22 Years Later, This Game Boy Advance RPG Is Still One Of The Best-Looking Games Ever Made
A 20-year-old Game Boy Advance classic is still one of the best-looking video games of all time. First released in 2001, the GBA was home to some of handheld gaming's most enduring classics: A Link to the Past, Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, and Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire.
Most Game Boy Advance games show their age today, thanks in no small part to the handheld's miniscule screen and lack of a backlight. But one in particular still looks great, even when blown up to the size of modern displays, due to its unique aesthetic choices and some brilliant feats of design.
After 22 Years, This GBA Game Is Still Peak Pixel Art
The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap still looks incredible today. The 2004 adventure game uses a colorful, cartoonish pixel art style, making every frame look like a colored pencil drawing. Grass, trees, stone, and steel are intricately textured, with an incredible commitment to detail, especially relative to other GBA games.
While this is apparent throughout the entire runtime, it's especially obvious when Link shrinks down — the game's main gimmick, and one of its central mechanics. When Link gets smaller, the world around him appears to grow: fields of grass appear as dense jungles, and mushrooms are big enough to serve as houses.
This concept lends itself incredibly well to Minish Cap's cartoonish aesthetic: when we zoom in on the world, it reveals an even greater level of detail, recontextualizing the mundane as fantastic and wonderful. It all comes through brilliantly in the game's visuals.
This is a strategy many Zelda games have used in their visual style. Instead of attempting at realism, only to look uncanny and outdated five years down the line, they develop a timeless, stylized look. It's why games like The Wind Waker still look incredible all these years on.
Minish Cap Is An Incredible Zelda Adventure
Visuals aside, The Minish Cap is a journey you need to experience for yourself, especially if you're a Zelda fan. Like several Game Boy Color and Advance Zelda games, this one was developed by Capcom and Flagship, and, while it's recognizable as a Zelda game, it does feel somewhat distinct from Nintendo's first-party entries.
In The Minish Cap, Link seeks to defeat the villain Vaati (familiar if you played Four Swords), who has turned Zelda to stone and disappeared. He gets help from a sort of bird-shaped talking hat, Ezlo, who allows him to shrink down to the size of a thimble, hoping he'll be able to make contact with the tiny, isolated species known as the Picori and recruit them to his side.
The shrinking mechanic is similar to the parallel universes of A Link to the Past: tiny Link will be able to squeeze into smaller passages, making his way into areas totally inaccessible to full-size Link, and vice versa. It's just another tool in your puzzle-solving arsenal and, in conjunction with other equipment, allows you to unlock new areas throughout the game.
In between all of that, you're treated to the usual Zelda standards: tools like the boomerang and bombs make an appearance, alongside new gear that lets you summon winds, dig underground, and even briefly fly. You'll explore tricky dungeons and fight all sorts of different bosses, then use the new abilities you gain to unlock secrets in the overworld.
The Minish Cap has never officially been remade, and it's unlikely that Nintendo would take up the project now — but it doesn't need to be. Everything about it, its gameplay, music, and visuals, hold up remarkably well even 20-plus years on. If you want to try it for yourself, you can check out this Game Boy Advance classic on NSO.