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The 16 Best Game Boy Games of All Time
On July 31, 2023, GameBoy goes 34 in North America. Nintendo’s first-ever hand-held cabinet came stateside in 1989 and conquered the moveable gaming market for nine years until the issue of its heir, Game Boy Color, in 1998.
The modest 2.6-inch black-and-white show was a age group portal into on-the-go gaming, presenting the world to now-legendary Nintendo franchises like Pokemon, Kirby, and Wario. It finished its run with 118.69 million parts sold, good for quarter on the list of all-time best-selling comforts.
To memorialize the 34th anniversary of the console’s North American issue, IGN’s editors have formed a list of the 16 best Game Boy games of entirely time.
To be qualified for this tilt, a game must have remained free on the unique Game Boy (no Game Boy Color exclusives).
16. Final Fantasy Legend 2
Contempt resonant the Final Fantasy name, Legend 2 is another game in Square’s SaGa sequence of extra systems-heavy turn-based RPGs. (The Final Fantasy name remained unified for the sequence’s North American proclamation as Square, rendering to SaGa director Akitoshi Kawazu, “was annoying to make a very humble ‘Square = Final Fantasy’ formula” in the West.)
The initial two SaGa/Final Fantasy Legend games are amid the Game Boy’s first-ever RPGs, and with prolonged gameplay schemes, graphical developments, and a extra impactful story, Final Fantasy Legend 2 stands above its precursor.
15. Donkey Kong Game Boy
Donkey Kong for Game Boy is a huge expansion and development on the Donkey Kong colonnade game. The GB version comprises all four levels found in the 1981 unique as well as 97 extra stages, moving outside the original’s building site into the jungle, arctic, and outside.
The extra 97 levels are filled out with a mixture of platforming and puzzle-solving, assisted by Mario’s newborn aptitude to pick up and toss items à la Super Mario Bros. 2.
14. Final Fantasy Legend 3
Final Fantasy Legend 3 (SaGa 3 in Japan) recalls the series’ solid turn-based RPG gameplay while integrating a deeper and extra attractive story than its precursors. Legend 3 is a time-travel story where past actions suitably affect the present, just as present-day actions affect the upcoming. As renowned in our appraisal, Legends 3, in this admiration, has greatly in common with extra excellent RPG from Square, Chrono Trigger.
13. Kirby’s Dream Land
Kirby’s Dream Land was the first-ever ready to feature Nintendo’s now-famous pink puff — and the first-ever up for designed by Smash Bros. director Masahiro Sakurai. The side-scrolling action-platformer also presented recurrent character King Dedede and the whimsical all God’s creatures of Dream Land, as well as the staple skills Kirby enjoys to this day: self-inflating in instruction to fly and allowing enemies (though he was then powerless to duplicate their skills; he’d in its place spit them out as star-shaped missiles).
The bite-sized game comprises of five levels and can simply be completed in below an hour.
12. Donkey Kong Land 2
Donkey Kong Land 2 is an altered, handheld form of the favorite SNES platformer Donkey Kong Country 2. The Game Boy form features the similar playable characters (Diddy and Dixie Kong) and evidence (saving Donkey Kong from Kaptain K.Rool), though the level and mystery strategy were reformed to familiarize to the less-powerful hardware. It’s a countless platformer in its individual right and, like Donkey Kong Land previously it, was unconfined on a sugary banana-yellow cartridge.
11. Kirby’s Dream Land 2
Associated to its precursor, Dream Land 2 is much extra of a Kirby game as we distinguish it today: The sequel lets players to combination and match controls thanks to the outline of Kirby’s ability-altering animal friends and his autograph ability-absorbing control. Dream Land 2 is also crowded with more gratified than the original — three epochs as much, rendering to IGN sister site How Extended to Beat.
10. Wario Land 2
Months beforehand the debut of the Game Boy Color, Nintendo unconfined Wario Land 2 for its unique handheld system. Wario is a considerably heartier playable character than Mario — his moveset, led by a influential charge occurrence, allows more violent gameplay, as does his immortality (Wario cannot die in Wario Land 2).
Ended the sequence of its 50+ levels, Wario Land 2 impresses with countless diversity in its boss battles and a astonishingly complex web of concealed exits, secret paths, and alternative endings.
9. Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3
An initial example of Nintendo’s disposition toward the untried, Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 ditches the business’s well-known symbol in favor of an unverified, beforehand unplayable menace. It helped as both the third admission in Nintendo’s Super Mario Land sequence and the first in its Wario-led spinoff sequence.
Wario Land approximately retained the platforming construction of Super Mario Land, though Mario’s energetic counterpart substituted mushrooms with garlic and presented new-fangled gameplay wrinkles, as well as more avenues for examination and a new-fangled set of power-inducing hats: Bull Cap (crushed pound and stick to maxima), Dragon Cap (sprout a stream of fire), and Jet Cap (glide finished the air).
8. Super Mario Land
One of two Game Boy presentation titles on this tilt, Super Mario Land was Nintendo’s first-ever Mario platformer intended and free wholly for handheld. Super Mario Land booked the basic premise of its 2D-platforming cabinet complement, Super Mario Bros., though as required by the Game Boy’s 2.6-inch shade, all gameplay and plan elements were radically shrunk. The consequence was an oddball version of a Mario game, with explosion Koopa shells, rubber-like ‘Superballs’ in its place of fireballs, and two forced-scrolling bombardment levels in the vein of Konami’s Gradius.
