Tag: Advance

THE BEST GBA GAMES

Very good vrutaleros, how long has it been since we had a top? The truth is that they have not been seen in these parts for a long time (we miss you Turcobandido T_T) that is why the idea of ​​reviving this “section” that had been abandoned in this news section occurred to me.

I have decided to reopen this section with a top 10 of the best GBA games, why? Because recently I caught a backlit GBA SP and I am giving the GBA catalog hard remembering old moments of my childhood and it is that it consolidates despite of the years it has nothing to envy to the current (semi) Portable of Nintendo.

In the Top positions I have decided to make a small presentation of the game and then explain the context of the history of this, since if I get detailed in some, I could write up to another contribution, and I do not want me to stay with too much text and very long because then I know you’re lazy to read it. I will also assume that you have played or that you at least know the game, since the titles that I will mention are quite famous.

Before starting, comment that this Top is fully subjective and although in theory the top goes from “worst” to “best” game, I have to say that all the games that I am going to mention I love equally, so don’t mind if I may put a game that you consider “the best” in the top 6 (for example) or even not appear.

With nothing more to comment, let’s get started!

SAGA DONKEY KONG COUNTRY

We started the TOP strong with what is one of the best known games on this console, I have not been able to decide which of the 3 to place because they seem like little gems. The trilogy originally released for SNES, it moves and looks great on the GameBoy, a port that demonstrated the power of the console.

The games themselves I imagine that by now everyone will know them, they are 2D platforms that follow a bit the theme of worlds of the super marios, with the peculiarity that in these games to make the path more enjoyable we have the company of certain animals that give us their help, apart we must also mention the various mini-games that the saga has.

Speaking a bit of history, in the first of the games we will have to recover the bananas that King K. Rool and the kremlings have stolen, for this we will have to travel the entire DK island to get to his ship. In the second, Kaptain K Rool kidnaps Donkey Kong and Diddy and his girlfriend Dixie are in charge of rescuing him, in this case we will go through certain of the most original scenarios to go and rescue him. And finally in the third of the saga, Donkey Kong and Diddy Kong go fishing to a sea in the north of the island DK, when Dixie saw that her beloved Diddy did not return, she grabs her cousin and takes him to look for them by the dangerous kremling island.

WARIOLAND 4

Warioland 4, you could say that it was my first game together with pokemon sapphire, since they gave me the console for kings for a year with these two games. Although at the beginning I spent a lot of the game because I really wanted the GBA for the Pokemon Sapphire, but one day boring of the Pokemo I decided to give it a try and I took one of the biggest surprises of my life, I discovered a great game that hooked me from minute one And I couldn’t stop playing it over and over again. My only regret about the game is that it is so short, being able to go through it in just a few hours.

Going to the history of the game, in this game we continue with the misadventures of Wario, where they take us this time to a mysterious pyramid in which we fall and get trapped in it, and to get out we must overcome 4 Zones, being able to choose the area As we please, within these areas there are portals that lead us to very picturesque and bizarre worlds, where we must find a key and some fragments of jewels to be able to continue advancing towards the next room in the area, where at the end a boss awaits us with Want to party, once this boss is defeated, we will make a golden pyramid appear in the central part of the map, where the last boss is, the exit of the pyramid, and most importantly, the happy treasure .

This game might be higher in the TOP if it weren’t for its short duration as I mentioned before, the game is very addictive, the worlds are graphically very colorful and have a cartoon aesthetic very in line with Wario. To travel these worlds and finish them, warioland uses a system of “transformations” in which the body of our character undergoes some type of transformation that makes it possible to continue advancing. If you have not tried it yet, it is highly recommended.

FIRE EMBLEM: THE SACRED STONES

Choosing one of the 3 out there has been difficult, at first I wanted to place the entire saga, but being objective and leaving us with subjectivities, I have to admit that The Sacred Stones is the most complete of all and the one with the most hours of vice to give.

History places us in the continent of Magvel, where there are six countries, of which 5 of them guard some sacred stones that were once used to defeat a demon king who tried to take over the continent, but was defeated by heroes who were the who carried these stones and confined the demon king.

The game begins when Grado, one of the 6 countries, decides to invade Renais, its neighboring country, to get the Renais stone, this is where we start and embody one of the 2 protagonists that this game has. In order not to start describing the whole story (that if we did not have for a while) the story is summarized in that we have to stop Grado, which tries to take control of the 5 sacred stones to invoke the fire emblem, revive to the demon king, dominate him and conquer Magvel.

The duration of the story of the game itself is actually shorter than in the other two previous Fire Emblem, but this is because the game has certain incentives to squeeze a little more duration, such as the extra characters or getting the collection of musical themes in its entirety, there are also the Tower of Valni and the Ladgou Ruins, which are sites that put us to the test by facing hordes of monsters in a series of several floors where we will have to reach the final floor and once there we expect a great treasure, although this site was used for farming more than for treasures.

THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: THE MINISH CAP

Minish cap, a game that goes through the zelda saga without pain or glory, although within the GBA catalog, it is undoubtedly one of the best games you can get your hands on.

The game follows the Toon Link aesthetic that we saw in Wind Waker and chronologically within the history of TLOZ, it is considered the second game after Skyward Sword.

In this world we are presented with a curious race called the “minis” that inhabit the world with humans without them being aware of their existence because they are tiny and imperceptible to the human eye and they are believed to be extinct or beings of mythology. The story orbits around these beings, and it is that according to the legends, the world was plunged in an era of darkness and decadence, then it was that the humans asked the minis for help, who helped them by forging a sword capable of sealing the darkness of the world, the sword was given to a certain brave hero and he managed to seal it in a chest, leaving the sword forged by the minis as a seal of the chest so that it could not escape.

The story of the game places us at a certain point in the present, on the day of the Minis holiday, where Vaati, a knight of the kingdom, breaks the seal of the sword and unleashes the darkness to absorb it and conquer Hyrule. This is where we come into play embodying Link who, with the help of Master Ezero (transformed into a hat), seek to forge a new master sword to seal the darkness again, for this we must explore the world of Hyrule and go exchanged between the world of the humans and minis to find the clues that lead us to the elements that can forge the master sword again.

As the original point of this game, I want to highlight the system of lucky stones, which when you manage to join them with others, you unlock new areas on the map that were previously inaccessible, making us revisit the areas and extending the life of the game.

SUPER MARIO WORLD ADVANCE

I really did not know whether to place this game here or not, because it really is a port of the SNES Super Mario World only with certain extras, certainly there are original GBA games that are also very good, if I have decided to place it here it is because It is a game that if or if you had to have for the GBA for all the hours of entertainment it offered, and also because it was my first contact with the super mario saga, and yes, I know what many of you will be thinking: how come I had never played super mario before until this game ?, because it is because none of my friends / cousins ​​had the game and that’s it, period (xD).

I am not going to get involved much in the history of this game because it is the same as always, only with the peculiarity of the Yoshis. If I place it so high in the TOP, it is because it is undoubtedly one of the most memorable games on the console and I think it is one of those games that everyone had together with pokemon. Note that this is where the pen was added, an object that if you knew how to use you could break the game.

METROID FUSION

It was difficult for me to choose between Metroid Fusion and Zero Mission. In the end, I chose Metroid Fusion because Zero Mission is a remake of the first NES Metroid, so I can’t consider it an original GBA game and I didn’t want to put two ports in the TOP.

The two games are great games and bring their own to the lore of Metroid, but if I finally had to stay with one of the two leaving aside that Zero Mission is a Remake, I would choose Metroid Fusion, the aesthetic of exploring a space station paid for in an orbit of a planet, surrounded by infected aliens and a dark samus from which you either flee or end up in small pieces … it is more striking to me than exploring a kind of refuge / alien city, where in my opinion all the scenarios are practically the same, at least in the space station we visit different “biomes” where different aliens live.

Speaking a bit of history, samus is infected by a parasite known as “the parasite X”, which steals all his abilities and tries to take over his body, but the parasite sees his mission failed because samus has Metroid cells. in its body, the natural enemy of the parasite X. They locate where the parasite came from, and it turns out that it came from a certain space station that was destined to study alien lives for scientific purposes. Samus’ mission is to go to that space station and try to find out what had happened. When it arrives it is found to be full of aliens that have been infected by the parasite and have become hostile, our mission will be to discover a cure for the parasite or to put an end to it by any means.

POKEMON ESMERALDA

I have decided to place it in 3rd position because I think (perhaps subjectively) that there are two games that surpass it.

Here I could have placed any of the other pokemons because they are all great (including red rescue team), but if I have decided on emerald it is for the battlefront, which extends the life of the game to hundreds of hours and is the main incentive of the game, where you put yourself and your knowledge of pokemon to the test to overcome the different and original challenges that the battlefront presents us with.

Hopefully someday they will release something similar to this, although a long time ago in an interview with Masuda when they released ROZA when they asked him why they did not include the Battle Front in the remakes, he said that possibly they would never do it again because times change and Today’s players who play pokemon are too “casual” to appreciate a challenge like the battle front (I’m not making this up, you can google the interview).

I am not going to talk about the story about this game because at this point we all know it from cover to cover, only to mention the innovations that the third generation brought to the saga, which would be: skills and natures, the true “beginning “From the competitive pokemon, the possibility of diving, the secret bases, the pokenav (although in my opinion, for what we used the pokenav the RF / VH fight hunter is better), the pokemon contests, the duality of the mountain bike with the racing and finally the double combat, which would become the official competitive format of pokemon in later generations.

