The best GBA games.. of all time! ALL TIME!

So let’s say you, hypothetically speaking, wanted to get your almost 8 year old son a classic gaming handheld. So maybe you might pick something like this, the Revo K101 Plus

So you can run real physical Gameboy Advance carts (nice!) or the included faux cart with a SD card slot to play ROMs. (Not just GBA ROMs but a few other old systems, PC Engine, NES, Game Gear, etc.)

Then you might, hypothetically speaking, be a little overwhelmed by the list of about 1000 cartridges that were released for the GBA over its lifespan, which ran until about 2007. Do you really want to present your kid with a menu that has two thousand choices? Are there really that many GBA games worth … playing?

So rather than trying to pare down the list by removing obvious dreck, or “worst game ever” lists, I went backwards: I composed a list of only GBA games listed in at least one credible Best Of GBA article using Google searches as you’d expect. Here’s what I ended up with. (Not in any particular order, but numbered so I can have an idea of how many choices there are.)

  1. Mario Golf
  2. Mario vs Donkey Kong
  3. Mario Power Tennis
  4. Super Mario Advance
  5. Super Mario Advance 2
  6. Super Mario Advance 3
  7. Super Mario Advance 4
  8. Mario and Luigi Superstar Saga
  9. Mario Kart Super Circuit
  10. Dr Mario & Puzzle League
  11. Kirby and Amazing Mirror
  12. Car Battler Joe
  13. Wario Land 4
  14. WarioWare Mega Microgame$!
  15. Advance Wars 2
  16. Tactics Ogre - Knight
  17. Harvest Moon Friends of Mineral Town
  18. Drill Dozer
  19. Golden Sun
  20. Final Fantasy 6
  21. Final Fantasy Tactics Advance
  22. Mega Man Zero
  23. Mega Man Zero 2
  24. Tony Hawks Pro Skater 2
  25. Fire Emblem
  26. Astro Boy Omega
  27. Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald
  28. Castlevania Aria of Sorrow
  29. Castlevania Harmony
  30. Metroid Fusion
  31. Metroid Zero Mission
  32. Zelda Minish cap
  33. Zelda: Link to the Past
  34. Ninja Five-O
  35. Super Monkey Ball Jr.
  36. Prince of Persia Sands of Time
  37. Pinball of the Dead
  38. Sonic Advance 2
  39. Sonic Pinball Party
  40. Kingdom Hearts
  41. V-Rally 3
  42. Lilo & Stitch
  43. F-Zero GP Legend
  44. Motoracer Advance
  45. Racing Gears Advance
  46. Final Fight One
  47. River City Ransom EX
  48. Iridon II
  49. Space Invaders
  50. Gradius Galaxies
  51. Bubble Bobble
  52. Super Puzzle Fighter II
  53. Puyo Pop
  54. Pokemon Pinball
  55. TMNT
  56. King of Fighters EX 2
  57. Street Fighter Alpha 3
  58. Rayman 3
  59. Crash Bandicoot
  60. Crash Nitro Kart
  61. Donkey Kong Country
  62. Donkey Kong King of Swing
  63. Klonoa Dreams
  64. Spider Man Mysterio
  65. Contra Advance: Alien Wars
  66. Metal Slug Advance
  67. Ninja Cop
  68. Kuru Kuru Kururin
  69. Medal of Honor Infiltrator
  70. Star Wars - Episode III
  71. Matt Hoffmans Pro Bmx 2
  72. R-Type 3
  73. Gunstar Superheroes
  74. Sabre Wulf
  75. Doom II

(I did not include a few frequently cited that had cartridges with special hardware, such as WarioWare Twisted with rotation and Boktai with the sunlight sensor. I have no particular objection to used cartridges but I don’t want to deal with more physical stuff.)

So this is a “top 100” meta-list generated by combining all the “best GBA games of all time” lists I could find. The only risk is outliers, where one person ranked some weird game way higher than everyone else. The metacritic GBA list was particularly solid, if you want a single list to verify … 2000-2007 were plenty active years on the Internet for new GBA game release reviews, versus say the life of the Game Boy which seriously predates the Internet.

Any objections to anything on this list? Anything I missed?

I hope my meta-aggregation of the best GBA games of all time can help others who might find themselves in this … hypothetical … situation.

Metroid Fusion, Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced, Zelda Minish Cap, Mega Man Zero, Mario and Luigi Superstar Saga, Link to the Past, Advanced Wars, and Pokemon?

Nah, that’s a pretty good list. Those would have been my suggestions, and they are all fairly high. Of course lots more good games are there, but go for it.

That’s a pretty comprehensive list, you certainly couldn’t go wrong with those games. Some games are pretty hard to find these days, like Ninja Five-O and Fire Emblem. Plus, if you’re going to go through eBay looking for games you run a pretty decent risk of coming up bootlegs. Anyway I went through my pile of GBA games and found a couple others that I personally thought were pretty great:

Grand Theft Auto - more like the first couple of games, top down, pretty simple but good if you like old school GTA
Phantasy Star Collection - the first three games from the Sega Master System/Genesis, classics!
Advance Wars - I notice the second game is on the list and not the first - I liked the first better
Lady Sia - platform and combat, kind of like the Shantae games
Rebelstar Tactical Command - XCOM on a GBA! Made by Julian Gollop even!

Also really cool to see Car Battler Joe on that list - kind of like the old Autoduel game, with big-eyed anime children instead of hardened drivers behind the wheel.

