Graphically Impressive GBA Games
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 29 ก.ย. 2024
- Even though the GBA is over 20 years old now, some games that released for the home console are still graphically impressive to this day! Join TVGS as we take a look at some gameplay of the best looking and visually impressive Gameboy Advance games the handheld console ever received! Let me know your choice of best graphics down below.
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Nintendo: You can't put 3D on the GBA.
Third parties: Yeah? Watch us!
Modern day gameboys can run nintendo switch better then it can
@@roxaskingheartsthose aren't gameboys though, to make the injury worse, they are just cheap chinese toys😂😢
@@mariowario5945 so in English your parents failed you and all your options are is cheap Chinese knock offs
@@mariowario5945 raspberry pi sells diy kits so simple a child such as yourself can use
@@mariowario5945 you can add replaceable AA batteries to your arm processor and run switch games
Golden Sun was my first game on Game Boy Advance, and it was amazing experience! I still have it.
That’s probably one of the best first games to have!
@@thatvideogamesshow totally agree
I actually found the first golden sun on the ground when I was in High school and I almost cried because it was a game I ALWAYS wanted :)
Legacy of Goku 2 and Buus Fury are also impressive in sound, scope, and visuals.
Holy hell! That Kingdom Hearts game looks and MOVES like any 2D indie game from the 2010-2020 era! Amazing!
Yeah, Chain of memories is an amazing game. Tough as nails if you don't use all the games complex sleights and card combos.
@@rjsbean289 the music is so dam cool tho!
i should have reduced my hours in pokemon games and picked up that game instead.
@@SteelSquishy You should play other games as well since the (Almost) all games are goddamn nutty to play.
So, it's just garbage...
Trivia: Until Castlevania: Circle of the Moon, the official dev kit for the GBA was -wrong-. The appearance of colors and light in the dev-kit did not match the original hardware (that lacked a backlight.) It was only until Circle of the Moon that this mismatched was discovered and the dev-kit adjusted. It also explains Harmony of Dissonances color scheme. It was to overcompensate if Nintendo got the numbers wrong again with their official software.
I didn't mind the muteness of colours in Circle of the moon but Harmony of Dissonance was oversaturated and painful to look at
Is there any visuals that replicate this, or any way to replicate this on MGBA?
@@whatisfzeroanymore2nd turn the backlight of your monitor/tv-screen off or on lowest possible?
@@TiroDvD Soo...what, it just didnt have a backlight? Didn't a lot of games compensate for that aspect? Also, MGBA has a setting for that.
The raw output of the pixels is different between each revision of the gba.
The first screen didn't have a backlight, the SP1 had a frontlight, and had the same colors as the original, and the SP2 had a backlight, with more vibrant colors
@@whatisfzeroanymore2nd "Didn't a lot of games compensate for that aspect?" Yes b/c they found out by Circle of the Moon. "The GBA is sure as a hell lot darker than what Nintendo is telling us. Make it really bright."
If you play Breath of Fire GBA it's too colorful. It looks like Crayola crayons. However if you play it on the original GBA without a front/backlight, the color are more realistic/mute like the SNES pallet.
More Trivia: Boktai 1, 2, and 3 look awful on SP1, SP2, and NDS. Everything is all washed out with white/grey. That's because the game (with it's solar sensor) is to be played with direct sunlight on the screen. So no frontlight is the more crisp and clear. (Full backlight with SP2 or TV is OK as well. I dont' know about micro GBA.)
I adore these videos - as a developer it’s super handy having all this stuff for reference in one place.
But please, if possible, can you not use footage with pixel filters on?
The Castlevania and Sword of Mana footage in this vid is really messy and hard to visually parse.
Other than than, great work as always!
Keep up the awesome!
A huge hug from Brazil, your videos are amazing, nice job!
Graphically speaking Mother 3 has some of the best visuals of all the GBA games because it came out in 2006. Although I know not many people talk about mother 3 because it was a Japan only release.