Super Mario Land also presented Princess Daisy, who fleetingly supplanted Peach as Mario’s damsel in suffering.
7. Dr. Mario
A Tetris-like falling-block mystery game, Dr. Mario errands players with abolishing viruses by corresponding the colors* of on-screen virus fairies with the colors of dwindling pill capsules. The acquainted and addictive gameplay loop balancing with the innovation of Mario as a doctor made Dr. Mario one of the most favorite and memorable Game Boy titles.
6. Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins
The greatest of Nintendo’s Mario/Wario Game Boy platformers is Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins. The consequence was a huge improvement on the unique with additional fluid gameplay and particularly bigger, additional detailed sprites. Mario Land 2 also additional the skill to backtrack (the original’s screens lone stimulated right), a Super Mario World-like overworld, and six cunningly designed zones that companies can tackle in the directive of their selecting.
6 Golden Coins abandoned the original’s Superball Flower in service of the more acquainted and filling Fire Flower and presented Bunny Mario, who can hurdle higher and glide finished the air. Wario, who developed the series’ playable character in Super Mario Land 3, unveilings here as the game’s chief villain.
5. Tetris
Tetris may originate in as our fifth-ranked Game Boy game, though it’s debatably the hand-held console’s greatest significant. In North America and Europe, Tetris was identical with Game Boy, as it was involved as a pack-in game for the system’s unveiling in 1989. The ageless puzzle was a picture-perfect fit for on-the-go gameplay and is accredited with serving boost and uphold Game Boy sales for Nintendo.
The Game Boy form featured three styles: A-Type (endless mode), B-Type (25-line speed-based mode), and 2 Player (head-to-head multiplayer via the Game Link wire— Tetris was the primary Game Boy game to utilize the accessory). It sold 35 million units on the comfort, creation it the best-selling single Game Boy announcement ever. (It’s the second-best-selling general behindhand the collective sales entire of Pokemon Red/Green/Blue/Yellow).
4. Metroid 2: Return of Samus
Metroid 2: Return of Samus, the permit’s second-ever game and its first on hand-held, summarizes much of what brands the sequence so singular: It’s a superpowered single quest with an eerie intelligence of separation augmented by cramped, decisively obtuse level project.
Reoccurrence of Samus presented numerous lasting weapons and skills, counting the Plasma Beam, Space Jump, and the essential Spider Ball. Its remaining power spreads to its story as well, presenting Baby Metroid and setting up the measures of its strange SNES sequel, Super Metroid.
Metroid 2 was re-created for 3DS in 2017 as Metroid: Samus Returns.
3. Pokemon Red and Blue
The games that started the Pokemon craze 27 years ago, Pokemon Red and Blue rapidly turn out to be must-play games on Game Boy. The creature-collecting and -battling games presented the ironic world of beings, characters, and company Pokemon leftovers known for to this day. Players boarded on a journey to develop Kanto’s Champion, collection, training, and battling Pokemon to downfall the region’s eight gym privileged and Elite Four.
The modest Game Boy games, stimulated by maker Satoshi Tajiri’s childhood love of bug collecting, spawned the highest-grossing media permit ever with over 100 sequels and byproducts, an globally popular exchange card game, dozens of fruitful movies and TV sequence, and boundless merch.
2. The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening
Zelda debuted on a hand-held cabinet for the primary time with the permit’s fourth game, The Myth of Zelda: Link’s Developing. A Zelda escapade unlike any extra, the game starts with Link stranded and stranded on Koholint Island absent from the knowledge of Hyrule. As Link, the actor is taxed with dungeon-crawling approximately the island to gather eight tools before climbing to the top of a crag to aftermath the divine Wind Fish who slumbers within a giant egg.
Similarly, the Zelda games beforehand it, the gameplay of Link’s Emerging balances battle, survey, and puzzle-solving. It’s a hard Zelda game by those old-style events, raised by a strange, secret-filled, surrealist story well-intentioned of its Twin Peaks stimulus.
A complete re-creation of Link’s Developing was unrestricted for Switch in 2019.
1. Pokemon Yellow
To a subsection of landlords, Game Boy was chiefly a Pokemon mechanism, and Pokemon Yellow was the cabinet’s definitive Pokemon knowledge. The improved form of Game Freak’s first-ever Pokemon escapade most particularly substituted the player’s appetizer Pokemon with a buddy Pikachu that followed you about in the overworld.
Game Freak complete other vicissitudes in Creamy to align with the first period of the Pokemon anime, addition Team Rocket’s Jessie and James and rehashing the gym leaders’ parties (Giovanni switches out a Rhyhorn for his autograph Persian, for example).
Pokemon’s first age group of games (Yellow, Red, Blue, and Green) continue its best-selling with an projected 47 million reproductions sold — good for 12th place on the tilt of all-time best-selling video games. Imminent three periods later, the permit is still thriving nowadays: the modern games, Pokemon Reddish besides Violet, are mid Nintendo’s fastest-selling games always, and the game permit’s collective auctions total is approaching 500 million replicas.
