By Jason Venter Published Oct 7, 2026, 12:02 AM EDT Polygon Lists There's always room for more
Image: James Bareham/Polygon Sign in to your Polygon.com account Add Us Summary Generate a summary of this story Like Like follow Follow followed Followed Thread Log in Here is a fact-based summary of the story contents: Try something different: Show me the facts Explain it like I’m 5 Give me a lighthearted recap When the original Game Boy came out, games like the ones people enjoyed on their NES were finally playable on the go, and players loved Nintendo for it. The green and black color palette was a bit of a bummer, but finally was rectified with the Game Boy Color. Even so, most of the games were still pretty basic. The next step was to make a handheld unit that could replicate the superior experience offered on the Super Nintendo, and the Game Boy Advance did precisely that.
Happily, many of the best games from the Game Boy Advance are available to enjoy today with a subscription to Switch Online with the Expansion Pack. However, there are still some absolute gems missing from that library. Here are 10 essential GBA games that belong on Switch Online.
The WarioWare franchise got its start on the Game Boy Advance, with 2003’s WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$! Until that point, Wario had mostly lived life as a villainous foil to Mario, but then he became an entrepreneur fascinated with the commercial potential for tiny little video games. Or so goes the lore. WarioWare: Twisted! was the second and final entry for the series on the GBA, offering another selection of “microgames” for players to conquer. This time around, the focus was on twisting the Game Boy unit around (hence the title) instead of pressing buttons on the d-pad. Perhaps that’s why the game hasn’t arrived on Switch Online, despite being a critical darling upon release. But it seems like there ought to be some way to make it happen, even so.
Image: Namco/Nintendo Released: Aug. 1, 2003
Tales of Phantasia , the first game in the long-running Tales series of RPGs, made its debut in Japan on the Super Nintendo in 1995. Like numerous entries in the franchise, it was never released overseas on its original hardware. However, a Game Boy Advance port followed a little over a decade later. Published by Nintendo in 2006, it finally gave players outside Japan the chance to see what we’d been missing: an action-RPG with beautiful visuals. Namco also made slight tweaks to improve the experience, including a reduction in the enemy encounter rate. English voiceover work also was added in North America and Europe. Two decades later, with the Tales series still going, it feels like the right time to bring the first entry to a new audience.
Image: Game Freak/Nintendo via Moby Games Released: Sep. 22, 2005
Game Freak has worked on games besides Pokémon for years, and Drill Dozer is one of the developer’s early successes. Known as Screw Breaker in Japan, the platformer presented colorful stages that stood apart from other games in the genre and featured a young girl driving a powerful little tank. A rumble pack built into the cartridge let players feel as if they were dealing actual destruction in the stages they cleared. Unfortunately, the timing for Drill Dozer ’s launch wasn’t ideal. Nintendo was already in the middle of a big push to make its DS hardware a success, and didn’t do a lot of marketing for its final releases on older hardware.
Image: HAL Laboratory/Nintendo via Moby…