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Advancing in Years

It's the Game Boy Advance's 20th anniversary! I rarely write about the GBA but, like many of you I suspect, I have plenty of fond memories sneaking in quick sessions on Nintendo's first big successor to the Game Boy while out and about. I remember how it went from what was essentially a portable SNES - complete with way too many SNES-to-GBA conversions - to something wholly its own, with newer games taking advantage of tech that finally pushed it out of the SNES's shadow.

The temptation is to lump a whole bunch of Castlevania and Metroid games in here, but I'm going to do twenty games from twenty franchises for the twentieth anniversary just to keep things diverse. I can't promise these are all bangers: I've opted more for a mix of games that I felt were important for the history of the Game Boy Advance and of Nintendo in a broader sense, as well as those that meant more to me personally.

List items

  • No shit, Advance Wars got me my first video game industry job. The development team were in a bit of a hurry, I'd later realize, so part of the expedited interview process was to design an Advance Wars map since the game we'd be working on was a turn-based strategy game. I must've nailed it because I made the shortlist and got the job as a mid-development contractor quickly put onto level design duties. The appeal of Advance Wars is in its relative simplicity: the goal is to conquer and then retain resource-producing bases and use that income to overwhelm your opponents in unit production. As such, most maps boil down to finding the most efficient route towards gaining the upper hand. It's the 4X formula in a microcosm, taking advantage of the strengths and limitations of the portable format.

    The Advance Wars series was one of the more major new first-party IPs during the GBA era (for us in the west at least; Famicom Wars and Super Famicom Wars had long been a thing in Japan) and would also have a major presence on the Nintendo DS, the GBA's eventual successor. Sadly, it seems Intelligent Systems had put it aside by the 3DS era to focus on Fire Emblem and Paper Mario.

  • The GBA saw a total of three "IGAvania"s and Aria of Sorrow is easily the best of that trio. Following teenager Soma Cruz in an uncommon (for Castlevania) modern setting, Aria has players acquiring the souls of monsters and employing them as power-ups, offering separate slots for active skills, companion "familiars," and passive boosts. It also has the full equipment system of Symphony on top of that, giving you plenty of customization choices. It also has one of the more interesting stories and narrative twists in Castlevania canon, which its DS sequel goes on to explore in more (perhaps unnecessary) detail.

    Shout-outs also to Circle of the Moon and Harmony of Dissonance: two games that are overshadowed by the innovations and polish of Aria of Sorrow but are still excellent explormers from a foregone era when Konami and other major developers used to still make them.

  • I'm going to go out ahead of this one and say that the Eye of the Beholder game for GBA wasn't all that great. It was definitely on the languid side and it couldn't quite live up to the complex table-top ruleset of the D&D game series it homages due to a significant amount of portable-necessitated streamlining. However, it is fascinating to me how its developer Pronto Games approached the license: Eye of the Beholder has the same basic story outline as the original 1991 dungeon-crawler from Westwood, but mechanically far more closely resembles the older Gold Box series of tactical RPGs from SSI (Pool of Radiance, etc.). It jumps from a first-person exploration view to a grid-based format for battles, pitting your small group of adventurers against any number of D&D beasties in drawn-out strategic conflicts.

    Console ports of CRPGs rarely live up to the originals, and portable versions even less so given how important UI can be for navigation and how little room there is for it on a GBA's 240×160 pixel screen, but this scaled-down RPG from an untested developer took some bold steps with the source material that I found myself appreciating as a longtime CRPG fan.

  • Golden Sun was the first GBA game I can recall where it felt like it had graphical flourishes that couldn't be performed on a SNES. I'm not sure if the technical specs of the SNES necessarily back me up on that, but Golden Sun had some showy sprite-scaling and visual effects during combat that made it feel like a step above what the older system could manage. It was also a solid portable RPG, adopting a system where each playable character equips an elemental sprite (or "djinn") and that determined what kind of abilities and spells they could use, or enhanced the ones they already had in specific ways. I also remember the soundtrack being fantastic; developers Camelot employed regular Tales composer Motoi Sakuraba for the music, and so the battle themes had a similar mastery of energetic synth.

