What makes GBA art look like GBA art?

We know what a NES game looks like. Much to the consternation of classic PC and arcade enthusiasts, Nintendo's hardware dominates our collective memory of the "8-bit" aesthetic; when an artist, game developer, or barcade owner invokes "8-bit" art, the imagery they rely on comes not from the Apple II, BBC Micro, or PC-8801, but from the 56 colors possible on the Nintendo Entertainment System. When Final Fantasy recalls its late 80s heritage, it pulls its spritesheets from the NES, not the MSX2. When Capcom needs to print anniversary merchandise for Mega Man, they draw not on the richer colors of the Wily Wars ports, but on the harsh azure and cyan of the NES originals. Shovel Knight wears its NES inspiration proudly and makes few deviations from that aesthetic, sharing almost every color in its palette with DuckTales, Castlevania, and Batman: The Video Game.

Many of these recollections distort the visual reality of the NES with RGB colors--as if everyone in the 80s was gaming on Playchoice-10 cabinets instead of running RF cables through tube TVs--but the correction itself has already emerged in a subculture of CRT shaders, custom palettes, and comparison photographs demonstrating the "intended" look of these games. This NES awareness is not just the legacy of sales data, but of derivative cultural works: fansites, sprite comics, Flash abnimations, dōjin games, and merchandise. The Spriter's Resource, Sprite Database, The Shyguy Kingdom, Sprites INC, 8-Bit Theater, Bob & George, and Captain SNES all helped to preserve the imagery of Final Fantasy, Mega Man, and innumerable others, while Redbubble and Etsy shops churning out unlicensed T-shirts and memorabilia carried on that memory until the big studios finally took interest in capitalizing on their legacies. Roughly five years before Capcom decided to embrace the 8-bit aesthetic with Mega Man 9, fans were creating their own Flash-based Mega Man tributes on personal sites and Newgrounds, using a menagerie of sprites pulled from different eras of the franchise. Already, indie game developers setting out to recreate the NES aesthetic today are embracing the correction with their own in-house CRT shaders, and if you set out to create an "8-bit" video game now, you will need to tread carefully when making one that evokes the Master System, MSX, or 256-color IBM PCs--because the public is used to imagining the NES, and so other 8-bit aesthetics become illegible outside a narrow niche.

We can say something similar of other game aesthetics. The world remembers the Game Boy, not the Neo-Geo Pocket, and so the web is populated with "demakes" of Monster Hunter and Elden Ring done in four shades of green while poor Pocket Rumble languishes in obscurity. The visual language of the WonderSwan hardware is an anomaly for most prospective viewers, while Super Nintendo and Mega Drive art glosses quite easily--just ask CrossCode, Pier Solar, Chasm, and Sonic Mania. The world remembers the PlayStation, and the Nintendo 64, and the Game Boy Color. Time will tell if it remembers the Dreamcast.

Does the world remember the Game Boy Advance?

On the face of it, it seems a silly question. It hasn't been that long; twenty years give or take, and the last one rolled off the line in 2008. But truth be told, other aesthetics faded much faster. At the turn of the millennium, people had never paid much mind to scanlines or phosphor artifacts, and so how SNES games from as recently as two years ago "looked" was already being lost in favor of the sharp, clear pixels found in Snes9x, ZSNES, and in GBA ports of 16-bit games. In theory, the GBA should be much better preserved than the SNES because of the DS and DS Lite's backwards compatibility, how much of its hardware was reused in the DS and even used in DS games, and how much more quickly it was archived both through the Wii U's Virtual Console and through unofficial emulation. Yet in practice, I think the memory of the GBA has become much like the memory of the SNES twenty years ago. We don't know what a GBA game looks like.

What do we imagine when we think of Game Boy Advance art?

Fire Emblem, Advance Wars, Pokémon, and The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap. Jury's out on Mario & Luigi.

That sounds trite, but look at what's said to be "GBA-inspired" today: Wargroove, Coromon, Ocean's Heart, Sunvale, and Moonstone Island. Midora was forced to defend itself against accusations of plagiarism over just how deep its Minish Cap inspiration went, there's a lot of Metroid Fusion in Iconoclasts and Wario Land 4 in Goodboy Galaxy, and then there's all the Mother 3 in Garden Story, Oddventure, and HEARTBEAT. I see pieces of M&L echoed in Folkloria, but I don't see a whole glut of other games emulating that style or filling the void now that Alpha Dream is dead. The reference pools are significantly smaller than the system's actual library; technically accomplished games like Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, Sword of Mana, and Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Red Rescue Team, have had their legacies buried by remakes or reboots that replaced the pixel art visuals with polygon models.

Other masterful titles like Dragon Ball: Advanced Adventure and Boktai were doomed to obscurity by low initial availability and a lack of publisher interest in rereleases. Meanwhile fansites like FEPlanet sprung up largely around efforts to compile spritesheets out of Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade, Blazing Blade, and Sacred Stones, and those sheets gave way to animated GIFs that saw extensive use in different web forums, roleplay communities, discussion threads and screenshot Let's Plays. We are accustomed to thinking about specific games when it comes to the GBA, and so the console's legacy is smaller than it should be; our purpose here is to pull back the curtain on the games time forgot.

Hardware and Software

To understand what GBA games look like and why, we have to first look at the conditions the games were produced under. Contrary to the popular imagination, there were very few magical tools behind the curtain: the initial software disks shipped with the official emulation and debugging kits said "Windows 95/98/NT" on them, and were later revised to support Win2k. (Not XP, but that's okay because 2000 was the best edition of Windows.) The days of developing Super Famicom games on a mix of HP 64ks and PC-98s were long gone, while deluxe workstations like the SGI Octane and Sun Ultra were rendered unnecessary by the low-end hardware. As one Blizzard developer put it, high-fi PC and console games were sucking all the air out of the room; developing for the GBA enabled projects that could reasonably be finished by a small team in a short development cycle to good returns.

