by mento
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.
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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).