There were a number of Asterisk games released before the Super Nintendo entries. A couple of the master system games are held in quite high regard 👍
Bro “Cool Breeze” in the background just brought back so many memories I’m crying
I always enjoy your gaming videos, thanks!
Thanks!
I keep forgetting how amazing the pixel art for this system was. Nestled between the limitations of the GBC and the expanded capabilities of the DS, the GBA really hit the sweet spot for applying all of the techniques of 20 years of hard-won pixel-based graphics knowledge. The DS still has a lot of great stuff, but muddy 3D-to-2D conversions would begin taking hold, and now that many people use 3D engines to make 2D-rendered games, especially for mobile, 2D games look incongruous and janky way more often. (Mind you, there's also really incredible 2D stuff that wasn't possible before, but it's the old "with lower cost of entry, less polished results more often" kind of a thing.)
GBA was truly the peak of pre-modern GPU 2D.
Growing up my favorite games on my GBA was Dragon Ball Z: Legacy of Goku 2, Buu's Fury, and Pokémon Emerald
minor gripe but i wish you didn't use filters while showcasing these, or maybe showed filtered and filterless segments
Props for the Trauma Center OST at the beginning
Urbz: Sims in the city was impressive as well. One of my very favorite GBA games as well.
Castlevania:Aria of Sorrow is my absolute favorite Castlevania, and not just because it's gorgeous. The Gameplay was deep and full, the soundtrack was atmospheric, and It's the only Castlevania game I actually managed to BEAT lol.
How am I just now finding out how good the music in Iridion 2 is?! Just looked up the OST and good lerd it's amazing
Solid soundtrack!
Golden sun is such an amazing series
Metroid fusion was the best and my favorite gba game of all time. Beside Pokémon of course
Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance had very rich graphics and impressive sprite rotation as well. Juste doesn’t have the best animations he could have, and the neon colors may be much for some, but the game is still quite the visual spectacle in some ways.
Thanks for mentioning my game :)
WOW That V-Rally 3. I can't believe it, it looks better than some ps1 games,... just wow,.
My man with the bangers! Appreciate your work fam
11:57-13:22
Nice, you used Mega Man Star Force music
Would you happen to know which song is playing at 8:42 ?
Golden Sun was the first thing that came to mind
Iridion 2 looks like a freaking DS game with the 3D and depth effects.
I so love to see praise heaped on Metroid Fusion. It's such an absolute masterpiece and merely second to Super Metroid. I love it so much and the hate it gets is so undeserved.
I prefer Harmony over Aria. Specifically because of the movement and the music. The music absolutely slaps.
It's really a good thing that you put Castlevania Aria of Sorrow first. AoS definitely deserve the spot
Song at 15:08? Awesome video as always, bloke 🤌
No Tekken advanced?
omg golden sun. flashbacks unlocked
"Graphically impressive gba games"
And he puts Golden Sun in the thumbnail.
I see you're a man of culture.
Gba was such an awesome handheld to grow up with
Golden sun is on the list, isn't it?
Golden Sun is one of those aesthetically looking games that really pushed the GBA to its limits
Golden Sun is my favorite rpg series ever!
The vídeo would be better if you had anti aliasing turned off on every game footage.
wish there was an updated rom hack of golden sun
I guess the 3d games here demonstrates that the gameboy advanced was not a handheld snes, as is easy to assume for plebs like myself.
Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga “somewhat easy” until you get to Cackletta’s final form 😳. Very steep spike in difficulty.
I always thought the PSP was the first 3D handheld, and it was GBA all along...
Max Payne is an amazing port on the GBA
I’m really disappointed none of the dragon ball games are on this list. Especially Buu’s Fury. That game is a 10/10 masterpiece and visually stunning for a GBA game.
I fail to see how a 32 bit system was under powered for these 2d games.
great list
back in the day devs had to be minimalist. had to find ways to be effective. now its must feel so weird for them to look at the next generation of devs with all the space and firepower.
id be cool to know what their games were like if that technology came 50 yrs sooner. but humans thought war was more fun at the time and were busy playing that.
