10 Game Boy Advance Games I Keep Coming Back To

The GBA is the handheld I argue for the hardest. Not because it gets ignored, the Pokemon games alone make sure it doesn't, but because the conversation around it almost always lands in the same three places: Mario, Pokemon, Fire Emblem. Those are fine. They aren't why I still keep the cart slot warm. The ten below are. Some are obvious. A few were Japan-only or fan-translated. All ten still hold up on whatever you use to play GBA in 2026.

1. Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow

Pound for pound the best Castlevania ever made and I will fight anyone who picks Symphony of the Night over it. Aria takes the Igavania template, drops it into 2035, and gives you a soul collection system that turns every enemy on screen into a build option. The plot is the one where Dracula is reborn and you find out who he is, and they pull off the reveal cleanly enough that I still recommend going in cold. The sprite work might be the prettiest in the series. The soundtrack is Michiru Yamane in a building mood. I have replayed this game more than any other on the system and I'm still finding souls I never bothered to grab.

2. Metroid: Zero Mission

Fusion is the more divisive pick and I get the case for it, but Zero Mission is the better game. It reframes the original NES Metroid as a tutorial for the real ending, the Zero Suit escape sequence, and that pivot single-handedly invented a character who carried the franchise for the next twenty years. The map is paced like Super Metroid in miniature. The Chozodia stealth chapter is the best forced-vulnerability stretch in the series. Whenever someone tells me they want to start with Metroid, this is the one I hand them, no question.

3. Mother 3

Still Japan-only, still the best Mother game, still one of the saddest things Nintendo ever published and refuses to translate. Play it with the Tomato fan patch. The combat hook, where you can chain extra hits by tapping in time with the battle music, is one of those mechanics nobody else has tried in twenty years and I don't understand why. The opening chapter does a thing to you that I won't spoil. Itoi wrote about grief and capitalism and family in a way the genre still hasn't caught up to. If your only exposure to Mother is the Smash trophy, fix that.

4. Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga

AlphaDream's debut and the only Mario RPG that ever made me laugh out loud at the writing. The two-button combat where you assign Mario and Luigi to A and B respectively forces a kind of constant low-grade attention that should be exhausting and somehow isn't. The Beanbean Kingdom is the best original setting any Mario spinoff has ever invented, sorry Paper Mario fans. Fawful is a top-five Nintendo villain by mouth alone. The remake on 3DS is fine but the GBA cart has a tighter pace and a punchier sprite style and I'd play it first.

5. Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising

Advance Wars 1 is the cleaner introduction. Advance Wars 2 is the better game. The CO powers system gets a proper second pass with super powers tuned for the asymmetric campaign, and Sturm is the only Intelligent Systems villain who ever made me restart a mission out of spite. The hex-style grid combat is still the gold standard for "easy to learn, infinite to master" turn-based war games. I played the Reboot Camp remake last year, it's faithful and lovely and I went right back to the cart. The original sprite art still wins.

6. Final Fantasy VI Advance

This is the version of FFVI I recommend. Yes, the Pixel Remaster is the prettiest and the SNES original is the canonical one, but the GBA port adds the dungeons, the bestiary, the espers, the bonus content, and most importantly it lets you carry the best RPG ever written in your pocket. The translation cleans up the rougher Woolsey spots without sanding off the charm. Kefka is still Kefka. The opera scene still hits in the elevator. Riding the GBA-bus version of Celes through the World of Ruin opener on a road trip is one of my favorite gaming memories of the last decade.

7. Drill Dozer

Game Freak made a game that wasn't Pokemon and almost nobody bought it, which is a sentence I have to live with every year I see this cart in my drawer. Drill Dozer is a platformer about a girl in a mech that drills, and the whole game pivots on rotating the drill with the shoulder buttons to torque your way through walls, enemies, and bosses. The rumble pak built into the cart is the only one of its kind on the system. The bosses are tight, weird little puzzle fights. The pixel art looks like a Saturday morning cartoon nobody got to make. This is the GBA game I push hardest on people who only know Game Freak from monster catching.

8. Astro Boy: Omega Factor

Treasure made an Astro Boy beat-em-up shoot-em-up that lets you punch the moon, and the only reason it isn't in every GBA conversation is that Sega published it and the print run was tiny. The combat is the kind of dense, six-button, layered chaos Treasure used to do in their sleep. There's a New Game Plus that opens a second half of the story you cannot see on the first run. The character roster is pulled from sixty years of Tezuka manga and the game expects you to keep up. It is one of the best action games on the system and you can still find it on cart for less than dinner if you look.

9. WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$!

The original. Three to five seconds per game, two hundred games on the cart, no tutorial that matters. Every microgame entry on every platform since has been a remix of this one, and most of them are worse for adding context the original didn't need. I keep this cart in the slot for travel because it is the only handheld game I know where a single run gives you the same dopamine hit as ten minutes of doomscrolling and you walk away laughing. Picking up a banana with a monkey arm at 5x speed is a perfect joke and they got there in 2003.

10. Golden Sun

Camelot's pre-Mario Tennis JRPG is the GBA game most likely to start a fight in a Discord. Some people swear it's overrated, some swear it's the high watermark of handheld RPGs. I split the difference. Golden Sun is a game where the dungeons, the puzzles, and the Djinn system are doing the heavy lifting, and they carry it. The combat is slow. The story is overwrought. The voice acting in your head will sound like a young dub no matter how hard you try. I keep coming back because it's the rare RPG where I solve puzzles in the field rather than menus, and that loop scratches an itch nothing else on the system does. The Lost Age is the better game; play the first one anyway to earn it.

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That's my ten. Yours will be different and the GBA library is big enough to support that argument forever. If any of these are sitting in your stack waiting for a turn, drop them into your StackPop and let the picker hand one back to you next week. I caught Drill Dozer again that way last fall and now we're here.