Game Boy Advance Archive

It’s over, it’s over! My quest to document the GBA port of Link to the Past in Japanese is over! All for this:

The friggin’ Cane of Somasoa! Which used to be called the Cane of Somaria in Japanese. Actually it still is called the Cane of Somaria in subsequent ports of the Japanese version… Nintendo got a little inconsistent.

To get that screenshot, I had to beat LttP regularly, then phase into the Palace of the Four Swords and beat 4 souped-up bosses and four versions of Dark Link. Since you can only unlock the bonus dungeon by beating Four Swords, and since FS is multiplayer only, I had to use a code to warp past the guy guarding the dungeon. Do you wanna traverse the bonus dungeon for yourself and see a different ending to LttP?

Use this code: 030038F0:20

Don’t talk to the guy guarding the dungeon! Just enable the code while standing in front of him and you’ll be warped past him. Then disable it and you can play through the FS dungeon.

And how long did LttP Somasoa% take?

Oh…

Back in like 2003 when Nintendo started releasing ports of NES and SNES games for the Game Boy Advance, I was really excited. Especially when my most favorite game was released: A Link to the Past. But when I played it, I was turned off by Link yelling every time he swung his sword. Not to mention the excruciating sound of phasing between the Light World and Dark World. I don’t think I bothered beating it on the GBA.

But now it’s time to Somaria% this game! Well, more than that – I’m also getting screenshots of all the text and creating many save states for future use.

O.G. San is on the prowl in Hyrule once again! But lordy lordy, I’d forgotten how strange the GBA version sounded. Some pieces of the Hyrule Castle song were simply missing, so it didn’t sound as important and intimidating as it did in the SNES version. And when I fell down that hole in the beginning, Link screamed :I

And the controls! The buttons are mapped strangely because the GBA has fewer buttons than the SNES controller. I had to complete remap them before I could comfortably play it. It’s also a bit easier – my magic bar filled up as soon as I got the Lantern, which doesn’t happen in the SNES version. And the enemies drop way more hearts.

Now that every popular Nintendo game is released over and over on whatever new digital service Nintendo happens to be running, it’s not exciting anymore. It’s exhausting. I pity the poor souls whose first experience with LttP was on the GBA.

The November 1999 issue of N64 Magazine got their hands on the technical specs of the Game Boy Advance. They included a picture of an artist’s guess at what the new Game Boy would look like:

Hey, they weren’t too far off!