Collection essentials #537-#540: Super Mario Advance 1-4 (GBA)

It’s the norm for a Nintendo system to launch with some kind of Mario game. Game Boy Advance wouldn’t be an exception. However, the GBA, perhaps surprisingly, would not see a single brand new traditional Mario platformer. Instead, Nintendo launched the system with Super Mario Advance, a port of an older game, and followed up with three more ports during the lifespan of the system.

The original few Super Mario Bros. games on the NES and Famicom, of course, were the biggest titles to catapult Nintendo and Mario into the mainstream, so it’s not surprising that Nintendo made a habit out of porting or remaking them on a regular basis. The very next console generation, before it was common to do such a thing, they gave us Super Mario All-Stars which were full remakes with faithful gameplay but updated graphics and music. It was pretty awesome that four classic Mario titles were on one single SNES cartridge, modernized and with the ability to save your game. Super Mario Advance, nearly a decade later, features one of the Mario All-Stars remakes, with some changes made. It’s perhaps surprising that they just didn’t do full-on Mario All-Stars with the four games in one. I don’t know if that’s because of hardware limitations or whether it was their personal choice.

The first Super Mario Advance is a remake of Super Mario Bros. 2, also known as Super Mario Bros. USA, which itself is based on the Famicom Disk System game Doki Doki Panic. This isn’t simply a straight port of that SNES remake, though, as a series of changes were made. The first and most obvious one (if you have the volume on) is that this game now has a lot of voice clips. The four playable characters now make quips that you’d normally hear in the 3D games of the era such as Mario Kart, featuring the same voice actors such as Charles Martinet. What’s odd, though, is some of the voice clips that the bosses make when you encounter them, as they often come off as cheesy and out of place to me. There are a series of minor changes which generally aren’t a huge deal, but occasionally they can stick out like a sore thumb. For example, when Mario enters the small chambers inside a jar, you’ll find that they feature completely redesigned brightly-colored backgrounds and music which don’t jive at all with the original game in my opinion. You’re probably reading this as a criticism, which it kinda is, but I also find it a little fascinating and it’s rare to see Nintendo tinker with one of their sacred classic games like this.

While Super Mario Advance isn’t a proper Mario All-Stars collection, it also does offer a little bit more than just Super Mario Bros. 2. It also has a brand new 16-bit remake of the Mario Bros. arcade game, the one where you have to defeat a series of enemies that emerge from pipes. This version contains 16-bit graphics, updated physics, plus a multiplayer battle mode based on the battle mode from Super Mario Bros. 3 which greatly resembled the original arcade game. The GBA was Nintendo’s first Game Boy system with “single-cartridge multiplayer”, meaning that if you had two GBAs and a link cable, the other player didn’t also need their own copy of Mario Advance in order to join in and play. This remake of Mario Bros. from the arcade is present in all four Super Mario Advance titles, plus Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga as well. It wouldn’t be worth it as a standalone GBA release, but as a bonus to these games, it’s a great addition!

Of course they weren’t just going to stop with the first Mario Advance, so the next game they decided to port was Super Mario World. This is where it can get confusing, because it was called “Super Mario Advance 2: Super Mario World”. So the Mario Bros. game with 2 in the title was the FIRST Super Mario Advance, and then Super Mario Advance 2 was something different…ooh boy. Anyway, this port of Super Mario World is “tinkered with” a little less, which I like. And the new additions are actually pretty good. Luigi is now more than just a different “skin” for player 2, as now he has different physics as we’ve seen in certain other Mario games. That’s cool since it provides a genuinely new way to experience Super Mario World. The game also keeps track of whether or not you’ve collected five “dragon coins” in each level, something that was in the original game but only served to give a 1-up. I liked having an extra incentive to find them for completion’s sake. Another change is that, when you’re fully powered up, it now takes two hits to bring you down to small Mario instead of just one, making the game easier. Overall, I prefer the original release, but this is a very respectable alternate version.

The game choice for Super Mario Advance 3 was a little odd. Rather than go for another Super Mario Bros. game, they instead went with Yoshi’s Island on the SNES, which did have “Super Mario World 2” originally in the title but is generally thought of as a “Yoshi game” and plays quite differently. Not that I’m complaining, because it’s a great classic worthy of a GBA port. There aren’t a lot of changes in this version aside from the usual graphical and audio compromises to compensate for the GBA hardware. The game was made a little easier, and six new levels were added, which I’ve to this day not played so I can’t comment on them.

Finally, for the last one, we have a game that probably everyone expected to be the first one ported, that being Super Mario Bros. 3! And the weird/confusing titles get even weirder, as this one is a doozy: “Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3”. What an odd thing to call your video game! This was mostly the type of port you’d expect, taking the All-Stars release as a base, and making some small changes that most players won’t notice. There is some significant new content in Mario Advance 4 though, as there are a whole 32 new levels…but they can only be accessed by using a certain GBA accessory sold separately, which I haven’t talked about on this blog just yet. So most people who actually bought this game didn’t even get to play these new levels. However, rereleases of Super Mario Advance 4 DO contain all these levels available by default, so that’s pretty nice.

As for Super Mario Bros. 1 and Lost Levels, the All-Stars versions of these games were never ported to the GBA. Perhaps this is because Super Mario Bros. DX had brought those games on the Game Boy Color…though they did straight-port the 8-bit originals to GBA in 2004 as part of the budget “Classic NES Series” and “Famicom Mini” series. 

Back in the GBA’s heyday, I didn’t get any of these four games. Again, my preference has always been to play original and exclusive titles on my handheld systems rather than get portable versions of games that I already have on home consoles. But I enjoyed trying out these four remakes years later and seeing what was different about them. If you’re specifically interested in these versions, they’re available with the Switch Online Expansion Pack, and the original GBA carts themselves are not expensive nowadays. While they may not be my preferred way to play the classics, they’re still interesting official versions that I think deserve their spots in my collection as essentials.