    I sadly never did get around to the sequel - though I do own the third game, Dark Dawn, released on DS - so I might need a replay if I ever decide to take on the whole series. Camelot seem to be more focused on Mario Sports games at present, but my hope is for some kind of remastered trilogy for Switch someday.

  • You might scoff, but the Hamtaro licensed games were legit. There were three of them and the first two employed this narrative-heavy adventure game format where you'd explore the world and solved puzzles in a vaguely Zelda-like manner (just without the conflict, usually), but I recall Rainbow Rescue (the second one) in particular started incorporating mini-games that could be a great deal of fun. That the third game was entirely mini-games probably gives you some indication of how well their inclusion in Rainbow Rescue was received.

    While it's worth keeping in mind that you are getting cask-strength anime UwU kawaiiness from these games, just in case you happen to be allergic to all that, the actual game design and graphical fidelity were a cut above almost any other licensed GBA game.

  • While Nintendo and their third-party partners were in the process of scaling-down and porting almost any vaguely successful console series for the Game Boy, there were a precious few that just fit the portable format that much better. Harvest Moon's unhurried daily cycle of planting and watering crops, animal husbandry, and anime wifery proved apposite for the intermittent play sessions that were often the reality of portable gaming for many. You also didn't need incredible graphics hardware to convey Harvest Moon's modest cartoon charms and the compact UI didn't detract too much from fussing around with seeds and tools.

    Best of all, there was a distaff version - More Friends of Mineral Town - in case you wanted to play a lady looking for a fine himbo to carry hay bales around without a shirt. As far as I recall the two games were otherwise the same, but it was a good early step towards acknowledging the other 50% of the GBA audience (a similar "alternative" version was available for the GameCube Harvest Moon as well).

  • If there was one genre in particular that had always thrived on portable consoles, it was the puzzle genre. Tetris and Dr. Mario were mainstays on my original Game Boy, and Kuru Kuru Kururin was probably my favorite of the batch that first emerged on GBA. Controlling a constantly-spinning craft named Helirin, the goal of the game was to maneuver it around obstacle courses filled with hazards and tricky narrow passages, using springs to alternate between clockwise and counter-clockwise rotations. It was one of those games that started easy and ramped up the difficulty in no time at all, demanding a level of precision that could be frustrating and rewarding in equal measure.

    Developer 8ing (Eighting), comprised of former Compile and Toaplan staff, would go on to make many anime tie-in games after this though it seems they were most recently spotted helping Nintendo with the Pikmin 3 Switch remaster. If Nintendo ever decides to leave the future of Pikmin in their hands, I'm confident that some ex-Compile folk will know how best to handle a bunch of tiny multi-colored bean creatures.

  • Strange to think given how prominent the Zelda franchise tends to be on any given Nintendo console, but The Minish Cap (it took me a while to see the pun) was the only "new" Zelda game for the GBA. The only other Zeldas for the system were ports of the first three titles, one of which included the earliest version of the "Four Swords" co-operative multiplayer format as a bonus campaign. Even if The Minish Cap was all we got though, we were happy: it's debatably the greatest of all the portable Zeldas, in part because it finds the right balance of innovation (Spirit Tracks was certainly innovative, but maybe focused too much on all that train business) and solid fundamental Zelda gameplay. Like another game coming up on this list, I loved that you kept discovering entire dungeons within the most innocuous of objects and places after shrinking down and seeing the world from a whole new perspective.

    Any early adopters of the 3DS were fortunate enough to receive a digital copy of this game for free as part of the ambassador program, though it's a little hard to find now unless you still have a Wii U connected to the internet. One of many legacy Zelda games that are overdue for a Switch conversion.

