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10 Best Handheld Games With 100+ Hours of Content

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10 Best Handheld Games With 100+ Hours of Content
10 Best Handheld Games With 100+ Hours of Content

While games that drain hours upon hours of your time in what feels like just a few minutes are typically reserved for the big consoles and PC, you can find plenty of RPGs, simulation games, and sandboxes that fulfill that same purpose on handhelds.

You can obviously find hundreds of these on the Nintendo Switch, and especially on the Steam Deck. Still, I find it more interesting to limit it to the handhelds that came before, when technology was far more constrained, and you couldn’t just play anything on the go.

It made the few games that could achieve hundreds of hours of gameplay all the more special, so for this list, I’ll be particularly looking at games on the PSP, Vita, DS, and 3DS that can all run you well over a hundred hours, if you’re completing them.

Of course, play time is completely subjective and depends entirely on your skill, so these rankings are primarily centered on how well the game does at keeping your interest for the full hundred hours of runtime.

10 Fantasy Life

Good Job

While just taking a single run through Fantasy Life will only take a respectable 30 hours of your time, trying to 100% complete the game is an absolute behemoth of a task, due to all the unique jobs you can take on.

Every job changes the game fundamentally, giving you different tasks to do, a different character to report back to once you finish, and a bunch of new abilities and rewards for doing quests.

You’re essentially taking on twelve different, smaller RPGs, which typically take around 150 hours or longer. It’s genuinely incredibly impressive, given this is one of the earlier 3DS games.

That said, things definitely get monotonous after your first time completing one of the jobs. The dialogue feels less interesting as you go on, and the story wasn’t much to grab on to, especially after you spend a long time with it.

9 Minecraft

Cubed and Diced

Released
November 18, 2011

The amount of time you can get out of Minecraft — especially in the Vita or 3DS versions, which are quite limited — is going to vary a ton from person to person. That said, I could fill several lifetimes with the amount of hours I have in this block game.

The world is as open as you need, and after growing up on Pocket Edition before I moved over to Java, playing through the game on 3DS is wild. It’s surprisingly not anywhere near as compromised as I thought, and having a map and my inventory on the touch screen is really nice.

It’s choppy, the stuff you can do with redstone is a bit limited, and the render distance fog can tend to make it feel like you’re living through a Herobrine confirmed video from 2011 YouTube, but at the same time, I kinda love that vibe. It’s rather charming.

It brings me back to the really weird, limited version of my most played video game, and I love that. I haven’t played the Vita version myself, but everything I’ve seen of it looks perfectly fine, even if it’s limited to the Aquatic Update like the other legacy editions.

8 The World Ends With You

Not Simple Or Clean

If you haven’t already played The World Ends With You, then do yourself a favor and give it a shot, preferably on the original release on the DS or 3DS. The other, newer versions of the game just control way worse or oversimplify the main mechanic, unfortunately.

It’s a solid 25+ hour game for a single run through, but if you want to do absolutely everything the game has to offer, then you’re going to be here for upwards of 125 hours. That is, if you really want to bother with the 100% experience.

This game can be a daunting pain to complete, making you grind to max stats, find all the secret reports, buy every item from shops, do the boss rush pretty much perfectly, and achieve the max rank to get that sweet full completion.

Granted, it’s a game you can enjoy in short bursts whenever you’re waiting for something else, something that a ton of DS games do really well, and controlling two characters at once makes the game engaging enough that you could absolutely knock it out and love it.

7 Kid Icarus: Uprising

Burnt Up

Kid Icarus: Uprising is that one game that Masahiro Sakurai made that felt so totally out of his wheelhouse, yet it ended up being a masterpiece with controls that could give you early-onset arthritis if you play the game for too long.

It’s usually only around 12 hours long, which is good for your hands. But if you want to do absolutely everything, then you can either spend 90 hours or 200, depending on how keen you are on trying to re-experience a dead online multiplayer.

Just on single player content alone, doing all the missions on the hardest difficulty without dying and dropping the challenge is already a big task, but actually finding people to play the really damn fun arena fights with is even more challenging.

This game has over a hundred weapons to find, and trying to do that will frequently involve you replaying stages and trying to locate them while simultaneously not erroneously being shot to death behind the 7-11 is a very hard, very fun task.

6 Terraria

Peep The Horror

Released
May 16, 2011

As someone with around 2000 hours in Terraria, I can say it’s absolutely a game worth giving a go if you want something that will give you hundreds of hours of content. Unfortunately, neither the 3DS nor the Vita versions of Terraria are particularly ideal.

The 3DS version controls better than any of the console versions, and the Vita one runs fine, but neither of them is on the latest version of the game. However, one upside to this is that you get access to some pretty exclusive content.

Back in the day, before the 1.3 update made its way to mobile and console, Terraria had exclusive bosses, items, and enemies that would only ever appear in the console versions, and these two versions of the game are the only ones that still have those.