I love Chain of Memories.
I think Fire Emblem Sacred Stones should have been on here. The sprite work for the battles is so pretty. The best looking graphics on the GBA in my opinion.
Digimon Battle Spirit 2 Has Beautiful Finishing Move Animations!It Deserves A Remake,Ver.2.5!Lucemon Must Be Made Playable Along With All The Evil Warriors!DIVINE ATONEMENT!FLASH OF 7 DEADLY SINS!
Those crit animation are cool. Lyn's boob jiggle was surprising.
Game was garbage. AW2 was better looking than that trash heap.
I thought it was gonna be on this list as well, the sprite work is way too good not to be. I was surprised my first time ever playing it.
@@ZigealFaust No it wasn't lmao. Advance Wars 1 and 2 never looked that great. Sacred Stones had much more detailed spritework.
The GBA was really the little engine that could.
it's underrated and one of my fav consoles imo
Ehhhh. GBA was an easily skippable system. Going from Original Game Boy to the GBA was like going from a Sega Saturn to a PS1, while going from the GBA to the DS was like going from the SNES to a Playstation 2. Most of the best titles on GBA actually arguably were just rehashes of old SNES titles that, ironically, were often much better on the original system. The availability of Fire Emblem, Advance Wars, and a few Pokemon titles were really the only thing it had going for it.
@@VesperAegis Not correct. That is all.
It was an absolute beast of a system.
@@VesperAegis The original Gameboy was 8-bit, the GBA was 32-bit. It was capable of things the original GB hardware could never have done. Your absolute ignorance of the library is highlighted by the "SNES ports" comment. Its best games were certainly not the shitty SNES ports. This was the first system to give us portable versions of Doom and Doom 2 and they ran well! You're either a troll or just ignorant.
Man, the GBA was capable of doing some really cool things.
I still use my GB Micro regularly. With EZ Flash cart including every gameboy and NES game it never gets boring
I haven't finished the video yet but I had to pause because I appreciate it so much that you just jump right into it and don't give a 3 minute introduction going over everything that we're going to watch anyway like all other TH-cam videos do as a standard.
Very cool!
This right here got me to subscribe~
Holy shit yes! It's one of the most annoying things on TH-cam that people use to drag out the video length 😬
Imagine the video if the beginning would be like "GBA was a console released by Nintendo in the early 2000's. Most of its games look like this *shows example* or this *shows another example* or... even like this. *shows ugly example*
But some graphical gems were hidden within this console's library! But first, a word from our sponsor!"
He also didn’t demand “Like, share, and subscribe” before even showing the video first. That’s one of my pet peeves. Since he didn’t do that, I instantly Liked and sub’d
👏
Golden Sun was crazy when it released. I still remember a kid playing it at school and I was blown away by the visuals. Went to EB games that weekend and begged my mom to buy it.
And she buy it to you?
Goldensun was the best game GBA had, I love how it looks, the riddles and puzzles, why can't they make a game like that anymore with more content
@@javiertorreszamora3831 yes she buy it to me
It's still the best RPG game ever made for GBA.
It's also the best game I got for my real Gameboy!
I can't wait for my mum to buy me it again.
Bro WHAT is going on with these emulator upscaling filters??? If you're making a video about how impressive a GBA game looks, you shouldn't run the footage through upscaling filters
Exactly.
Yeah
Maybe seeing the footage at hi res was a worse representation?
Maybe seeing the footage at hi res was a worse representation?
Most people use emulation anyways. With higher resolution screens
The golden sun series was my favor gba game as a kids still is with being almost 30 yrs old god it's such a great series
Golden Sun is fantastic!! A timeless classic.
Beautiful awesome golden sun
Yup
Not golden Sun every games back then is master piece. Because before 2015 i didnt knew the existence of this Console i was shocked playing some games through emulator that how lucky kids who played these way before in 2000 - 2006. Graphics gameplay story and especially in that era when their is no smartphone devices and n gage games are shit compare to these gba games. Seriously Nintendo is way ahead in time back then.