You can actually download the original 2001 development kit for the first GBA titles thanks to the preservationists over at Forest of Illusion. This software package was meant to be used in conjunction with an official emulator unit, a piece of hardware from Intelligent Systems used for development, compilation, and debugging, that could interface directly with both PCs and Game Boy cartridges. Of particular interest to us is the AGB-CHARACTER and AGB-ANIMEVIEWER software,

However, it's important to keep in mind that not all developers used these kits. Intelligent Systems' software and hardware packages were only for the top-of-the-line clients and internal studios, and these types of hardware emulators could easily cost thousands of dollars because they included not just the GBA hardware but also a computer built around it meant to communicate with the development PC directly and convey things like hardware interrupts and debug commands from the PC to the Game Boy. Moreover, how kits were handled could vary depending on your company's relationship with Nintendo. For many studios it simply wasn't a worthwhile investment to shell out when the GBA was infamous for being emulated with high compatibility less than a year out from launch. For a direct example of this, you can see the developers of Dragon Ball Z: The Legacy of Goku II over at Webfoot running their game in Visual Boy Aadvance in this official making-of video. (Also, look at those hunks of junk they're using to play the game. Jim Grant is using a Saitek! Andrew Meyers has a Gravis Pro! The days before XInput were dark times.)

The speed at which unofficial GBA emulation progressed remains unprecedented, as the system was emulated before launch. There are conflicting accounts of how this was accomplished: if you comb through the documentation on sites like gbadev.org or devrs.com, the authors stress that their documentation of the GBA was created legally through examining the public ARM7TDMI specs and datasheet, reverse-engineering, and examining public domain demos. By this account, the earliest work was simply picking apart the ARM spec and going from there. An alternative explanation--and one that few will talk about openly--is that the full design documentation was leaked onto IRC chats back in 2000. This is hard to confirm, but it's hard to believe that someone without access could have created GBAEmu in September of the same year, an emulator that could run the Yoshi Demo shipped with software development kits. If the full spec was leaked, then exactly how it happened is one of the GBA's deepest mysteries. Other tools were acquired several years later through unsecured Intelligent Systems FTP servers configured with default usernames and passwords, but how the entire GBA spec got out in 2000 remains unanswered decades after. Unofficial demos and homebrew tools for editing graphics were being released constantly in the half-year period between the leak and the GBA's Japanese launch.

Regardless of how it happened, once it was in the wild the information was effectively impossible to suppress: the official dev scene overlapped heavily with the unofficial demoscene and the emulation community. It enabled future emulators to build on what GBAEmu had accomplished, and VGBA, iGBA, Boycott Advance, DreamGBA, No$GBA, and ultimately VisualBoy Advance, all independently released in 2001 while capable of running commerical games by the end of the year. As the GBA wasn't a particularly powerful system even when it was new, many smaller developers did the logical thing and used free unofficial emulators derived from the leaked design spec to develop for it. (The irony is not lost on me as a developer: turning to software you know will be used to pirate your games so that you can develop those games more cheaply.)

For the artists at the high end of the market, the endpoint of their workflow was with two programs. AGB-CHARACTER was used for editing the actual pixels, and could interface with an emulator unit or the AGB-Parallel Interface Cartridge (AGB-PIC)--a cart wired to ribbon cable ending in a 25-pin printer port that connected the PC directly to a GBA. The AGB-PIC mirrored the contents of the "Screen" subwindow in AGB-CHARACTER, allowing artists to view their pixel art exactly as it would be rendered on real hardware. The primary use case for AGB-PIC was cutting together spritesheets from graphics imported from an outside editor; artists would first draw their graphics in another program, then open up AGB-CHARACTER to optimize their sprites for the hardware, and finally cut the finished sprites into 4x4 pixel regions called "tiles" to cram them into whatever open space was available in the ROM's graphics memory. AGB-ANIMEVIEWER was for previewing and editing together sets of animations from spritesheets, and could be run on PC or on Viewer64, a cartridge that plugged into a Nintendo 64 to display the animation on a television set.

Getting to that endpoint made up the bulk of their work. Windows was the unified platform for developing GBA games, but there was still some "magic" lurking around the scene. While programmers were writing up C++ code in text editors and IDEs much like the Emacs derivatives past and present, and musicians were continuing to work with familiar SC-88 synthesizers and Impulse Tracker, artists had more choices to make in how they developed for the GBA. In the west Pro Motion was the closest thing the industry had to a standard, although some artists still clung to emulated versions of Deluxe Paint II/III, and others resorted to Photoshop. Over in Japan, EDGE gained some traction as a successor to Multi Paint from the PC-98 days, notably at Pokémon and Drill Dozer developer GAME FREAK, but the Amiga's poor initial showing back in the 80s meant that dPaint had never been widely adopted there. Other Japanese developers simply pressed on with in-house art tools they had been updating continuously during the previous decade, having already recompiled them during the transition from domestic PCs to Windows 95.

What did those tools look like? We only have brief glimpses--some of them remained in use through the life of the Nintendo DS. There are some hard-to-confirm statements allegedly from former Capcom employees floating around about placing pixels one at a time using just the arrow keys to navigate the canvas, corroborated by similar anecdotes of tools that could draw sprites by navigating a palette with the number line and A~F keys, but even Capcom may have begun using digitizer pens by this time. (Sega had been for over a decade.) Wacom was just spreading into professional use by the time the first Game Boy Advance games entered development, with the first Graphire and Intuos tablets launching in 2000. (The PenPartner had already been around for two years but wasn't very practical for drawing because of its size.) We also know that some developers made the jump to GraphicsGale in 2004, as GG was created specifically to address pixel artists' need for layering and faster turnaround on animation. Regardless of the actual input methods and software, the workflow was largely directed by the Game Boy Advance hardware. Artists made use of:

• 15-bit RGB sliders, with each channel ranging from 0 to 31. By sliding the Red, Green, and Blue values to the left or right, artists could increase how much of each type of light was output by each pixel. (You can convert the 15-bit RGB notations to our modern 24-bit standards by running the specific color's hex code through this tool. For the most part, the absolute ends of the color spectrum remain the same so that 31/31/31 becomes 255/255/255, it's the subtle in-between values that become more diverse as bit depth increases.)
• Background ("tile") canvases of 8x8 pixels, and foreground ("sprite") canvases ranging from as low as 8x8 pixels up to a hard limit of 64x64.
• A cap of 16 colors per canvas, with 1 color reserved for transparency on sprites. For many developers, e.g. Webfoot in that Legacy of Goku II video, transparency was indicated by magenta--31 Red/0 Green/31 Blue. This was because (being brutally honest) no one would ever use magenta in a real sprite. Everybody hates this color, but no one hates it more than digital artists, because it was a mandatory color in the first color graphics cards, out of four. (It joined 0/0/0 Black, 0/31/31 Cyan, and 31/31/31 White to make up what is possibly the worst color palette in the history of mankind, designed purely for contrast and numerical symmetry with no thought to how it would look or feel on the eyes.)