  • For a while, it felt like Super Mario RPG was an anomaly - a one-off project between Square and Nintendo, unlikely to ever be repeated given the very public falling out between the two companies - and then Paper Mario came along with a similar foundation of RPG mechanics if nothing quite on the level of the comic silliness and irreverence towards the malleable Super Mario canon that frequently made Super Mario RPG an unexpected joy. For as much as I love Paper Mario, AlphaDream's Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga felt much more like the SNES RPG's natural successor. Using the two Mario brothers as allies in and out combat by assigning each of them a separate face button for cooperative puzzles, the first game in what would become a reliable enough RPG franchise for Nintendo's portable systems nailed the mix of breezy, streamlined fun generally associated with the Super Mario franchise and the silly iconoclasm of its world of easily flustered mushroom people and a princess who won't stop getting abducted by a dragon turtle. Of course, in this case the star of the show were the new villains, especially the verbally-challenged henchperson Fawful. This was back when the Mario RPGs regularly introduced new characters and visual designs, rather than seventeen different flavors of Toad.

    If you're looking to play Superstar Saga today you're better off grabbing its remaster for Nintendo 3DS, which is also accompanied by a new Bowser-centric bonus campaign.

  • There's a wide universe of Mega Man portable games, and the GBA in particular saw four games in the new Mega Man Z canon. More prolific than that, though, was the Mega Man Battle Network spin-off franchise, which had a total of six outings for the GBA (more, if you include the Pokémon-esque "red edition/blue edition" system they had going on with the later entries). These games reimagined Mega Man and his Robot Master rivals as computer programs rather than robots, with the Blue Bomber often having to jump into computer systems to clean up the corruption within. This meant virtual dungeons based around home computers, vending machines, construction equipment, microwaves, telephones, and who knows what else, making this series like an unpredictable Capcom version of Tron. It also had this distinct combat system that used grids but was all in real-time: your ability to quickly hop around your side of the grid to avoid enemy attack patterns was paramount to success.

    I never did get around to any of its sequels, so I couldn't say for sure which is the best in what proved to be an enduring franchise, but I suspect each new game would feel slightly less than the one before as the surprise of jumping into different computer chips - everything seems to have one in the future - and seeing what resulted would lose its zing after a while. Then again, video game sequels tend introduce a lot of vital improvements, so maybe I should give the series another shot someday. They're all still available on Wii U's Virtual Console last I checked (though they'll probably show up on one or more of those Mega Man compilations before too long).

  • Again, I'm putting Fusion here instead of Zero Mission because it's a brand new entry rather than a rehash, but I also believe it's the superior game just because of the way it elevates the already tense atmosphere of this series by giving you the alien equivalent of the Nemesis (or Alien: Isolation's alien, I suppose): a brutal and unstoppable foe wearing your old Varia suit that generates no short amount of dread whenever it suddenly shows up during your explorations. The game more or less follows the previous entries in the series, particularly Super Metroid and its many suit transformations, and finds a foe even sneakier and deadlier than the metroids in the X parasites, which can resemble anything but also make for some tasty snacks once their defenses have been depleted.

    Metroid Fusion's another game granted to us early worms via the 3DS ambassador service, but it's also on the Wii U Virtual Console if you missed out. Really hoping they start adding some GBA games to the Switch Online service soon but then Nintendo's never been in a hurry to give away anything for free when it comes to their own legacy.

  • It was my fervent hope that the long-rumored (though these rumors appear to be powered by wishful thinking alone) Mother 3 Switch port would arrive to celebrate the GBA's 20th anniversary by giving a new lease of life to what might be the system's best RPG if not best game period. It doesn't currently look like that's happening, but maybe Nintendo has a surprise announcement for it in a Direct lined up April 1st to soften the blow of all those Mario games disappearing after the 31st. Of course, we're unlikely to believe any news coming out on that date, but it seems somehow perfect for such a bizarre journey for an already bizarre game.

    Mother 3 is of course the sequel to EarthBound, featuring a (mostly) new cast of protagonists and a slightly disconnected story that follows them individually for a while over a period of several years before they unite to save the world. Humor, pathos, adult themes like grief and the corruptive effects of capitalism and the evils of animal bondage (not that kind), philosophical frog save points, a little guy called Rope Snake who is always trying his best, and the funkiest music track that a CGI bear has ever danced to. It's truly something else.

