i was really boutta come back and give this a low 8 and then that ending hit, got damn. might be a little on the short side but that's all the more reason to play it if you haven't yet.

if possible:
- go in completely blind. even if you know some stuff that happens i doubt it's the entire picture
- try to play on an actual DS. emu is fine but the compression they used on some of the fmv cutscenes is a little jank when blown up to the size of a monitor

This is a super hard game to rate, especially since I believe that the best (and only reasonable way to play on a world for more than 2 hours) is modded. The base game is good, but damn if I'm not tired of it after probably at least two thousand hours of it. Would recommend Material Energy^3 and Questing Mayhem.

update from Several years into the future:
vanilla survival is actually legit maybe like a 4 or 5/10. boring as shit and there's nothing to do. BUT mods make this game really good, and so do all the servers with minigames and whatnot. Adventure maps are great as well, don't know how much those really exist anymore but they're always fun. Everything here is good except the actual "main" game and it sucks that so many devs have taken the wrong message from this game's success and just made soooo many shitty, boring survival crafting games lol