@@sarthaksingh5480 Yeah, look not gonna lie but before the widespread net and corporate bullshit games were just written better and had gameplay put BEFORE "how much can we make"'.
Something was lost in gaming and we only get it from Indie studios now. RARELY a AAA company will do it though (Insomniac, Naughty Dog, Digital Devolver).
Velez and Dubail are masters of the Game Boy Advance. DRIV3R and V-Rally 3 were both made by them. Fernando Velez passed away in 2016, but his legacy lives on in the incredible work he and his partner did on the first three Game Boy generations.
I don't really like rpg's but I tried golden sun last year and to me it is one of the best games I've ever played. The sound tracks are amazing and there are many challenging puzzles throughout the game. I would love to play it again for the first time.
One of the greats!
Final fantasy is similar. Personally i love 8 more so then 7.
Were you able to play both? The lost age was just as amazing as the first one
@@seanfitzgerald341 You HAVE to play both imo. They are one game, hence the transfer data system.
I'm about to finish The Lost Age. Both Golden Sun and Golden Sun The Lost age great games, but I liked TLA more. It seemed to be more refined and had a greater variety of puzzles, locations, and psyenergies. Would be cool to be able to play with Isaac and company up to the jupiter light house and reunion though.
I was hoping to see May Payne for the GBA on the list. That game looks amazing and plays great on the GBA. The developers got picked by Rockstar games to make the GTA games on the PSP after they saw what they were able to do with Max Payne on the GBA.
agreed! there are so many games that could have been placed up on the list, one that i didn't enjoy but graphics wise is impressive is gekido!
@@brosyouknow5013 Max Payne is a good port. I enjoyed it n
May I humbly submit Super Robot Wars J. The animations make you really feel like you're playing an anime. It even has screen caps and shots from the anime that are featured in the game. One of the best looking GBA games, in my humble opinion.
among SRW games it has the best animations for Brain Powerd, that's for sure. And that series was even in SRW Alpha 2 on PS2
01. Castlevania: Aria of sorrow
02. Kingdom hearts: chain of memories
03. Iridion 2
04. Mario and luigi superstar saga
05. Sword of mania
06. Metroid fusion
07. Asterix and obelix xxl
08. V-rally 3
09. Golden sun
10. Driver 3
You're a tool
Good list but some of the best are missing:
1) Super monkey ball jr is a real technical miracle and at the time it seemed to have a mini Gamecube in hand.
2) Kurohige no golf shiyouyo is an entirely polygonal golf game and you can see the whole hole rotate and zoom, despite an unstable frame rate and an average resolution is still impressive.
3) Duke nukem advance is THE most impressive game on the console, especially in the final levels is incredible.
4) Payback, a clone of Gta that on GBA is much better than Gta advance, fully polygonal and full of light effects and explosions in real time, one of the best.
5) Hot wheels stunt track has an absurd graphics engine, graphically reminiscent of the first polygonal games like Virtua racing and has an incredible frame rate, the game is nothing special but the graphics engine is one of the best on the console.
6) Tokyo Xtreme racer is an excellent driving game, even if it is not very fast it also has all polygonal cars unlike V rally 3 (which is still impressive).
7) Kill switch is a third person shooter that also works pretty well and has a pretty good graphics engine.
8) Riviera the promised land, besides being (in my opinion) the best jrpg on GBA has a beautiful graphic style, with a fantastic use of colors and really fantastic sprite animations.
9) Wario ware twisted in addition to being fun and making use of the rotation sensor has many graphic styles all well done, you can see rotations and zooms of huge sprites, and a whole other series of special effects that make it an excellent candidate for this list.
10) Dan Doh!! Tobase shouri no smile shot is a golf game that makes extraordinary use of Snes-style mode 7 with remarkable fluidity and visual clarity (the sequel `` Dan Doh !! Xi '' has less bright colors and a few less graphic effects, and doesn't even have the voices of the original dubbers of the anime series, I own that too).