This article isn't about the DS, but it's worth noting the actual 15-bit RGB graphics editors some developers packed into their games during the DS era. While the DS' full palette was 18-bit and had a gamut of 262,144 colors, that range wasn't accessible in every graphics mode: the DS had seven graphics modes, six of which could display up to 1024 colors from its 18-bit gamut (256 colors per layer, four layers per screen) but Mode 6 was limited to the same 15-bit 32,768 color gamut as the Game Boy Advance. (Albeit with the very specific superpower of being able to use all 32,000+ colors on any object.) Because Mode 6 was the only mode that could draw 3D graphics, every game on the DS that draws any polygons at all has the same color range as the GBA, no matter how minor the 3D used. This applies to Lunar Knights, The World Ends With You, and the DS Pokémon games, among numerous others.

For our purposes, the Mega Man Star Force/Ryūsei no Rockman trilogy are especially important. All three games use Mode 6 and have an embedded pixel art program used to draw icons for their local and network social features. This drawing app can only generate pixels in the 15-bit range, using three RGB sliders ranging 0~31 and pen, line, bucket, eyedropper, and undo/redo tools, as well as a pixel grid that can be toggled on or off to aid drawing. Treasure's Bleach: Dark Souls has another graphics editor in this style, used to customize the player's squad emblems for its online multiplayer mode. Bleach DS has similar a slider-driven workflow and toolset, but also has cut and paste features and hotkeys using the DS' hardware buttons. While never confirmed explicitly, it's not unreasonable to think these are all stripped-down versions of internal pixel art tools used at Capcom and Treasure, as it would make sense to simply reuse an existing tool for the multiplayer features rather than develop an entirely new one. Whatever the case, being tools made by the developers themselves, they provide a small window into their priorities--using those 31 RGB ranges rather than a color wheel or picker, for example.

If I was a more competent engineer I'd generate a labeled chromaticity diagram showing how 15-bit and 18-bit color both represent a portion of the colors possible in 24-bit, but I'm not so I'll leave it to someone else to puzzle out. For now, imagine an isoceles triangle inside this diagram, and then a much smaller isoceles triangle inside that, and you'll have an idea of how the different bit depths relate to one another:

Saturation and Lighting

It's often said that Game Boy Advance titles were deliberately oversaturated to compensate for the unlit screen of the launch models. This is mostly true, but with some caveats: first-party games, and games from third parties that had already worked on the similarly-unlit Game Boy Color were indeed oversaturated, but games from developers that skipped the CGB or were new to portables had more naive color palettes that didn't account for needing to compete against other light sources hitting the screen. (i.e. the entire sun) Most infamously, Konami's Castlevania: Circle of the Moon was the must-have title at the GBA's launch, but the game was often rendered illegible on real hardware. The "intended" way to play Circle of the Moon is on a backlit LCD, as it's essentially unplayable on a stock AGB-001 without a worm light. When you compare it with contemporary launch titles like Nintendo's F-Zero: Maximum Velocity and Super Mario Advance, or Capcom's Rockman EXE, it's obvious that other developers experienced with color handhelds knew to oversaturate. Konami had learned their lesson by the time of Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance a year later, which uses neon blues and crimsons for better visibility, but as early as Zone of the Enders: The Fist of Mars they were selecting for higher-contrast color palettes in response to the feedback on Circle.

Another lesser-known reason for the oversaturated colors on the system's initial lineup is the screen quality. Like the Game Boy Color before it, the Game Boy Advance's panel had a lower gamma than most modern (and contemporaneous) LCD screens. Gamma is a rather complex property to unpack, but the gist of it is that gamma defines how bright or dark each pixel on a screen can be, meaning it affects all three color channels simultaneously. (A digital artist mixes light, not paint; tints and shades are the result of expressing multiple levels of red, green, and blue light in the same pixel to raise or lower the collective white levels and get closer to or further from black.) What this means broadly for GBC and GBA art is that absolute blacks and whites go unaffected, while brighter blacks and darker whites shift towards the middle, and the three primary colors desaturate at the far ends of the spectrum but become more vibrant near the low end. Most discussion of gamma is on how photorealistic an image it can reproduce based on the luminance of shadows and gradients, which is obviously not useful in the context of an abstract art machine like the Game Boy. A comparison shot should convey this better:

Look at how the blue in Nayru's hair and the green in Link's tunic both desaturate when the gamma is lowered to match the hardware, while the yellow background softens into a cream color. The gamma-corrected teal in Nayru's dress is a closer match for the official art of this scene than the raw, though many of the other colors in her design had to be consolidated to fit inside the constrained palette of GBC tiles. (You only get 4 colors per 8x8 pixel region and one of them is always the color defined as transparency, even when the tile itself doesn't have any transparent pixels.) The GBC and GBA actually share the same 32k color range but with more on-screen colors for the Advance, and while their resolutions differ the actual screens were sourced from the same factories, cut and engineered similarly. Consequently, both the Game Boy Color and Advance are capable of expressing colors in software that will not display correctly on hardware; the low gamma of their screens acts as a cap on how high and low their colors can go. 31/0/0 in 15-bit color space is the most unnaturally bright red you will ever see but the screen can't actually display 31/0/0, the highest the screen can go in that direction is more like 27/14/17. We're talking ~40% white mixed in, because gamma doesn't just affect the maximums but the minimums as well, so when the physical pixel grid tries to beam out maximum red light with zero green or blue it instead ends up with trace values of each in there that desaturates the final color.

