of my favourite DS RPGs.

The time travel and split universes are an interesting mechanic but I really enjoyed the addition of grid/layout to the traditional turn based combat. It makes no attempt to break free of JRPG tropes though, right down to the final boss.