I think there are still some but these are the ones that came to mind at the moment (and that I all own original and complete), maybe this comment will be useful for a future video (｡•̀ᴗ-)✧
Gonna give some of these a try, thanks for the recommendations 👍🏼
Shining Soul 2, and Zelda: the Minish Cap
thanks man for non-obvious positions
zelda minish cap beats every game on your list
The gba is the best looking sprite based system out there. In some respects the snes beats it, but the gba has many 32bit looking games and i just love it.
Remember tekken on gba 😅
@@dnegel9546 never knew that was a thing but just looked it up. Pretty rough looking lol
Hopefully smashing drive can make it into part 2. Probably the most impressive port ever made for the system.
I tried playing Castlevania Harmony of Dissonance about three times and gave up on it. The story bored me to tears! However, Aria of Sorrow was epic. I played it till I unlocked everything the game had to offer. The DS sequel was awesome too. 😁
Lol Harmony was better
Castlevania is not the series I usually play when I am looking for an exciting story... I play for the exciting gameplay :)
True, but the gameplay didn't give me a reason to stay either. 😅 I didn't like portrait of ruin's story that much but at least the levels were interesting enough to keep me around till the end credits.
@@PsychomachineryEBM Are you crazy?
@@lucasrinaldi9909 nope, maybe that's you, thinking everyone must have the same taste 🤷
Golden Sun is sucg an underrated series. It's crazy that it was made by Camelot. A studio that almost exclusively makes Mario sports titles. Guess they had a few holdovers from the Shining Force days.
Chain of memories was my first KH game. I was hooked on the atmosphere.
V-Rally 3 is truly mind blowing. Unreal graphics for a GBA game!
I felt the same way about tony hawk games.
the upscaled and filtered graphics in the video are not doing the GBA any favors.
"Graphically Impressive GBA Games" -> Applies some shitty HQ2X filter on the first game shown (Aria of Sorrow)... Well played. But I like your voice over and some nice choices.
Nice selection of games.
A really well made video.
The GBA is one of my favorite consoles of all time.
P.S. I have seen that you like RPGs as much as I like 3D games on GBA.
You have done a perfect combination of both.
I wait for your next video dedicated to the other most graphically impressive GBA games 😉
Nomad and gba my 2 favs
How about Shining Soul 1&2 and Summon Night Swordcraft Story 1&2?
Okay I have to ask: What the *heck* is the point of a graphics showcase if you're going to use an ugly sprite smoothing filter on the games? This is not how Castlevania or Sword of Mana looked on the original hardware.
On one hand thanks for the list but next time could you please not use a smoothing filter?
If the video is about graphics then I'd like to see how it is supposed to look like, smoothing imo makes it worse
Why would you use pixel smoothing for some of the footage here? Does not represent the games you're presenting accurately if they have post-processing on.
I never knew the gba was so good looking. I never moved passed the game boy when it comes to hand held devices 😅
Same here. I had a PSP but I hacked it so I could put emulators on it. lol
There's just something about the GBA that really hits home to me.
As an avid traval-gamer portable devices are my main source of gaming and the GBA has some of the best titles.
Recently I've been addicted to "YuGiOh Ultimate Masters 2006"
IRIDION 2 is one I'd not heard of myself and after seeing the footage I'm going to get onto giving that a try!
Same. I've put many thousands of hours into the Gameboy platform over the past 20 years. I played my SP from 2002 until several buttons stopped working in the mid 2010s. It's very dear to me.
@@zacharyrollick6169 hey Zachary, might be repairable. Could be as simple as cleaning the contacts with isopropyl alcohol. Lots of good videos online to help you make repairs, and thanks to the boom in Gameboy popularity, lots of spare parts and upgrades you can make too!!
I plan to fix up a bunch of devices after I finish my world travels, this includes my very much loved GBC.
Glad to see more GBA fans, some great titles.
Pokémon FireRed has amazing graphics as well! It’s graphics aged pretty good!