Plus, Terraria is still a fun time even if it’s a far older version than you’d get on PC. It’s still great for spending hundreds of hours delving into caves, shredding bosses, and actually seeing Ocram as a neat little novelty on these tiny versions of the game.

5 Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate

Beast Slayer

Not only is Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate one of the best games in the series despite being on a system that can barely run Mario Kart, but it’s also a great way to experience the MH franchise. It’s going to take you over 70 hours just to beat it, and well over 300 if you want to 100% it.

As far as traditional Monster Hunter titles go, before the massive shakeup that was Monster Hunter World, 4 Ultimate was one of the biggest and best. As long as you have the New 3DS and can use a C-stick, it also feels quite comfortable, controls-wise.

That said, as with every Monster Hunter game, you do have to trudge through movement that feels like you’re wading through a bog of molasses at the start. I get that feeling with every game in this series, though, so if that doesn’t bother you, you will probably love this game regardless.

Once you’re through the slowest part of the game, things do start picking up, feeling far more fluid and satisfying as you rank up and get better gear. If you need a game to play forever and have a 3DS to dust off, this is one of your best options.

4 The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth

Biblical Greed

The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth

Released
November 4, 2014
Multiplayer
Online Co-Op
How Long To Beat (Completionist Runs)
350 hours

While The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth is on the 3DS and Vita, neither version is ideal, but given that it’s still one of the best roguelikes of all time, it hardly matters. It’s still going to be a fun time that fits all too well on a handheld, though the Switch version is a tad better.

It’s a lot of dropping into runs, finding items that have the most vague descriptions known to man, hoping to god that they work, and dying to a random beast. Despite how cruel or frustrating it can occasionally be, it’s a hell of a lot of fun.

If you’re not the type to use a wiki even for a game as obtuse as Isaac, it’s a great thing to have on the go, get in a run real quick, and experiment with new items and synergies between those items, as well as any new unlocks you’ve obtained.

Just beating a single run will probably only take you a couple of hours, but this game is absolutely stuffed to the brim with content. Trying to see everything it has to offer can easily take you upwards of 370 hours, if not even more, and that’s not even on the most up-to-date version.

3 Xenoblade Chronicles 3D

Reyn Time

I think Xenoblade Chronicles 3D is one of the most impressive ports a Nintendo system has ever had. While seeing The Witcher 3 or DOOM on Switch is neat and all, seeing a game that pushed the Wii’s hardware past its limits on the 3DS is even crazier to me.

This is a fully 3D action RPG in an absolutely massive world that takes around 150 hours to fully complete, and it doesn’t even look half bad. The visuals and load times are downgraded from the Wii, but for the fact it’s on the 3DS alone, it feels just fine.

Sure, the Switch version is a bit prettier, and despite being terribly hard to find, the Wii version is pretty good too, but this one works, and that alone is a huge feat. The beautiful story, characters, and incredible music are intact, and having it on the go is lovely.

It works well as a handheld game for those long car rides or plane trips where you need something that will keep your interest forever. There’s always new stuff to do, massive areas to explore, and mountains of sidequests, and having it on a system this small is rather quaint.

2 Animal Crossing: New Leaf

Town Inside Me

Animal Crossing is one of those series that boomerangs in and out of my life every few years, but when I get back into it, I go for months at a time. The biggest example of this is New Leaf, which is so good that I played it for months, non-stop.

It’s one of the best life simulation type games ever made. It looks lovely, I enjoy hopping on for any festivities, and it feels like the villagers never really run out of things to say. Unlike New Horizons, I can’t get tired of New Leaf, even after hundreds of hours.

I have quite fond memories of heading to Tortimer Island and playing mini-games with my siblings for hours, and every time I play this game, it brings back that lovely time for me. It’s just a very pleasant time in general, especially with the amount of freedom you get.

You can’t change up the terrain of your island, but you get to change ordinances, make a bunch of public works projects, and it can take a hundred hours just to level up the shops and pay off your bills. It’s a lovely time, and I always wanna come back in check in when I can.

1 Persona 4 Golden

Heartbeat, Heartbreak

If the Persona series is known for one thing other than its fanbase, it’s probably the massive length of the games on a first playthrough. Just one run through Persona 4 Golden can take you 70 hours for a single playthrough, and well over 130 hours for 100% completion.

The fact that the best version of Persona 4 was stranded on the Vita for so long is wild, as this handheld that barely anyone bought held an utter gem of an RPG. Luckily, it’s available elsewhere now, but if you have a Vita, that version is still just as good as any other version.

It has one of the best casts of characters of any RPG I’ve ever played, and the social simulator part of the game is absolutely my favorite part of this entire series. The combat and dungeon crawling in general are pretty dated, but if you like older RPGs, you’ll absolutely love it.

If you have only played Persona 5, or if you haven’t touched the series at all, then playing Persona 4 Golden on the go is absolutely a great way to do it. It’s segmented by days in-game, and that means you have perfect points to start and stop whenever you pick it up.


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Author: 360 Technology Group

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