Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin DS

I bought this without having fully finished the previous game: Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow. (I'm on the last boss there and got distracted by everything else)

Here we have Jonathan Morris and Charlotte Aulin, with a huge array of weapons, spells for Charlotte, "Dual Crush" powers for both of them, and so many outfit items that the characters usually ended up with one set for the whole game (until I found a new item that was better!)

I realized I tend to always play with the same weapon too. There's an awesome directional whip that you find somewhere, I played with that almost the whole game.
The levels seem a little less unique than the first game, maybe because I'm used to the whole concept by now.
But it's fun to solve puzzles that require both characters, and I got past the point where I would have screwed up and got the bad ending. On to the good ending!
Playing this as opposed to Lunar Knights -- it's never confusing as to how to equip something or what its stats are.
It's fun to switch between characters but I don't switch as much as I do in Lunar Knights.
The gameplay is just all around fun -- I don't have the awkwardness as in Lunar Knights. Controls amazingly, jumping around feels very fluid.
I love the detail in the artwork in this game. It's all 2d but you can see that every pixel has been well loved.

Final Fantasy III DS

Jax, Milo, Arc, and Wesley...
My four adventurers in Final Fantasy III. Only Arc has his original name given in the game. The screenshot does not reflect the jobs my characters had.

I thought this game was going to be frustratingly hard because it was reviewed as an "old school RPG" or else almost boring because of the turn based battle.
But it was actually really fun and very addictive. I'm proud to say I made it through to the final Cloud of Darkness and actually beat the game!

Okami!

Okami Amerasu, mother of us all...
This and Final Fantasy III are probably my two favorite games of 2006, not including the general excitement of actually having a Wii.

I actually finished this as well - almost 100 hours of gameplay overall, with trying to get various side-quests done on top of the main storyline.

You get to play as a wolf-god, who can use brush powers to actually change the environment of the game - for example, hit a shoulder button, and slash the screen with the analog stick, and you've cut a fruit down from a tree (or killed an enemy, or split open a rock...)

Beautiful cell-shaded artwork as if you are running around inside a Japanese watercolor.
And it's just plain fun to play. Not too hard, and not really too easy either (at least for me). I just love this game.