If you have a soft spot for turn-based role-playing games but loathed everything "Final Fantasy XIII" stood for, there could scarcely be a more different game than "Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies," which takes a few superficially backward steps but cherishes the things that, in 2010 just as in 1986, ultimately matter most.

"FFXIII" is eye candy overload, but an arguably toxic appetite for storytelling overloads the game with scenes over which players have no effect. "Skies," meanwhile, takes a visual dive from its predecessor by migrating from the Playstation 2 to the Nintendo DS, and the story heads down a path that's practically boilerplate by genre standards.

But that open-ended sparseness allows "Skies" to give players more control from the start than "FFXIII" arguably provides in its lifetime.

"Skies" lets players not only name the characters in their party, but also design them using a surprisingly thorough character editor. The story that follows might be one that RPGs have been telling since their inception, but it stars whomever players want it to star. And while scenes that use the DS' real-time 3-D capabilities aren't in the same league as "FFXIII's" prerendered scenes, they're more personalized and, by extension, far more rewarding over the game's long haul.

The customization bent also complements the game's most impressive innovation: co-op play. Up to four players can team up wirelessly (local only, and everyone needs a copy of the game), and the game is surprisingly liberal with regard to what happens. Players can join and part as they please, regardless of experience levels and in-game progress.

For most, the 25 (main quest) to 100-plus (everything) hours needed to turn "Skies" inside out would be almost impossible to invest under inflexible conditions.The decision to take the game down the portable route looks like genius. A considerable time investment is needed before everything the game offers is freely available, but "Skies" is exponentially more freely explorable than "FFXIII's" depressing straight line. Being able to continually chip away at it more than compensates for whatever fidelity the graphics would have gained on flashier hardware.

But if you don't love "Dragon Quest," "Skies" won't be the gust of wind that turns the boat around. Impressively large and intelligently innovative though it may be, this ultimately is the same general pattern of turn-based battling game play and storytelling that has subsisted for nearly 25 years.

"Skies" excels at doing those things by balancing challenge, elegance and depth in ways few turned-based RPGs can, but not so much that it changes the game for anyone who doesn't love it already.