Mine has to be Dragon Quest: Rocket Slime, a DS spin off of the Dragon Quest series that sees you playing as a slime operating a tank and rescuing the people from your town. You run around the overworld, collecting items to use as ammunition and saving money to upgrade your tank. The art and music are just as great as you’d expect from the Dragon Quest series. It made fantastic use of the DS’s dual screens. It’s also written for a younger audience, so a lot of it is just really silly and fun! Try it out for sure, I’m so sad there’s no sequel :(
X-beyond the frontier got me into space games as a kid. Had trading, piracy, fighting, ship building, factory ownership. Great series, and they made more after that. I’ve never met a single person that has played that game before.
I played that a lot, also the second and third parts.
I remember starting the first game, I had no clue what to do and I put it aside again. Then I tried again, somehow got over the extremely high entry barrier in terms of difficulty (or so I remember) and I loved it. That feeling when you got your first decent ship or later on stations… It was a wild ride.
Literally, my favorite game as a child. Glad you enjoyed it too!