SB Recommends Game Boy Advance Games

Nintendo's nearly-as-popular successor to the Game Boy, with graphics comparable to the SNES. There were three very different hardware versions released, each with distinct advantages and disadvantages. It can link up to the Gamecube as a secondary display, and there are actually quite a few games that utilized this heavily. GBA games will play on the Gamecube (via the Game Boy Player peripheral) DS and DS Lite, but not the DSi.

There is a bulky add-on called the E-Reader, which could load data off (something like) bar codes. It's used to transmit Animal Crossing items from cards, play NES ports (that have to be loaded from multiple cards), and bonus Super Mario Bros. 3 levels. Nothing original other than a few minigames ever came out for it.

Ebay is plagued by GBA cartridge piracy. If it's unboxed (especially if they offer to send the box flattened/unmade), and sounds too-cheap-to-be-true, avoid it. They tend to have poor batteries that won't keep your save data for long.

• Advance Guardian Heroes
  • Sniper Honeyviper: Amazingly solid belt-scroll beatemup with fairly heavy RPG elements, significant possibilities for combos and the ability to play as literally every enemy and boss character in the game. Shame about the muddy graphics, though.
  • sawtooth: Advance Guardian Heroes is alright but I didn't find it very compelling at all. I couldn't be bothered to work out difficult timing when I'm being swarmed by enemies on a tiny screen.
  • The Blueberry Hill: My favourite of Treasure's pre-Bangaio GBA output. The countering is what makes it: feels really solid, and tangible.

• Advance Wars / Game Boy Wars Advance (JP)
  • The Blueberry Hill: It's still my favourite Advance Wars game. Later entries can feel a bit cluttered, with too-many unit types. The second GBA game is worth picking up too, if you need more of the series.

• Astroboy: The Omega Factor
  • sawtooth: Astro Boy is a masterpiece and charming as hell to boot (and the difficulty is pretty well-balanced on normal difficulty). The story doesn't really become clever until the second time around, and the actual structure of the game changes drastically. On the whole, the game deserves credit for weaving stage selection into the actual narrative, and while its themes aren't terribly profound in this day and age they're handled pretty well.
  • The Blueberry Hill: There are some wonderful moments, but most fighting is too tedious and repetitive.
  • Koji: has to be my number one game for the platform, it's pretty much perfect, especially if you're into beat'em ups, but in general as an action game.

• Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow / Castlevania: Akatsuki no Menuett (JP) - forum thread
  • Rudie: Thought of as the closest to Symphony of the Night. Takes place in the future, but there is almost nothing interesting done with that concept.
  • Sniper Honeyviper: I beat it in five hours and never felt compelled to pick it up again. Some people really got addicted to soul farming though. As diplo has said, the castle is very “comfy.”
  • dementia: The Double Pack featuring [Harmony of Dissonance] & [Aria of Sorrow] is mercifully easier to find than AoS alone. Buy that.

• Castlevania: Circle of the Moon (NA) / Castlevania (PAL) / Akumajo Dracula Circle of the Moon (JP) - forum thread
  • Rudie: The only recent Castlevania not done by Iga. Enemies and screens actually have some thought put into them.
  • Chris B: I do prefer the first GBA Castlevania (Circle of the Moon). Kinda felt like the Richter Belmont mode of Symphony of the Night done right and thanks to higher difficulty and less collectables this one didn't feel quite like such a grindy timewaster as most of the other metrovanias either.

• Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance / Castlevania: Byakuya no Concerto (JP) - forum thread
  • Rudie: It's interesting. I really like the music.

• Cima: The enemy
  • Leau: Kind of rare, but worth it if you can find it. One of my favorite GBA games. You need to lead a party of settlers through this demon world. They all have different abilities and all are playable. Feels a bit like Zelda, and has lots of personality. Spotty hit detection though.

• Digidrive
  • firenze: Digidrive [is] all kinds of fantastic and one of the best games on any system in 2006. Part of Nintendo's BitGenerations line, and arguably the best game of the bunch.
  • Broco: It has an intense, poker-like fold-or-keep-upping-the-stakes dynamic, great music, and quite simply I find it awesome just how incredibly abstract the whole thing is. People watching you play have no idea what's going on, and I find it impossible to talk about the game without getting into a terminology tangle because there is no obvious name to give to any of the elements. There's nothing quite like it.

• DK: King of Swing / Swinging Donkey (JP)
  • Leau: Tough to explain. You use the L and R buttons to control DK's hands, and swing from peg to peg over huge, intelligently designed levels. The highlight being, swinging to the top of a tornado on various pieces of debris. Honestly, much more fun than I'm making it sound.
  • Koji: Tight as a game can get, with one of the most original means of control in the genre, and just plain fun from beginning to end (well, it actually picks up a couple of stages into the game.)