  • OK, fine, this one is a bit of a cheat. International Ace Attorney fans almost assuredly started with the DS port of the original, which included updated graphics and a whole new case besides. Yet it's still the truth that the first entry - and the two that followed - in Capcom's less-than-serious courtroom thriller franchise began here on the GBA. It's still possibly my favorite game series Capcom's made since the 16-bit era; one that balances adventure game point-and-click investigations with trials that test the player's perception, reading comprehension, and legal acumen (though maybe not so much of the latter).

    The DS ports were where I first started wielding accusatory gestures while yelling "Objection!", but more recent converts and those yet to pass the anime bar are probably better served with the new compilation that was released recently for Switch, Steam, Xbox One, and PS4. The franchise has been dormant in the west since 2016's Spirit of Justice, but I'm hoping for a big Switch revival following that compilation or perhaps the overdue localizations of some of the currently Japan-only entries (like Dai Gyakuten Saiban and its sequel).

  • Pokémon fans were blessed many times over during the GBA era ("gluttons who would not be satisfied with all the riches of heaven" I believe is the phrase) as it ushered in both the third generation (Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald) and the lavish remakes of the first generation (FireRed/LeafGreen). There was even an updated Pokémon Pinball game featuring the new pokémon of Ruby/Sapphire's Hoenn region. However, I think the Pokémon game I spent the most time with on the GBA was the first Pokémon Mystery Dungeon, Red Rescue Team (Blue Rescue Team was instead a DS game). I've never really been a fan of roguelikes or monster-raising RPGs, yet something about the loop produced by both of them combined as you go about exploring new dungeons and evolving your companions made for a compelling grind across many shorter sessions. Definitely something of an acquired taste, perhaps best suited for a younger crowd with time to burn on procgen dungeon-crawling and power-levelling.

    The Pokémon Mystery Dungeons are still going strong today, incorporating the hundreds of new pokémon that have debuted since, so I can't imagine anyone's looking to revisit the original unless they only care about those first three generations (and I guess those people exist, because I am one). The most recent to come out, last year's Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX, is actually a combined version of Red Rescue Team and Blue Rescue Team.

  • Yeah, including this one for the same reason as Phoenix Wright above. I may not have played this GBA original but I've certainly dabbled with its DS and Wii sequels, and it's worth honoring the GBA as being the franchise's point of origin. The Rhythm Heaven series exhibits this odd personality and art style which built simple - though not easy - rhythm mini-game stages out of all sorts of bizarre scenarios, often involving monkeys. The series was the brainchild of a famous Japanese musician, Tsunku, who approached Nintendo with the idea of a "WarioWare but for music" and let them run wild with it. He also contributed a fair amount of the soundtrack too.

    Tengoku's probably not going to leave Japan any time soon, but Rhythm Heaven Megamix for 3DS has a few choice stages from it and its two sequels. No clue if they'll ever make another Rhythm Heaven: the in-house Nintendo development team behind the series was dissolved and its staff absorbed elsewhere shortly after Megamix, but I can't see why Nintendo couldn't take them off whatever they're doing and make a new one someday (which belies what little I know about how they run things over there).

  • Sting's been quietly making some very strange RPGs for years, and though I've not been able to penetrate a few of them (hello Knights in the Nightmare) there's others that I've been able to appreciate for their divergences from the norm. For instance, Riviera is a fully linear RPG with pre-determined encounters where you don't really control the main character outside of battle but can make decisions on his behalf. This novel-like format is supported by some dating sim elements: each of your companions is a potential love interest and the one you decide to support most in and outside of battle becomes your "chosen" for the remainder of the playthrough, each leading to a slightly different ending. The combat itself has a few unusual rules too including how using special abilities attached to weapons drains them of their durability (but there's usually an infinite-use "main" weapon to fall back on if you accidentally break everything).

    Sting used Riviera as a launching point for what they call the "Dept. Heaven" anthology series, which also includes Yggdra Union (also GBA, but a little too Fire Emblem-y for me), Knights in the Nightmare (a bizarre combination of chess, RTS, and shoot 'em up released on DS), and Gungnir (a relatively normal PSP SRPG). Yggdra Union's the only one that's seen a recent port, though only in Japan.