The harsher colors were at times chosen because of how desaturated they would appear on the final hardware. We have direct evidence of this in games where the weakening of whites was relied on to make different-colored tiles blend together as a single white, as in certain Devil Children cutscenes on the Game Boy Color--it's much easier to confirm than with examples from CRT TV sets, because virtually every Game Boy Color and Advance screen is identical to every other GBC and GBA screen, and there are numerous working models that will demonstrate this effect for you. When played with the direct RGB values in an emulator, it creates unintended artifacts that weren't visible on development kit screens or retail models.

However, the problem with applying a GBC-centric approach to the GBA should already be evident. We're talking about an immutable physical property of the hardware, something built into the very structure of the machine down to the properties of the liquid crystals filling its display. That makes sense for a static hardware standard that went unchanged for its entire life on the market, but the Advance was iterated upon with different backlit and frontlit models, TV-out and micro variants, and even the screen one experienced these games through eventually changed in the transition to the Nintendo DS, DS Lite, and 3DS. Ambassador Program users on the 3DS saw a different set of colors from anyone that bought an AGB-001 on launch day, while Mother 3 could look so different from Rockman EXE in part because the artists could anticipate it being played on a Game Boy Micro or DS Lite. For this reason, I've chosen to separate Game Boy Advance art into several distinct periods: the unlit AGB period, the frontlit AGS-001/TV-out DOL-017 period, and the backlit AGS-101/OXY/NTR-001 period.

As pixel artist Cyangmou observed in his own analysis of the Fire Emblem games, developers like Intelligent Systems adjusted their color choices over time to account for the changing hardware between the unlit AGB and the later backlit/frontlit AGS models. Green values as a whole were toned down to reduce the level of yellowing on whites and greens, background tiles got darker and the darkest colors used got more vibrant, shadows became more complex to take advantage of the higher contrast and gradients smoothed out. We don't need to wait for a developer to sit down in an interview on record and say "this is why we did it this way"; the artwork is self-evident in why it is doing what it is doing. It speaks to us about its purpose.

Consequently, the "intended" look of Game Boy Advance art is not so simple as applying a gamma correction filter. Each game was made with a particular hardware standard in mind, and certain titles like Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap featured different contrast settings to account for the variety of hardware on the market. The "correct" colors can only be determined on a game-by-game basis, and making sense of what the developers were looking at gives insight into why particular colors were chosen and how they contribute to the final image. The vibrant, high-saturation hues of Advance Wars and Superstar Saga with lime green grasses and purple rivers were certainly there in software, but they were not seen exactly as The Spriters Resource or VBA presents them.

Chronology

Starting at the beginning, Mega Man Battle Network/Rockman EXE is probably the standout game of the GBA's launch and one of the first titles to establish its aesthetic language. The game took advantage of the next-gen hardware to embrace an isometric perspective that would be difficult to impossible to implement on the earlier Game Boys, and its style inspired many imitators like Epoch and BEC's licensed Angelic Layer and Legendz adaptations. Despite this state-of-the-art perspective, many of EXE's principles carried over from Capcom's prior experience with Mega Man Xtreme, Gaia Master, The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages, and Oracle of Seasons: vibrant color choice that would come through even in direct sunlight, important characters separated by primary accent color (e.g. Rockman's blue, Netto's orange, Blues' red) and a focus on warm background environments to let the cool foreground characters stand out. Just as Link's stark black contour and desaturated mint-green accent were highly visibile in the golden forests of Labrynna, MegaMan.EXE's five shades of blue come across quite cleanly on the predominantly salmon-colored internet.

In fact, Capcom took these principles a little too far, chasing some ideas that wouldn't age well and would be dropped from the series after this. For one, the internet was too uniform in its coloration because of that strict adherence to warm backgrounds, making it visually indistinct and contributing to the disorientation of actually navigating it. Another issue was using prerendered sprites for tiled background animations and dungeon walkways. The cyberworlds of Battle Network are flooded with rotating copies of the letter E, digitized models of honeycomb geometry, and giant spark plugs that look like they were rendered in Maya with a basic phong shader before being reduced down to 15 colors and sent out to die. It looked good in Donkey Kong Country seven years earlier when there were phosphor artifacts to bleed out the sheer edges of the pixels and feed the imagination with a seemingly-3D object, deceiving the viewer into thinking the SNES could do polygons, but on an LCD screen these sprites became ugly, blocky, obviously-fake fascimiles of depth that clashed with their traditionally-drawn surroundings.

Nonetheless, the fundamentals this game established were solid: each dungeon had its own color ramp and themed abstract background, so that (for example) the frozen Waterworks network would ramp from blue paths to green, yellow, and eventually brown, with animated snowflakes and ice crystals behind the stage. Meanwhile the traffic signal network was impossible to confuse for it because of a separate black-red-yellow-blue ramp and animated warning signals filling the background layer. (Japan uses blue traffic signals instead of green.) The real world areas were also able to show more variation in color scheme because they didn't feature random encounters, one-way sliders, or dungeon puzzles as the internet did, so navigation was less critical and a darker palette representing urban environments could be used to contrast with cyberspace.

EXE 2 and 3 would perfect this visual style, which despite its apparent brightness today, had an overall lower-contrast look than many of its contemporaries. 3 came up with the clever idea of setting out a "main road" on the internet in yellow tones, while the connecting side paths were coded in a soft tea green, and entrances to character homepages distinguished by their accent colors: blue for Netto, pink for Meiru, gold for Yaito, and orange for Dekao. These games completely dropped the prerendered sprite elements, populating each area with specific animations representing their theme and mood. The zoo network is a continuous stream of animal banners hanging over a void of primary colors full of spinning seal, camel, bear, and gorilla silhouettes, connecting different virtual cages that serve as the destination platforms; the hospital network takes place on clusters of floating syringes bridged together by red and blue DNA sequences, with spinning pills dancing behind them like an abstract painting from Dr. Mario's retirement years; the Undernet is littered with collapsing platforms in an abyss of television static, drawn in stark purple and gray tones blotted with orange eyes, impressing on us the idea of a place slowly decaying and falling into itself. The medium of pixel art is used to make environments that feel like themed 00s internet servers, highly specific in their interests and roles.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about these games is that they were not tile-based at all. The Game Boy Advance had six display modes, with half being tilemapped and half bitmapped; very few titles ever used modes 3~5. The six core Battle Network entries belonged to an exclusive club of GBA games that stored each background as a unified bitmap image rather than breaking it up into tiles, which ate up a lot of memory and severely narrowed the kind of action that could take place on the overworld, but was perfect for an RPG with a separate battle screen. Today we see pixel art games that don't use tiles like River City Girls crop up with some regularity, but in 2001 Battle Network was on the forefront of uncharted territory. It could have ended very badly if it didn't complement the world exploration so well.

