There's a Chaos Rings trilogy pack getting a physical retail release in Japan for the Vita. My fingers are vehemently crossed that that little treat makes its way Westward. I have yet to play any of the games due to a combination of my lack of ownership of a phone capable of running them, and my dislike of digital distribution – but they're developed by my beloved Media Vision (the folks behind Wild Arms), so I'd relish the opportunity to own and play the franchise.

There are a few high-budget mobile games around — or more accurately, games with a strong degree of technical proficiency — but the trouble is that in most cases they simply don't have the gameplay to match the assets.

Take something like the popular Infinity Blade, for example. When that Unreal Engine tech demo first launched for iPhone and showed everyone that yes, it was indeed possible to have "console-quality" (whatever that means) visuals on a mobile phone, everyone collectively shat their pants and started sounding the death-knell for dedicated handhelds. Infinity Blade, of course, turned out to be approximately 15 minutes long and feature roughly as much interactivity as those old pre-rendered CD-ROM games of the early '90s, and then expect you to play those same 15 minutes over and over and over and over again until you had either ground your way to the best weapons and subsequent victory or, in later patches, handed over the cash to skip all that pesky playing the game and just beef up without effort.

It's far from the only example like this, either — The Drowning is a more recent example of something that looked great (i.e. visually) but totally failed to live up to its potential in terms of gameplay depth or true longevity.

Good point on Chaos Rings! I haven't played the subsequent games but I enjoyed the first one a lot, and was more than happy to pay the "premium" price for it, which an audience who had become accustomed to free or £0.99 games initially balked at. I'd much rather pay £20, £30, £40 for a polished, full-length game that respects my time and doesn't expect me to continue paying to continue playing, and rather than going along with mobile's race to the bottom since the App Store's launch, I've actually found myself more willing to pay a premium for quality experiences — usually on dedicated platforms.

As you say, though, it's a market thing. The smartphone audience is vast and, despite the best efforts of both Apple and certain Android handset manufacturers, doesn't have a particularly strong majority of what we'd call "gamers" — i.e. people who have grown up with Sony, Nintendo, Sega and Microsoft systems. Instead, the majority is a new breed of player who treat games the same way as they treat Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and whatever else they have on their — simple timewasters to while away a minute or two while waiting for a bus or as a means of pretending to be busy and avoid a conversation with someone else.

Some traditional "gamers" do have smartphones, but in most cases these people have other platforms too. And so long as we continue to have superior gaming experiences on 3DS and Vita, my phone will continue with its current role as "The Internet In My Pocket" while my on-the-go gaming time will continue to be 3DS and Vita-based.

I've enjoyed Square Enix/MediaVision's Chaos Rings series, which debuted on iOS and, at the time, had revolutionary production values. Heck, I'd even argue that the second game has better production values than most mobile games today, with its excellent soundtrack. It's a series of RPGs that cost what people would consider "premium" price for a phone game (*gasp* $16.99 each at debut), but contains no microtransactions whatsoever and were actually enjoyable as short-but-sweet turn-based RPGs ("short" here meaning ~20 hours). But I guess listing Chaos Rings is kind of cheating, because I played the JP Vita ports. The first game you could kind of tell that it was made to be quick and easy for mobile audiences (bosses die in 2-3 turns if you know your elemental rock-paper-scissors, and there are immersion-breaking block puzzles shoehorned into the dungeons), but the second game has challenge appropriate for a full-fledged RPG, as well as a rather nice story. The fact that the third game came out for both phones and the Vita at the same time suggests that the audience for this type of game is still on the dedicated handheld console side, though.

I tried searching on the App Store for other games like the Chaos Rings series and came out empty-handed. Even though most smartphones are more powerful than the 3DS (and the higher-end ones than the Vita, even), it seems like nobody actually utilizes that power to make high-budget games because the market doesn't demand it.