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48 comments

  • Excluding ports, my favourites are:

    Final Fantasy Tactics Advance

    Golden Sun series

    Hamtaro: Ham-Ham Heartbreak

    Hamtaro: Rainbow Rescue

    Mega Man Battle Network series

    Pokemon series

    Sonic Advance series

    Sword of Mana

    Summon Night: Swordcraft Story series

    • I always wanted to try the Summon Knight games, but never seen a copy out in the wild. I mostly remember it from write ups in Nintendo Power and word of mouth from the gaiaonline forums. Apparently the game was pretty gay for a game released in the early 2000s (at least if you played as the female protag)

      I definitely enjoyed Sword of Mana, though it definitely felt unpolished compared to what Square was putting out in those days. I just remember the OST hitting pretty hard, and me holding the GBA up to my ear to jam to the songs.

      • I don't know what it means for a game to be "gay". I played as the girl for both Summon Knight games and they seemed normal to me. There weren't any dating systems or anything like that.

        Dawn of Mana on PS2 had a higher quality version of "Endless Battlefield" from Sword of Mana. The GBA sound chip really held it back but the music was still very good.

  • Warioland 4 is amazing, and definitely one of Nintendo's greatest achievement. I didn't appreciate the weirdness as much as a kid, but going back to it, I simply love how off the wall it goes, and how it is halfway a Mario platformer and halfway a sonic game due to you having to rush back through the stages. If you have ever played Pizza Tower, this is the game that inspired it.

    Speaking a Wario, the Warioware games were some of my favorite pick up and play titles. There is just so much to do, even after you finish the short campaign. The DS one is by far the best one though.

    Dragon Ball Z Legacy of Goku 2 and Buu's Fury are some of the best Dragon Ball games period, and are pretty decent RPGs in their own right as well. I more or less experienced the entire story of Dragonball Z through those games, and they do a fairly decent job of retelling the events (Aside from the first Legacy of Goku game, which is garbage.) If nothing else, give the music a listen. Not only are their some good remixes of the American DBZ soundtrack, but a lot of original songs that are masterpieces.

    I may add more if I think of any

  • The GBA was a great system; my only complaint is they didn’t include X and Y buttons. Some games could have benefited from two more face buttons.

    I haven’t seen the Advance Wars series brought up yet. Great strategy game.

  • Mario Kart was by far the best. The ability to play coop with only one of you having the game is something all game companies should do.

  • I had tons of GBA games but the one I remember most fondly is Link's Awakening DX.

    Second would be uh... Damn, I forgot the name of it! It was that Hideo Kojima game with a solar panel in the cart because it used sunlight as a gimmick. It was the closest thing to a MGS game there was on GameBoy at the time, and I loved it. Didn't care for the gimmick tho. You couldn't actually see the screen if you were in direct sunlight which the sensor needed (unlike my damn calculator, using a lamp didn't work).

    Edit: Boktai! You mentioned it further down in the comments lol

  • I'll always go to bat for Gunstar Super Heroes. It's a full on sequel to the Genesis game - hardly anyone seems to talk about it, which is a shame because it's incredible. Easily one of the best action games on GBA, if not the best. Absolutely deserves a spot in any top GBA list, right alongside Astro Boy Omega Factor.

  • Since they haven’t been mentioned yet, I’d like to recommend all three Klonoa games on the GBA. There’s Empire of Dreams and Dream Champ Tournament which are both platformers with some puzzle elements. The third game is Klonoa Heroes, which is an ARPG (making it totally different from anything else in the series). Do note that Heroes wasn’t released outside Japan, but there is a translation patch available.

  • Max Payne's gba port was really impressive. Check it out if you haven't already :)

48 comments