Capcom was not the only company in 2001 thinking about isometry. The next game on our list is much more obscure than Battle Network, but nonetheless important for picking up an old legacy that would continue through the end of the DS' lifespan: Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis. Developed by Quest, this was a new entry in the Ogre Battle franchise following from the turn-based RPG Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together. Most gamers have never heard of Tactics Ogre, except perhaps as the forerunner to Final Fantasy Tactics, and The Knight of Lodis has roughly the same relationship to Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, which entered development soon after Lodis under the same team, using the same engine, and same visual style, launched about two years later to far greater financial success. In both cases it's a shame; both series were conceived as multi-part entries in two greater sagas by Matsuno Yasumi, whose greatest strength is his historical-realist approach to politics and ethics, in which historical personages are judged by the content of their actions rather than the beliefs they profess to justify them. While the Tactics Ogre games aren't shy about supernatural elements, the angels and demons are ultimately a thematic element subservient to the bigger issues of ethnic cleansing, class warfare, imperialism, and how much people will pay for their freedom. Final Fantasy Tactics tried to have that kind of nuance and flew close to it, until the disgruntled war veteran lecturing you about the church using false miracles and rewriting history to create an obedient underclass used a magic crystal to turn into an actual demon.

I digress. The Knight of Lodis is a much brighter game than Battle Network despite the much darker tone of the Tactics Ogre world. Most flesh tones are conveyed with a bold yellow that resembles nothing seen on an actual human being, but the screen reduces it down to a

Its secret ending is also one of the best conclusions to any game, in part because it only makes sense if you've already beaten Tactics Ogre and have a thorough working knowledge of its world to back the realization of just who you've been playing as the entire time. It may be inevitable that Tactics Ogre die in obscurity while Final Fantasy Tactics fans lament their spinoff's demise; the games are infinitely more pessimistic than Final Fantasy. Ogre argues that the political instruments of the ruling class are so vast and so morally destructive to anyone that sinks low enough to fight them that only incremental change can be acheived, and only through the repeated sacrifice of heroes that become so steeped in blood they become the new tyrants. Young heroes grow into old villains, are opposed and deposed by new young heroes, who manage to make one small difference before becoming jaded old monsters incapable of furthering progress without being slain. Meanwhile in Tactics' world, good men who stay true to their morals ride off into the sunset while your typical Ogre protagonist is off in the corner getting his comeuppance. The market isn't receptive to challenging stories about the inevitability of evil; it eats up straightforward caped crusaders fighting the devil. (*Throws rock at Hashmalum*)

Next on our list is a game much better remembered, Camelot's Golden Sun. This game was used heavily as a promotion tool in the lead-up to the Game Boy Advance's launch. It was likely the screenshots and early videos of this game's summon sequences, along with Sakuraba Motoi's masterful use of the GBA's very limited sound chip, that convinced developers to drop support for the competing WonderSwan Color hardware; Golden Sun maximized its use of the GBA's palette by deriving almost all of its sprites from pre-rendered 3D models, and took advantage of how the hardware treated every layer as affine (transformable) to scale the player characters, monsters, and backgrounds in real-time. Many overworld animations incorporate sprite scaling to impose "squash and stretch" distortion effects that Camelot previously had to hand-animate in Mario Golf and Tennis. The use of pre-rendered sprites looks incredibly ugly the farther you stray from the GBA's original resolution, but at the time ensured that every sprite would make full use of its assigned 15-color palette where other games like Rockman EXE would often fall short on color counts with only 12~13 colors per sprite. The transformations, gradients, and pre-rendered sprites used made maximal use of the GBA hardware, to the point that Golden Sun was once one of the more challenging titles to emulate and on older PCs often encountered slowdown on the world map, where transformation effects also pull the ground and horizon out behind the player character while tilting locations toward the viewpoint.

However, it wasn't all baked-in sprites. The menus, character portraits, and dialogue interface will strike a familiar chord with old school Sega fans, because Golden Sun is a stealth sequel to Shining Force II and Shining the Holy Ark, not just hitting on familiar plot points and battle presentation, but also replicating the main menu, dialogue scenes, and decision prompts with much richer colors. It's a more traditional turn-based RPG rather than a Strategy RPG or Dungeon RPG, but the Camelot blood running through its veins is unmistakable and it's a shame so much of the game is retouched CGI because the portraits and battle sprites end up being less expressive than Shining Force II for it. Aesthetically, Golden Sun has a lot more in common with Holy Ark than the Force games, and I suspect that if the hardware weren't holding them back, the prerendered sprites would've gotten even uglier.

...what, you expected more? Look, this game's got a big case of butterface. The towns? Beautiful. The dungeons? Gorgeous. But the battles? When I talk about pixel art, I'm generally aiming to talk about things that aged well.

Speaking of things that aged well, Wario Land 4!

The Advance Wars games are victims of time and circumstance. These are upbeat wargames created as a successor to the Japan-only Famicom Wars and Game Boy Wars titles from Nintendo R&D1 and Hudson Soft, with development handed over to Fire Emblem studio Intelligent Systems. They began development in 1999, and are themselves relics of the 90s: unlike in IntSys' other strategy games, units in Advance Wars represent entire groups of characters, with one hit point corresponding to one or more actual people. It can be somewhat disturbing now to go back to them and watch Commanding Officers playfully banter while casually sacrificing dozens of soldiers in the confidence they can simply send more fresh reserves to maintain the collective unit, but these games were developed during a time when the world was unironically talking about the end of history, democratic peace theory, and the end of all war. The game treats war as a toy precisely because, when it first entered development, war had become a distant and near-inconceivable thing. Philosophically, Advance Wars is the optimistic (if naive) opposite to Tactics Ogre and Final Fantasy Tactics--back in the 90s Matsuno looked at the apparent peace of the "First World", then to the Yugoslav Wars' invention of ethnic cleansing, and concluded mankind hadn't changed. Peace would inevitably collapse so long as an economic incentive existed for war:

