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Steadily but surely, the DS is becoming the mobile gaming system of choice for fans of classic Japanese RPGs. Last year's DS remake of Final Fantasy III was a minor success, encouraging Square-Enix not just to forge ahead with the two updates we're looking at today, but the upcoming conversion of Square's SNES era masterpiece, Chrono Trigger. Sure, the PSP has some greats, including Final Fantasy Tactics and Valkyrie Profile, but the DS seems to be attracting the lion's share of the big names. The fact that the next instalment in the central Dragon Quest saga will be a DS exclusive only confirms the cachet of the console. After all, Dragon Quest, not Final Fantasy, is the bigger property in Japan.

Historically speaking, these two are important games. Only a handful of Dragon Quest games before Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King were ever translated into English, and none of those actually made it over to Europe. Dragon Quest: Chapters of the Chosen is an update of Dragon Quest IV, meaning it's the first chance most of us in the UK will have to see one of the games that built the series' reputation. Final Fantasy IV (or Final Fantasy II as it was called in the US) earned a legendary status over here, but no official release until it emerged as part of the Final Fantasy Anthology on the original Playstation. That, however, was a fairly straight retro port. This is an all-new, 3D conversion made just for the DS.

All of this means a lot to the sort of old-school RPG fans who know their Xenogears from their Vagrant Story, but these releases are good news for anyone with a DS. There's something about the take anywhere convenience of Nintendo's handheld that makes it ideal for sinking into an epic RPG, and there's nothing like a big adventure when you've got time to kill while travelling around. Maybe one day we'll see a handheld Ultima or Baldur's Gate, but until then the big Japanese franchises are about as good as it gets.

Final Fantasy IV is hailed as one of the all-time-great games in the series, and for good reason. This was the game where the Japanese RPG started to get ambitious, rejecting the classic 'orphans on a quest' storylines of yore for bigger dramas encompassing huge casts, complex, multi-threaded plots and lashings of mildly overwrought melodrama. By today's standards – and even reproduced in 3D – it's all rather primitive and cliched stuff, but at the time this was groundbreaking. Even now the plot, concerning a heroic knight who rebels against his king's increasingly despotic military campaigns, has a resonance that other Japanese RPGs of the era couldn't hope to match. If you want to see where Final Fantasy VII evolved from, just look here.

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