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

That’s why it’s no surprise that the game lineup for Apple’s iPhone has been so boring. 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 formulas, like defending your tower from invading enemies (be they spaceships, dragons or zombies) or matching colored items, à la Bejeweled.

Which is all by way of explaining how dumbfounded, flabbergasted and just plain 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’s representatives, the game will also run on Apple’s iPad, but does not include any additional features or graphics for it.)

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 role-playing game that happens to run on the iPhone.

Chaos Rings is the vanguard of what Nintendo, the maker of the fabulously popular DS handheld console, and Sony, the maker of the PlayStation Portable, should have been fearing the last several years: that eventually major developers and publishers like Square Enix would start making iPhone-exclusive titles every bit as professional and polished as the games for their own systems. Chaos Rings costs $12.99 at Apple’s App Store  expensive for an iPhone game  but this product would easily find buyers at $29.99 on the DS or PlayStation Portable.