"Chaos Rings" shines on iPhone

In video games, the best things rarely come in small packages.

That is why it's not a surprise just how boring the game lineup for Apple's iPhone has been. Small American developers have preferred to focus on trying to get rich quick with 99-cent applications that -- they hope -- just happen to catch a wave of buzz for a week or two. The result has been little more than a parade of shlockware: uninspired knockoffs of the same small set of game formulas, such as defending your tower from invading enemies or matching colored items, à la "Bejeweled."

Which is all by way of explaining how dumbfounded, flabbergasted and impressed I have been with "Chaos Rings," the sprawling new role-playing game for the iPhone and iPod Touch from Square Enix of Japan. (According to the company, the game also will run on Apple's iPad but does not include additional features.)

"Chaos Rings" is the most technically advanced, visually captivating and extensively designed and written game yet made for the iPhone. Frankly, given the meager competition, it would almost be damning "Chaos Rings" with faint praise to call it an "iPhone game" at all. Rather, "Chaos Rings" is a solid, legitimate, Japanese-style single-player RPG that happens to run on the iPhone.

"Chaos Rings" is the vanguard of what Nintendo, the maker of the popular DS handheld console, and Sony, the maker of the PlayStation Portable, should have been fearing the past several years: Eventually, major developers and publishers such as Square Enix would start making iPhone- exclusive titles every bit as professional and polished as the games for their systems. "Chaos Rings" costs $13 at Apple's App Store -- expensive for an iPhone game -- but this product would easily find buyers at $30 on the DS or PSP.

I'll go even further. As an overall entertainment and design experience, "Chaos Rings" is more successful and ultimately more enjoyable than "Final Fantasy XIII," the big-budget, high-definition home console blockbuster that Square Enix released in North America last month.

"Chaos Rings" doesn't say "Final Fantasy" on it, but it is a "Final Fantasy" game nonetheless. In "Chaos Rings," as in all "Final Fantasy" titles, you will spend hours in tactical battles against all manner of incredible creatures as you try to unravel the back stories of the game's various characters.

What is shocking, however, is that "Chaos Rings" is actually more open-ended and more empowering for the player than "Final Fantasy XIII." In that recent game, the player spends dozens and dozens of hours on entirely linear paths with no ability to decide where to go or what to do next. In "Chaos Rings," by contrast, you must first choose between two completely different sets of characters and story arcs. The game soon opens up to give the player multiple choices of what sort of environments to explore and what sort of foes to battle.

After 12 hours with "Final Fantasy XIII," I was already gritting my teeth at the tedium, no matter how gorgeous it was. After nearly the same amount of time with "Chaos Rings," I'm champing at the bit to keep going. The game's three-dimensional animation is by far the best I have seen on the iPhone. Moreover, the controls are easy enough to use that I could hold my iPhone in one hand and play while standing in a moving subway and holding the overhead bar with my other (and missing my stop because I was so into the game, naturally).

Battles are turn-based, not real time, which suits the game's portable context because you never know when you might have to look away to do something like talk to a real person.