To that end, Matsuno wrote fantasy worlds that beyond their surface magical trappings were much like our own, full of industrial actors ready to fund wars to claim resources for themselves, political dynasties of politicians and aristocrats funded by industry, using racial and religious propaganda to marshall an impoverished soldier caste dependent on the war economy to function, and discarding them when their purpose is served. Meanwhile in Advance Wars, nothing ever happens, war isn't real, and politics is as simple as the good guys sitting on the bad guys' base for two turns. (Unlike virtually every other strategy game we'll be discussing here, including Super Robot Wars and Fire Emblem, we never see any civilian leadership in Advance Wars.) At the time Tactics Ogre's portrayal of humanity was completely against the grain of the optimistic "Long Boom" narrative popular media had embraced, while Advance Wars' frivolity was a direct product of it, and had Advance Wars been a global launch title for the GBA it probably would have enjoyed a much broader audience and become a mainstay Nintendo franchise. Instead, the first game launched on September 10th, 2001.

Oops.

In a fit of ironies, Advance Wars was originally going to a Japanese exclusive, but ended up debuting in North America first once Nintendo decided to take the (relatively low-stakes) gamble of establishing a new GBA IP overseas. The 9/11 attacks and the near-immediate start of the global War on Terror--which Japan provided financial and logistical support for to a degree their courts later determined was unconstitutional--resulted in Advance Wars being delayed indefinitely from its intended October release date, and ultimately the game only came to Japan as part of a 2-in-1 title three years later. One of the first GBA games to enter development became one of the last to release in its home country, missing an important window of opportunity and underperforming in the market. There's two great little games bundled in that cartridge, but they were also completely tone-deaf to the specter hanging over everyone's heads. It may have been easier to push out that first game closer to launch if it treated its subject matter with a little more gravitas, but as-is the playful attitude toward war just seemed distasteful. Even twenty years later, the callousness of the Commanding Officers is jarring compared to nearly any other strategy game; at least Super Robot Wars and Fire Emblem make token gestures to acknowledge the senselessness of killing each other.

As one of the earliest GBA titles, Advance Wars had a color palette carefully tuned to the AGB-001 screen: a lime green and lemon yellow that dither together into something resembling chartreuse for the grassy plains, a stone blue to form the contours of the mountain ranges, and a tawny brown for their shading. The ocean is rendered by pairing cornflower blue and ultramarine, with shadows drawn in indigo. On modern LCD screens these color choices look downright painful, but on real hardware (or with gamma correction) the boldest colors are robbed of much of their light, desaturating into pleasant middle-ground values that come across as naturalistic greens and yellows rather than the harsh tints we see in software. The sea loses its purple tones and becomes a navy blue instead, while the beaches take on a golden-brown hue. Something similar happens to the foreground objects, where their primary color channels shift down and secondary channels shift up to create a softer scene much easier on the eyes. Like its sister series Fire Emblem, we tend to remember Advance Wars for its bold and bright colors, but that's a distortion born from revisiting the games on the DS Lite, PC, and similarly-backlit systems. The colors as first conceived were less vibrant and more paper-like in their tone, and they were also closer to Hirata's official artwork than what an emulator will show you.

Note the saturation difference between the background and foreground, and how the background contours and accent colors on bases are both lighter than the equivalent colors on the foreground units. The Orange Star base has similar accents to the Orange Star armies, especially after gamma correction, but there's still about a 10% decrease in chroma between them. Separating objects from scenery like this for visibility is a lost art on modern games; it's a mistake to use the same black for the foreground as the background, as the player needs to be able to distinguish the environment they're moving through from the character they're controlling.

The four core armies in Advance Wars are distinguished by contrasting primary colors that serve as the accents for their units: Orange Star, Blue Moon, Green Earth, and Yellow Comet. The main campaign sees the player controlling Orange Star, so the other colors are all chosen to form a contrast pair against orange, but even against each other the specific green and blue chosen (as well as yellow and green) avoids the typical confusion that happens between the two colors. Black Hole rounds them out as the antagonist faction--in terms of the game's composition as an art piece, black complements rather than contrasts with the player's army, focusing the eye on one's own units rather than the enemies'.

The Commanding Officer portraits all use high-saturation two-tone shading for their hair and clothes, to provide maximum contrast against the background tiles. Note how Olaf's beard goes from a goldenrod and chestnut color in software to something more like beaver brown and sienna after it hits the screen. The values aren't just desaturating towards a higher luminance, in some cases they actually shift down.

Contrary to what the naked eye may suggest, the Advance Wars palettes were actually adjusted for the DS release Dual Strike, but the difference is so subtle they may as well not have bothered; we're talking #f78f58 versus #ff935b. The change in saturation is basically imposible to detect unless you put both sprites side-by-side and flip rapidly between them to see the accent colors brighten.

I didn't start these articles expecting to critique the Re-Boot Camp HD remake, but it seems its colors didn't take the contrast levels of the original game into account, because the grass and water tones are much closer to how Advance Wars appears raw in emulators rather than on how it runs on a real GBA:

Ultimately this points to one of the difficulties of creating art in the style of the GBA--these games were made with the hardware colors as the reference point, and the sprites were constructed around a final form that's no longer readily accessible. If you want to paint with the same colors as Advance Wars, you're better off inkdropping from gamma-corrected screenshots than trying to pull your palettes out of the raw data.

Rounding out 2001 is Capcom's little-known take on the monster-catching genre, Granbo. Even in Japan, Granbo is something of a hidden gem, highly-reviewed but rarely played--we have sales data for practically every Japanese game released in 2001 and 2002 thanks to Famitsu magazine's week-by-week software sales tracking, but Granbo never appears even once in the top 30 charts of any week of any year, nor in the bi-annual aggregate data.