I will personally vouch for Mario Golf, Advance Wars 2, Golden Sun, Fire Emblem, Mario Kart Super Circuit, WarioWare Mega Minigames, Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow, and Metroid Fusion. I would personally also include Advance Wars 1, Castlevania: Circle of the Moon and Golden Sun: The Lost Age (a direct continuation of the first, it’s a disservice to play only one of them). If he happens to like RTS games (like yours truly did when he was younger), then Mech Platoon was the only GBA RTS worth a damn.

Plenty of those other games are likely good, but I only named anything I actually played rather than anything I know just by reputation.

Although the list contains pretty much every great games for the platform, it also seems to include a bunch of games that were there because there weren’t better portable options back then, not because they were particularly memorable, and so it could be potentially deflated quite a bit (who would still play and genuinely enjoy King of Fighters EX nowadays?). There may be also a need to check for duplicates (40. Metal Slug and 70.Metal Slug Advance is one such instance).
The only other objections I’d formulate would be for stuff not released in the United States, but I guess that is outside the scope of this project - after all if you don’t want to present your kid with thousands of potential turds, you wouldn’t want to present her stuff in a language she can’t understand (although that is how I personally learned the best sports of the universe, baseball, so good things may come out of such vagrancy!).
Speaking of which, Netsal is a cute and pretty original sports and team management game. You raise your team of monsters during a limited time Team management game, then you can take them out to compete against other teams in Futsal mockup competitions. Starring Shiren the Wanderer’s cast of monsters.
More accessible, there is the awesome (and arguably superior) prequel to Rhythm Heaven, Rhythm Tengoku.

Also a few items that were ports from other systems (usually SNES). Granted this isn’t a reason not to play Link to the Past or Final Fantasy 6. In fact any reason is a good one for those games, they’d arguably belong on a list of 100 greatest games regardless of system.

Astro Boy Omega is by Treasure and I can personally vouch for it being awesome.

Fun analysis of who pulled off the best 3D engine within the constraints of the GBA

I remember Colin McRae Rally 2 being quite good on the GBA with decent physics and 3D.

Agreed – I cleaned up the list a bit, semi-sorted it (or at least grouped similar items together) and ended up with 75 total.

I also watched a few more best GBA videos and made sure they were represented. If you pick the top 25 GBA games, most sites more or less agree on at least 20 of those, I’d say.

Great list but some of those may be too difficult for an 8 year old, no?

I’d forgotten how many great games were released for the GBA! I particularly loved the Final Fantasy ports of 4/5/6, Golden Sun 1 & 2, Metroid Fusion and Zero Mission, the Castlevania games and I had a blast with Mario Golf!

For an 8 year old, you can’t go wrong with the Mario and possibly Mega Man games. Wario Land 4 was also pretty awesome.

Could be, guess that depends on the 8 year old. I think Advance Wars and Rebelstar introduce concepts over several tutorial levels, though they certainly get complex over the course of the game. I would think it helps that they’re turn based, you can take your time evaluating options.

That’s what we’re gonna find out! With ~80 choices, hopefully he can pick and choose what he likes. The Revo k101 plus arrived today; it’s a really cool little device. You can see why it gets very positive reviews.

(The only downside seems to be super sketchy emulation of anything other than GBA and GB, but … that’s not a serious downside in my book.)

I still play my GBA SP, it’s a great little device and the games are still great, as that list attests. Does this device you bought allow backward compatibility with Game Boy/Color games? Some great ones there too.

Yes definitely older Gameboy is handled perfectly in ROMs – though I happen to have an old GB cart here and it only works with physical GBA carts, not physical GB carts. So the “other” emulations are rom-only:

Built-in Emulation for ROM files:

  • Gameboy Advance (.GBA .GBK)
  • NES (.NES)
  • PC-Engine / TG16 (.PCE)
  • Sega Master System (.SMS)
  • Sega Game Gear (.GG)
  • Sega Genesis (.SG)
  • Gameboy Color (.GBC)
  • Gameboy (.GB)

Wow, nobody mentioned Genesis before. I gotta try that. Gameboy Link cables also work perfectly, between the real systems and this as well.

Whoa, TurboGrafx too - ok you need to let us know how this works out, I may need one of those.

Don’t get too excited as many of the recent reviews mention that outside of GBA and GB (and presumably NES?) the emulation is kinda sketchy. It’s the only serious flaw they list for the device.

Having some hands on time with it, and some SD cards, it’s a remarkably solid little device:

Basically just dump the ROMs in the root folder, then add the ksystem folder with the cheats and game preview images, and you’re done. You can even customize the background and boot pictures, too!

I also updated the firmware to latest which was from March 2016 but it might already have been at that version. Hard to tell, there’s no version number in the help page. Aha! I found the firmware update notes:

03-10-2016

  • changes to 3:2 screen formatting

02-24-2016

  • 3 new brightness levels
  • Adjusted power levels required to trigger the low battery red light
  • New option to specify wake mode. (any button / press A+ B together to wake)
  • New ‘reset game’ option in in game menu
  • Now supports zipped 8bit roms
  • improved 3:2 mode for better text display. (screen mode #2)

I concur with this guy. Sketchy “other than GBA / GB” emulation aside, this is a near-perfect device.

I really liked the GBA Tactics Ogre.

Very curious on that front too!
I must confess I used to use my DS for that purpose, but it was more of a bother to set it up properly.

Wumpus, I’m wondering if you should include the Megaman Battle Network games on the list. Certainly Megaman Battle Network 3 (Blue or White) is when the games started to be better refined gameplay experiences.