BODY: No trailer, no countdown, no Direct. On October 14, Nintendo simply switched on three more Game Boy Advance titles for its Nintendo Classics library — and one of them has spent years sitting behind glass in Japanese retro shops with an uncomfortable price tag attached.
That one is Metal Slug Advance, SNK's 2004 handheld entry in the run-and-gun series. Built specifically for GBA rather than ported from the arcade, it introduced a card-collecting system and a slower, more exploratory stage design than its coin-op siblings. It has never been reissued on any platform since, which is exactly why loose cartridges have drifted steadily upward in price. For most players, this is the first realistic way to play it in two decades.
Monster Rancher Advance (released in Japan as Monster Farm Advance) arrives alongside it. Tecmo's breeding series made its name by generating creatures from whatever music CD you shoved into your PlayStation — a trick impossible on a cartridge handheld, so the GBA version swapped in a word-and-name-based generation system instead. Rounding out the trio is Kururin Paradise, the 2002 sequel to the cult tilt-and-thread puzzler Kuru Kuru Kururin, in which you pilot a spinning stick through mazes without touching the walls.
The service remains gated behind a Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack subscription, and library contents can differ by region, so Western subscribers should check their own list before celebrating too hard.
The insider take
Shadow-drops like this one land differently in Tokyo than they do abroad. Walk the Akihabara used-game floors and GBA carts have become the pricing story of the last few years — compact, nostalgic, and finite in supply, with SNK titles especially inflated. A quiet Nintendo Classics addition doesn't just restore access; it visibly dents the secondhand market overnight, which is why Japanese collector circles tend to react to these announcements with equal parts delight and wincing. Kururin Paradise, meanwhile, never left Japan at all, making it one of those domestic cult oddities that Nintendo's archive work keeps dragging, happily, into a wider audience's reach.
Originally reported by AUTOMATON (Japanese).