Sonic Advance

Fire Emblem 6 + 7

Narikiri Dungeon 2+3, Summoner's Lineage

Starfy

Superstar Saga

Rockman EXE 6

Minish Cap

Fire Emblem 8

Chain of Memories -- Of note is that the raw software colors with the in-game low brightness setting are a close match for the gamma-corrected colors on max brightness; this game predates the backlit AGS-101, Game Boy Micro and DS Lite, but Nintendo was already reaching out to developers at the time about the specifications for the DS "phat" and the Game Boy Player and AGS-001 were both on the market. Square devised three different brightness levels with their knowledge of the different hardware revisions, with the default brightness intended for the GB Player and frontlit AGS-001, dark mode for the future AGS-101, DS, and Micro, and light mode for the original AGB. As a result, when playing on any modern device with a backlit LCD screen, the dark mode feature renders colors very similar to the ones you find with gamma-corrected or on stock hardware. The most imporant difference is in blue-green and red-yellow mixes, as the blues and oranges are both slightly redder in software colors. Compare the harsh purple in the stained glass of the raw, max-brightnes setting, with its gamma-corrected navy blue equivalent, and the softer purple of the uncorrected low-brightness version:

The navy blue is closer to how Hollow Bastion's textures are painted in the PlayStation 2 Kingdom Hearts and later remake Re:Chain of Memories:

Dragon Ball: Advanced Adventure

Boktai 3

Drill Dozer

Pokemon Mystery Dungeon

Super Robot Wars Judgment

Yggdra Union

Mother 3

There are six games that I would tentatively identify as the most beautiful entries on the Game Boy Advance--and not just on the GBA, but six of the most beautiful games ever made. These are Magical Vacation, Sword of Mana, Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade, The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, Boktai 3: Sabata's Counterattack, Super Robot Wars Judgment, and Mother 3. Out of this pool, Mother 3 is the largest game at 32 megabytes in size, while the smallest--Magical Vacation--is only eight MB. The others are all 16.

Think about that for a moment. Eight, 16, or 32 megabytes. Within those seven titles you have three action RPGs ranging from 17 to 35 hours of playtime, two 30~55 hour turn-based RPGs, and two 35~40 hour strategy RPGs. To clear them all back-to-back without any interuptions or breaks, you would have to play for a little over nine real-world days. Their combined file size is 200 megabytes, about one-fifth a gigabyte, one-three-hundredth the size of Uncharted 4: A Thief's End. (Which all of these games are better than.) The final boss music for Paper Mario: Color Splash is the same size as Magical Vacation's entire cartridge. All of that content, all of that time, is packed into less than a third the storage volume of one CD-ROM. And that content is packed tightly; these six games do not pad their data with grainy full motion video like Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, or with crude attempts at polygonal graphics like the BlueRoses Engine demos. Every byte is used to a great and singular purpose.

How? How does one make a game like that?

There are a myriad number of methods. Being largely written as self-contained C++ projects with no external dependencies on outside libraries or reused engine elements, the code isn't verbose, and with chiptune soundtracks written with sequencer software like Impulse Tracker, the audio takes up a negligible footprint in cartridge memory. Rather than playing a sound file directly, the music in these games was divided up into dozens of different small sound samples (a "sound font") and a master sequence instructing which samples to play at each interval. However, it's graphics that eat up the most space in games; our modern day hundred-gigabyte blockbusters are so big because of a pervasive (yet entertainingly wrong) assumption among developers that storage is free. What does it matter if your game is bigger than the Switch's entire internal storage? Don't you people buy SD cards?

In kind, the smallest games we play got that small by being clever about graphics. Shovel Knight is 147 MB; Panzer Paladin is 434 MB; Shredder's Revenge is 917 MB. Vector-based graphics have become a popular option in indie circles, but they come with a price of their own--Hollow Knight would be five to six gigabytes smaller if it used pixel art. (Yet its file size is still preferable to the absurd 90,000-polygon character models of the AAA "studios" attempting to steer this culture industry.) This isn't to say pixel art games can't be big, but working with exponents means the fewer your colors and the smaller your sprites, the more dramatic your scaling will be. River City Girls is almost 5 GB in large part because the game does not use tilesets or adhere to a strict palette, it employs massive singular freeform canvases full of painstaking detail and as many colors as the artists wished to use. Truth be told, even modern pixel art games can't use all the tricks the old school did--not without fundamental changes to the hardware they're running on.

GBA games could be so small precisely because the Game Boy Advance was designed as a tilemapped system. It doesn't draw a series of triangles and then map textures to them as modern game systems do; everything is a tile with a fixed height and width according to the graphics mode the programmer chooses, and each tile is really just a colorless map of numbers instructing the hardware to fill each pixel in the map with a whatever's in the same palette entry as the number presented; the hardware never really knows what color something is, it only knows to pull the color in palette 0 and put it in pixels 01 through 04, then pull the color from palette 1 and send it to pixels 05 through 08. When we talk about "palette swapping" in classic video games, we're talking about changing an entire set of data points so that palettes 0 and 1 now correspond to a different color from before, and the system just fills the sprites in the same as always. Because no color assets are actually stored--just data points about palettes--tilemaps are the most memory-efficient graphics system our civilization has ever devised.

Tilemaps are also the most challenging medium to create art for.

When I think about what's difficult in pixel art, my mind jumps to the background layers. There are never enough environmental artists in any medium; if you want a living as an artist, you need to go where the most demand and greatest scarcity is, and the two best places to do that are environmental art and fetish porn. You can't put porn on a resume unless you want to keep working in porn though, so modeling objects and painting textures (or just hacking them together from stock photos, let's be real) is probably the most reliable way to stay employed without opening a Patreon, Fanbox, or Gumroad. In an age where all movies are basically just animated films with actors greenscreened in, and video games are themselves movies broken up by timed button prompts, the environmental artist is the least expendable member of the team. (Which means he'll still get fired to avoid paying him bonuses at the end of the project, but hey, at least he'll be the first one they hire back in the next fiscal quarter, right?)

All the problems associated with pixel art are exacerbated tenfold when working with backgrounds, and a hundredfold when working with tilemaps, which is why the industry was so quick to switch to digitized backgrounds even when sprites remained low-resolution, and to drop tilemaps entirely at the first practical opportunity. Tilemapped backgrounds on the Game Boy Advance don't just have to fit into a 16x16 grid and 15-color palette memory, they have to tile seamlessly in multiple directions with multiple kinds of other tiles. You will never guess how many tiles are in the image below:

Sword of Mana is one of the most technically accomplished works of pixel art ever made, because it convinces you that everything you see in it was drawn as a completely unique hand-painted environment and not cut and pasted into different forms assembled from a single tilemap drawn to look like a bunch of stopsigns. Budding pixel artists are often encouraged to "conceal the grid" but Sword of Mana convinces every first-time player that there is no grid.