• Double Dragon Advance

• Drill Dozer / Screw Breaker (JP)
  • showka: a great, classical platforming game with some really interesting mechanics. The rumble gimmick is put to surprisingly good use and I can't imagine playing the game without it.
  • Koji: The game starts off pretty boring, but luckily it gets interesting down the road, as its level design gets trickier. The bosses are all fun to fight, too, and you pretty much have one per stage. Some stages and bosses even reminded me a bit of Astro Boy: Omega Factor (which is a very good thing,) though obviously not as hard. Hm, in fact, the game feels very inspired by that beat'em up style, with regular enemies that actually take some work to defeat and scenes where you get swarmed by cannon fodder enemies, plus clunkier-than-usual controls.
  • TORUMASUTA: Drill Dozer is the only sidescroller since Yoshi's Island to make me go “Wow, this is a genuinely good sidescroller; I don't like it just because it's an entry in a dead genre I love.
  • Mr Peckerston: Unfortunately there's not much variety in Drill Dozer's enemy design; the late stages of the game tend to focus on adding new objects to make a bunch of “how do I get there?” puzzles. There's more plot later on too, but I wouldn't exactly call it 'fleshed out'.

• Drome Racers
  • glitch: If flat-shaded polygons give you warm fuzzy feelings, get this. closest thing to Stunt Race FX on the system, including sluggish controls and awkward collision detection, but now with a decent frame-rate. starts out trivially easy and takes too long to get moderately difficult, but once it does it's challenging enough. one I always keep close to my GBA to pull out for a quick-race or 2. Or 5.

The Famicom Mini series is a line of 30 Famicom, and Famicom Disk System, ports released to commemorate the Famicom's 20th anniversary. A similar, smaller, series was released outside Japan (as the Classic NES Series in North America, and NES Classics in PAL territories), but their ports are based on the NES releases. So no FDS Metroid, and Kid Icarus.
A few of the FDS ports are worth picking up, mostly for the better sound, no disk-swapping or load times, and the use of on-cart saves, instead of passwords.

• Kid Icarus / Hikari Shinwa: Parutena no Kagami (JP) (also on: NES; FDS)

• Metroid (also on: NES; FDS)

• Nazo no Murasame Jou (also on: FDS)
  • NeoZeedeater: A light-hearted overhead action samurai game with catchy music.
  • Laurel Soup: I've been on a big Nazo no Murasamejō kick lately. It's the Kid Icarus to Zelda's Metroid if that makes sense. It's top down context-based sword or shuriken craziness plus a button that makes you invisible sometimes for some reason. The bosses are pretty hellish.
  • dessgeega: I like to think of Murasamejou as Legend of Kage in Legend of Zelda's world map. the GBA version is the NO LOADING TIMES version.

• Final Fantasy V Advance
  • gatotsu2501: The highly amusing localization in this version of the game makes it the definitive one in my book, despite the degraded sound quality that it shares with the other GBA Final Fantasy ports. The bonus dungeon and extra Jobs will probably entertain players who get really into the character-twinking aspect too.

• Final Fantasy Tactics Advance
  • gatotsu2501: Once you get over the fact that it's not Final Fantasy Tactics, this is actually a lot of fun. It's not very challenging (which is regrettable, considering how deep the game's customization system is) but the long and winding road to building the ultimate clan of invincible demigod-warriors is quite a gratifying one. The story also turns out to be better than you might initially expect.

• Fire Emblem / Fire Emblem Rekka no Ken (JP)

• Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones
  • gatotsu2501: A more forgiving Fire Emblem, with grinding and weapon/item shops available in between battles. Still plenty challenging though.

• Fire Pro Wrestling
  • Loki Laufeyson: The western version has all the wrestlers in the two american companies pallette swapped as well as renamed, which is a minor annoyance. There also aren't many match types. But it's still a portable Fire Pro game, and it's a lot easier to find than the sequel.

• Guru logic Champ (also on: DSi (as Snapdots))
  • The Blueberry Hill: A charmingly presented puzzle game from Champ Team, and Compile. The puzzles are logic based, and solved by rotating the playfield and moving/removing blocks to form a picture. The game bursts with sass, and life, but is, unfortunately, now quite a rare thing.

• Hatena Satena
  • Booter: Hudson puzzle game, essentially a Picross variant. was pretty into it for a few weeks. Super Lovers art direction. You owe it to yourself to try it if you liked Picross. Japanese not necessary.
  • The Blueberry Hill: This interesting Nonogame-slash-Mine Sweeper-clone is recommended with a caveat: there is a lot of stupid text to wade through in the story mode. I'd avoid it if you don't have convenient access to a fast forward key.

• Invader
  • glitch: Pretty amazing vertical shmup, nice music, 2-player co-op (if you have 2 copies and a cable), elaborate weapon system, frustrating as hell and hard. love it. Possibly euro only.

• Kuru Kuru Kururin
  • Koji: more enjoyable to me over the sequel, Paradise, because of its simpler controls that result in gameplay that's more methodical rather than hectic.
  • Grengz: easily my favourite game on the system. The time attack element of the game is incredibly addictive. Kururin Paradise is nice in a 'more please' sense but it's no way as enjoyable as the original.
  • Deets: Guide a constantly rotating stick through a series of overhead-view mazes without scraping the walls. There's a lot of finesse to be squeezed out of the simple controls, and I find myself subconsciously comparing it to games like Cameltry and Umihara Kawase — a good thing! It's classy as hell, perfect for short play sessions.

• Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga
  • spectralsound: The perfect midpoint between Paper Mario and Super Mario RPG, with nice setpieces and a pretty funny script. “Hey, it's Mario! And… that green guy!”
  • gatotsu2501: Did not like this one for whatever reason. I found it ugly and repetitive and not that funny. I vastly prefer SMRPG and especially Paper Mario.

• Metroid Fusion
  • firenze: Fusion is fantastic and is one of the few non-arcade games this decade that I've completed more than once. It's pretty linear, but also pretty awesome.
  • spectralsound: Dense, tight and dripping with tension. This was probably the closest Nintendo ever got to making Metroid a straight-up Alien game.

• Mother 3 - forums threads: 1, 2 (with spoilers), 3 (with spoilers)
  • Sniper Honeyviper: You know how everyone says that Final Fantasy VII “was a life-changing experience” or whatever? This game actually is that. Avoid Earthbound fan communities like the plague, though.

• Ninja Cop / Ninja Five-O (NA)
  • The Blueberry Hill: Tidy, precise, action game from Hudson. It feels like it was made in the 16-bit era, though the great variety of movement options may belie its vintage. One of the system's best. And it has a grappling hook!
  • Chris B: Beware of spending too much money on Ninja Five-0. While it's certainly a pretty good game, it's also a little overrated.

• Pirates of the Carribean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
  • Ronnoc: This is a bit weird, but my favorite GBA game is probably the first Pirates of the Caribbean one. I am the only person in the world who likes that game :(

• Puyo Pop / Minna de Puyo Puyo (JP)
  • Koji: I loved Puyo Pop for being the most approachable Puyo ever, with the most balanced and satisfying mechanics of the old games and a gentle difficulty curve.

• Rhythm Tengoku
  • Felix: It's the absolute perfect culmination of the Warioware games, rhythm games, and the GBA itself.

• Riviera: The Promised Land (also on: PSP)
  • Sniper Honeyviper: Entirely menu-based JRPG where every decision made has an evenly split upside and downside, and huge implications for the rest of the game. There's a pretty blatant dating sim overtone and elements, as you're pretty much forced to “choose” one of your female party members and ignore one of the others. Could be your thing, but I just found it too stressful and unrewarding. The PSP version has anime cutscenes and more voice acting, but the GBA is playable on more platforms and with no loading times.
  • TORUMASUTA: Like a kind of RPG/interactive fiction crossover. If you read about it on websites you'll say to yourself that there is no way that could work, but it's totally natural when you start playing. You'll wonder why other games don't work like that. Screw other games!
  • rudie: Counterpoint. I despise this game on all levels. My burning hatred for it is so great I can't remember what I hated about it. I played it for 30 minutes before beginning to scream violently. I sold it the next day.
  • gatotsu2501: I definitely fall on the pro-Riviera side of the debate, though the immense amount of irrevocable decisions, and by extension missed stuff, drives my inner OCD freak up the wall. Regardless, it is neat and fun and totally unique. It is also worth mentioning that the game has a pretty sweet soundtrack. The battle theme for Training mode makes the hours you inevitably spend there fly by.

• Shining Soul II
  • Dark Age Iron Savior: While the first Shining Soul game is definitely bad, the second one actually manages to be very playable despite not really changing the core gameplay. While it's still an awkward game and not “really Shining”, a lot of things changed for the better.

• Super Mario Advance series

• Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis

• Wario Land 4
  • gatotsu2501: Fun, stylish little platformer with a lot of polish. Levels are based more around exploration and light puzzle-solving than timing and reflexes, but the controls and friction are great (and the boss fights provide a good challenge, especially on Hard mode). Even though it's an early-life title, the graphics, sound and animation are easily among the best on the GBA.

• WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$! / Made In Wario (JP)
  • gatotsu2501: Video games for the video game generation. Sure, it may be glorified “Simon Says”, but the demand for constant and increasingly split-second adaptability on the part of the player is an honest-to-god exhilarating game mechanic. Tellingly, a lot of the microgames are fun even outside of a “mix”, and are almost all designed to be able to stand alone (“mash A” games notwithstanding). In retrospect, the whole thing is also a surprisingly canny precursor to the wave of tiny, instant-gratification mobile games currently in fashion.

• WarioWare: Twisted!!
  • gatotsu2501: The gyroscope mechanic is not as annoying as you might think!

• Yggdra Union (also on: PSP)
  • gatotsu2501: An above-average Fire Emblem clone with some neat twists. Battle system is set up in such a way that you are less likely to lose a vital unit to a single lucky hit from the enemy, but still required to meticulously plot out your maneuvers - in other words, it feels more fair without actually being much less challenging. A sort of very loose spiritual successor to Riviera: The Promised Land, and like that game, it has a PSP remake (which, last time I checked, came free with the PSP version of its own spiritual successor, Knights in the Nightmare) with remixed music, added voice acting, and bonus levels.

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