FINAL FANTASY TACTICS ADVANCE

Many of you will be surprised, but I think (maybe subjectively) that this game is a full stop within the console catalog, although there are games with a similar system, for me FFTA is the one with the best system of all within the genre .

FFTA is a game that gives you hours and hours and hours of vice, a game that to this day I continue to replay it when I have nothing to do and for a new game I miss at least 50 hours and it is very addictive, I always compare it with pokemon and its slogan “get hold of them all” because the main grace that FFTA has is trying to unlock all the trades of the game in full with all the skills and with all the techniques of these, which is not easy at all since for People who have not played the game can get an idea, there are 5 races: humans, moguls, viera, bangaas and nu mous. For each race we start with some basic trades with different roles, there are the classic white magician, the black magician, the archer, the soldier … etc. when we learn a certain number of skills we can “evolve” them to various trades of the same style, but superior in all the basic battle techniques. For example, the trade “soldier” of humans, when we learn a couple of skills we can make it “fighter” or “paladin” where the improvement of techniques and skills is noted.

In addition, the game system has certain combinations of races with trades and skills that are very broken and achieving that level of your own as a player of knowledge within the game is quite satisfactory.

Apart from all this of completing all the jobs that will already take us a good handful of hours, we will also have to complete the 300 missions of the game and liberate the 26 areas of the map. So we will have a while.

The story in short (because it is long …) places us in a small town called St. Ivalice where a group of 4 boys find an old book that talks about places and magical beings, that same night, the entire town is transformed into the continent that the book recounted. Our mission, break the spell of the book, searching the continent for 5 crystals to destroy them and return to normal, but of course it will not be easy, because along the journey we will meet our companions who (logically) do not want to return to the other world because in this new world they are in, everything is much better, they have magical powers, they are part of a clan, they have money, some have even fame … etc.

Speaking of the history of the game, it is somewhat curious because as you progress through the story you realize that you are like the villain of the game by wanting to destroy that fantasy world that is unreal.

And to finish this post, here is a post I made some time ago where I analyze the game in depth in case you want to know more about it: https://www.vrutal.com/noticias/31302-joyas-ocultas -of-the-videogames-final-fantasy-tactics-advance

HONORABLE MENTIONS

Before we got to the TOP 1, I wanted to make certain honorable mentions to games that have not been here but deserve to be mentioned:

-Yoshis island.
-Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow; Harmony of Dissonance; Cirlce of the Moon.
-Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories.
-Sword of Mana.
-Dragon Ball Advance Adventures.
-Mario Kart Super Circuit.
-Advance Wars.
-Mother 3.
-Grand Theft Auto Advance.
-Sonic Advance.
-Saga de Megaman Zero.
-Drill Dozer.

I know that I left so many in the pipeline, but I don’t want to start writing each game in the console’s catalog either, these are some of the games that I have played and I wanted to leave their mention here because they are also great games that I have not put in the TOP not because they are bad or worse, but because for me I consider that those who are in the TOP, have offered me more hours of fun.

SAGA GOLDEN SUN

I think we will all more or less agree that the Golden Sun saga is the best of GBA, I will really fall short with everything I can say about this game, because I would have so much to comment that I would give for a new post so I will comment on a little above some little things of the game in case there is someone who does not know it and wants to know more or less how it is:

It is a classic JRPG cut game in Final Fantasy style, which includes as a novelty the system of the “Djins”, spirits of the continent that are like fairies that help us in our adventure, this gives some added depth to the combat system by having to combine it with psynergies (which would be like magic).

We also have movements in the game that we can use outside of combat as in the pokemon saga, but more developed.

The world is a Final Fantasy style, open, with cities that as we approach them we will enter a new scenario where everything is seen in more detail.

About the story, in Golden Sun 1 and in Golden Sun 2, we have different objectives, they are actually the same but what we want to avoid in 1, in 2 is what we want to do and our objective, I don’t want to talk a lot for Spoilers, but to say that once you have caught it, you are not going to release it.

This was a JRPG that marked many of us in our childhood, and it is that for me it was one of the first JRPGs that I played in my life, the lore of the world, the development of history, the different cultures that we meet through the world as we advance in our adventure … all that makes this game something special, and today many of us are waiting for the return of the saga with a 4th part, although we all know that you will not see it, I’m sorry for being pessimistic but this was confirmed a long time ago, and how much we can aspire to the fans of this saga is to a possible remake of the first two now that they are fashionable on Nintendo.

Well, the TOP came up here, I hope you liked it, tell me what you think and if I see that it has been received positively, maybe I would encourage myself to do other TOPs of the same style.

Thanks for reading and taking care of you!