They're PC titles originally.
Europa Universalis was originally an insanely complicated board game that required literally months to play completely. There's a lot of micromanagement and diplomacy involved. EU2 took the game even further and greatly expanded on the number of scenarios and playable empires. In the original board game you were restricted to basically Austria, France, Spain, Portugal, England, Russia and Holland. EU2 you could play as virtually any minor nationstate on the planet (like the Palatinate, the Golden Horde, Ethiopia, etc). There's nothing in console gaming quite like it... its kind of like Koei's Romance of the Three Kingdoms Series, but much, much deeper. Its easily the deepest historical strategy game in existance, and while you can play a "beer and skittles" style game with faster time and complete it in a couple of days, to truly appreciate the full depth you can set it to a month a minute and a single game will require 80 hours of play time. The whole game is played with a mouse, so you can imagine how well suited it would be to a touch screen interface.
Multiplayer EU2 is possible, but generally tough to do, because it requires the players to dedicate a long time to playing it. I had a couple of occasions where I managed to get together a 4-5 player EU2 marathon, but invariably someone would bail on us when the Protestant Reformation hits. I just don't see multiplayer as a priority in the DS version.
The best way I can describe Disciples is as a cross between Heroes of Might and Magic and the Warlords series. It's a well-balanced TBS that's very fun single or multiplayer. Its a very deep game in its own right (considerably moreso than HOMM, though never quite as critically acclaimed), and again is well suited to a touch screen.
Multiplayer in Disciples 2 also requires a fair amount of time, but its more like "a few hours", not "a few hours a night for a month" like EU2... I'd really like to see an online multiplayer option here, because I think it would add a lot.
As I said before, I've never actually played JA2, but its a strategy game with some heavy RPG elements, and I've heard a lot of good things about it.
Topic: Three More Insanely Great DS titles for this year (Read 3480 times)
