Appreciating Fire Emblem for the Game Boy Advance

When I was a kid, I had a Game Boy. The original, the chonky gray DMG-1 itself. I went in hard on the Game Boy, with a carrying case, multiple games, and even that nightmarish magnifier/light attachment thing, the Handy Boy.

We do not speak of the Handy Boy.

Despite my Game Boy love as a youth, I never had a Game Boy Advance. (I did have an Atari Lynx, though. Please refrain from swooning too hard.) When the GBA rolled out in 2001, I was already in and preparing to fail at college. Gaming had taken a different path for me, with more PC titles and the consoles I had in that generation, the Gamecube and my beloved Dreamcast. Handheld portable gaming had simply fallen off the radar for me, and as a result, there were a lot of games and series I simply never experienced.