It has good sprite art, but outside of that the graphics are very bare bones. I've been playing a ton of Fire Red lately and that's what I've noticed.
No
I'd say emerald looks better.
@@jackson633 The high point of 3rd gen games is the full locked 60fps. In visuals games like Golden Sun are more charming.
I disagree. Not the best looking game. I appreciate it but it isn't known for its graphics.
Driver 3 looks so good for the GBA,shame its almost impossible,atleast for me, the car chases are too punishing, 1 mistake and you are probably out of the mission,I dont know what they were thinking,should be way easier especially for a handheld game
Poeple who emulate GBA emulator and just looking for some nice games
👇👇
12:10 why did you feel the need to speed up the footage for V Rally 3?
Honest question, not trying to be a jerk.
Also you forgot to mention Stuntman, made by the same dev team and in some regions was even bundled in a 2 games cartridge with V Rally 3.
Don't you usually have the name of the game in the corner all the way through? Was a bit of a pain having to go back and forth to check out the titles.
Nice video !!
P.S. Where is the environmental background in Driv3r ?
The sky and the horizon should not be represented by a solid color 🤔
Thank you for making this video. This subject makes me feel so much nostalgia. Also, the art design of every game you chose was amazing! Also, admittedly, your voice is rather kind and soothing. You seem like a very nice person :) Thanks again. Looking forward to your next video. Be well
V-Rally 3 and Driv3r don't run as smooth and fast on original hardware though. Looking at the clock in V-Rally 3 for example, either the CPU is overclocked or the footage itself is sped up. Still a ton of fun though.
Mega Man games are better than all of these graphically.
07:07 I do not trust anyone's opinion on retro games graphics if you play with that smudgy filter.
Pixel perfect and use a CRT if you can... but never use the smudge stick looking filter, it's disgusting
Golden Sun is hands down one of my fav JRPG's ever because those crazy fucks managed to cram a full PS1 game on 2 GBA carts.
Apple introduced this awful way of speaking like a snob in it's keynotes around 2007 and people are adopting it to this day. Loud whispering, fakes laughs and making strange pauses like EVERY…. SERIOUS… GBA…. COLL…. ECTION. Can't listen to this bs anymore. Thumbs down.
A video about graphically impressive gba games, but you use the crappy "smoothing" filter on your emulator that makes all the sprites look like clay...
Some people prefer filtered retro games over its original pixelate looks.
WARIO LAND 4 was définitely impressive and I don't see it in the video 🥲
Part 2 in the works 🙂
Wario Land was one of the games I played the most on the system. It's a fantastic game. So many animations and fun mechanics
I hate to be that nerd defending f*cking Sonic games, but I feel the Advanced series deserved some love
What is crazy for me on V-Rally, besides the FPS they managed to squeeze out of the GBA, is that it includes a quite immersive cockpit view as well. A great little game indeed.
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 is missing from the list. That game has awesome graphics on the GBA, even though, strangely enough, the later entries in the series on the GBA had way worse graphics.
“These games have great graphics and art!”
“Im just gonna cover them up with weird filtering so you can’t see them”
It's nice to see a decent mix of 2D and 3D software rendering, the V3D engine from end(Asterix) to start (VR3) but why was the even more technically impressive blueroses engine games ignored? Wing Commander Prophecy is a direct PC port with all the models retained, stages, etc just no FMV due to cart size(cutscene replacement) and then smashing drive, a few others. That thing really pushed things almost too far.
These are amazing titles, I’ll have to dig out my GBA from storage
Golden Sun is my baby, still two of my favorite games ever.
Fire emblem, sword of mana, golden sun, tactic ogre and super robot taisen... I'm definitely not biased towards SRPG 🙃
interpolation really kills the mood when you are trying to feature "Graphically Impressive GBA Games''
I saw a kid playing kingdom hearts on the school bus and I thought it was neat. I had kingdom hearts at home on the ps2 and i remember thinking mine was better. Childish thoughts ..