  • As anyone who regularly reads my Indie Game of the Week feature might have cottoned on to, I have a predilection for explormers - my name for what are usually called metroidvanias elsewhere on the internet - and I picked up Scurge: Hive because it looked like it was heavily influenced by Metroid in particular with the design of its heroine "Jenosa Arma" and its story of a bounty hunter called in to quell a dangerous invasive alien species. Similar to Metroid Fusion, Arma is infected almost instantly by this parasite upon arrival and must work quickly to defeat major nodes of this infestation (i.e. the bosses) and recover at regular cleansing stations before she succumbs to the virus and transforms into another of its monstrous hosts.

    Scurge has a few aberrations to the Metroid formula. One is the isometric perspective, which allows for some slightly more devious level design and puzzles. Another is Arma's weaponry: she ends up with three different types of projectile which operate in a rock-paper-scissors dynamic, each of which is strong against one type of enemy though can power-up another - the idea being to quickly and accurately switch between the right ammo types to clear rooms as fast as possible. The spreading infection is an ever present timer that pushes you towards efficiency and there's many risk vs. reward decisions for going off the critical path for upgrades or what have you. I was surprised by how much I was digging its novel features, especially given how flagrantly it borrows everything else from its inspiration.

  • Originally created by Yasumi Matsuno, who sadly did not work on this particular entry, the Tactics Ogre games (and the more RTS-like Ogre Battle games) were dense strategy RPGs that allowed for a significant degree of character customization between its many set-piece battles. Lodis is a little more streamlined compared to the previous entry, 1995's Let Us Cling Together for SNES, but is still packed with micromanagement options and a relatively dense story about noble knights and less-than-noble nobles. You might have noticed the conspicuous absence of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance on this list; I found Knight of Lodis to be a very similar but much more palatable option, mostly because it doesn't have those damn Judges.

    It would end up being the last Quest game ever made: although Square had already poached many of their best talents in 1995 to make Final Fantasy Tactics and Vagrant Story (including Matsuno), they came back to acquire the rest soon after Knight of Lodis launched. Since then, the only Ogre game has been a PSP remake of Let Us Cling Together.

  • Though this was not the debut of Tales of Phantasia - like many GBA games, it was originally released on SNES - it was its international debut. It also meant that any new Tales converts - this port was released in North America and Europe in 2006, a few years after the highly successful Tales of Symphonia for GameCube - now had the opportunity to see where the series originated. The 2D Tales games have a certain purity to their form that the 3D games have been struggling to recapture, given the LMB System (did you hear? The Wiki's got tons about LMB Systems) was built to resemble a fighting game and a tactical party RPG combined. Easier to do the tank/archer/mage dynamic when you're all on the same plane and can stand behind one another.

    Phantasia definitely feels a bit prototypical as a Tales game - they hadn't yet put as much focus on personalities, team interactions, and character development, so only about half of Phantasia's cast leave any kind of impression besides "designated hero" and "healer" - but it's a solid 16-bit action-RPG with some neat narrative ideas (time travel! Off-screen grinding!) that isn't too rough a starting point if you ever felt like playing all the Tales games in a row, like an insane person.

  • It took a while for Nintendo to find the right niche for its fragrant Mario doppelganger, but Mario Land 3: Wario Land established his love of wealth and WarioWare - which has Wario create his own game company along with a fresh cast of weirdos - is a natural extension of his Dunning-Kruger-derived business acumen in action. Rather than any semblance of a narrative or a persistent gameplay loop, the player is instead subjected to a quickfire series of "micro-games" that each boil down to a single imperative that the player must accomplish in a matter of seconds. Quick reflexes, rolling with the surprises, and trying to keep up with the ever increasing speed are the keys to success, though failure is often inevitable. It also feels like an homage to the simple arcade and LCD games that gave Nintendo its start in gaming - the "Game & Watch" series from the early '80s in particular - delivered in a random, rapid manner more suited to a modern, attention-deficient audience.

    The WarioWare series appears to have stalled after Game & Wario, which remains one of the few first-party Wii U games to not have made the jump to a Switch port. Given the past success and fan appeal of this series though, it feels like the announcement of a new Switch entry might only be a matter of time.
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