Games covered:

2001

• Mega Man Battle Network
• Mega Man Battle Network 2
• Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis
• Toy Robo Force
• Golden Sun
• Wario Land 4
• Medarot Navi
• Advance Wars
• Super Robot Wars Advance
• Zone of the Enders: The Fist of Mars
• Gyakuten Saiban
• Magical Vacation
• Torneko no Daibouken 2
• Sonic Advance
• Angelic Layer
• Granbo

2002

• Tomato Adventure
• Lufia: The Ruins of Lore
• Shining Soul
• Fire Emblem: Fuuin no Tsurugi
• Mega Man Zero
• Hamtaro: Ham-Ham Heartbreak
• Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance
• Golden Sun: The Lost Age
• Medabots AX
• Custom Robo GX
• Super Robot Wars Reversal
• Klonoa 2: Dream Champ Tournament
• Densetsu no Starfy
• Gyakuten Saiban 2
• DigiCharat: Digital Communication
• Kirby: Nightmare in Dreamland
• Tales of the World: Narikiri Dungeon 2
• Devil Children Light & Dark
• Pokémon Ruby & Sapphire
• Super Robot Wars: Original Generation
• Rockman EXE 3
• Chocobo Land: A Game of Dice
• Klonoa Heroes
• Magi Nation (JPN remake
• Sonic Advance 2

2003

• Fushigi no Kuni no Alice
• Final Fantasy Tactics Advance [GBA SP release date]
• Metroid Fusion
• Tales of the World: Summoner's Lineage [GB Player release month]
• Medarot 2 Core
• Fire Emblem: Rekka no Ken
• Summon Night: Swordcraft Story
• Mega Man Zero 2
• Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow
• Hamtaro: Rainbow Rescue
• Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising
• Boktai: The Sun is in Your Hand
• Shining Soul II
• Onimusha Tactics
• Devil Children: Puzzle de Call!
• Pokémon Pinball: Ruby & Sapphire
• Tales of Phantasia
• Duel Masters
• Super Robot Wars Destiny
• Sword of Mana
• Densetsu no Starfy 2
• Devil Children 2 - Honoo/Koori
• Oriental Blue: Ao no Tengai
• Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga
• F-Zero: GP Legend
• Sonic Battle
• Mega Man Battle Network 4
• Astro Boy: Omega Factor

2004

• Gyakuten Saiban 3
• Pokémon FireRed & LeafGreen
• River City Ransom EX
• Duel Masters 2
• Yu-Gi-Oh! Destiny Board Traveler
• Kirby & the Amazing Mirror
• Mario Golf: Advance Tour
• Mega Man Zero 3
• Metroid: Zero Mission
• Mario vs. Donkey Kong
• Sonic Advance 3
• Torneko no Daibouken 3 Advance
• Hamtaro: Ham-Ham Games
• Boktai 2: Solar Boy Django
• Dragon Ball Z: The Legacy of Goku II
• Densetsu no Starfy 3
• Rockman EXE 4.5
• Summon Night: Swordcraft Story 2
• Mario Pinball Land
• Pokémon Emerald
• Advance Guardian Heroes
• Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones
• F-Zero Climax
• Devil Children: Messiah Riser
• The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap
• Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories
• Dragon Ball: Advanced Adventure
• Riviera: The Promised Land
• Rockman EXE 5
• Yoshi's Universal Gravitation
• Duel Masters 3
• Shingata Medarot

2005

• Tales of the World: Narikiri Dungeon 3
• Mario Party Advance
• Bouken-Ou Beet: Buster's Road
• Super Robot Wars: Original Generation 2
• Mega Man Zero 4
• Boktai 3: Sabata's Counterattack
• Battle B-Daman: Fire Spirits!
• Dr. Mario / Puzzle League (AGS101 launches this month)
• Mario Tennis: Power Tour
• Super Robot Wars Judgment
• Drill Dozer
• Gunstar Super Heroes
• CIMA: The Enemy
• Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Red Rescue Team
• Rockman EXE 6
• Summon Night Swordcraft Story 3

2006

• Yggdra Union: We'll Never Fight Alone
• Mother 3

There are 45 colors in the above map, 13 more than the Game Boy Advance can display. On the GBA, you get 32 colors for the background, broken up into 8 palettes of 4. There are two ways around this; the first is by cycling palettes out of memory, since those 8 palettes can actually use any out of 32,768 colors but only 32 at a time. As the screen scrolls in a given direction, you throw one or more of those 4-color palettes out of the system's RAM, and bring a different one in. As long as the total number of palettes used on one screen is still 32, you can have any number of colors in a given map.

That's not what Advance Wars 2 is doing with this map, though. Instead,

Pillow shading gets a bad rep because it's a fundamental misunderstanding of how light works. When a light source hits an object, the light diffuses across its surface; light grows weaker in intensity the farther it travels from its origin point, shadows appear where the light's intensity weakens, and the shadows darken as the light's intensity decreases. Pillow shading assumes that light diffuses over all objects equally--the lightest color appears at the center where the light is strongest, then a band of darker color appears around that where the light weakens, and an even darker color around that, and so on. Superficially it resembles light hitting a pillow, but not all objects are pillows, and even pillows don't really look like this because they develop folds, creases, and wrinkles, which cause the light to hit them unevenly and form ridges of shadows that interrupt and break up the form of the color bands.

Pillow shading's prevalence isn't surprising, as a lot of commercial games do make use of it; look at the lighting around the window and on the floor in this screenshot from Shugo Chara! Mitsu no Tamago to Koisuru Joker, or how the light hits the tabletops at the top right and middle left. (Ironically, the actual pillows are shaded correctly.) The reality is that for the ~30 years when pixel art was a necessity and not an aesthetic, many of the industry's rank and file artists were either engineers forced to become artists by circumstance, or professional artists trying to adjust to an extremely limited environment they were unprepared for.