Three more Game Boy Advance games are now playable on Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 through Nintendo Classics. Nintendo has added Metal Slug Advance, Monster Rancher Advance and Kururin Paradise to the Game Boy Advance app, and they're available today for Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack members. The headline is Kururin Paradise. It came out only in Japan in 2002, so this is the first time it has been officially available in the West, almost a quarter of a century later.
Kururin Paradise finally leaves Japan
The Kururin series is one of Nintendo's odder handheld experiments. You steer a long, thin stick, the Helirin, that never stops spinning. Your job is to get it through narrow, maze-like corridors without touching the walls. The first game, Kuru Kuru Kururin, launched alongside the Game Boy Advance in Japan and Europe in 2001 but never came to North America. Kururin Paradise followed a year later in Japan only, and the series' last entry, the GameCube's Kururin Squash!, didn't leave Japan either.
Paradise keeps the spinning-stick formula and adds a set of 16 mini-games next to the main stages, so it's built for short bursts and passing the console around. Its appeal comes from timing and spatial puzzles rather than dialogue, so the language barrier that has kept other Japan-only GBA games off Western menus matters much less here.
That gap is still real. Text-heavy Japanese GBA releases such as Mother 3, Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade, Magical Vacation and Tomato Adventure have never had official English versions, and none of them is in the Western app. Kururin Paradise is the kind of import that can make the jump without a full localization.
Metal Slug Advance brings SNK's run-and-gun to a handheld
Metal Slug Advance is a 2004 handheld spin-off of SNK's arcade series, not a port of an arcade entry. It still has what the series is known for: dense hand-drawn sprite work, piles of enemy soldiers, and tanks and vehicles you can jump into and drive. It also adjusts the formula for a portable. Instead of dying in one hit as in the arcade games, you have a life bar, and collectible cards hidden around the stages encourage replays.
This isn't the first time the series has appeared on a Nintendo subscription. Several mainline Metal Slug games have been sold on Switch through other re-release lines. But this handheld-original entry is now part of a subscription library rather than sold on its own.
Monster Rancher Advance swaps CDs for words
Tecmo's Monster Rancher series is built around a clever gimmick. On PlayStation, the main games generated monsters from the data on any music CD you put in the console, so your record collection decided what you could raise. A cartridge can't read a CD, so Monster Rancher Advance does it differently: you type in words, and the game turns each one into a monster. After that it plays like the series always has. You train your creature, manage its diet and rest, and enter it in tournament fights.
The word-based system made the GBA version a playground for experiments, as players tried names, phrases and in-jokes to see what came out. On Switch, it's a self-contained way to try a series that otherwise depends on hardware many people no longer own.
What you need to play
Game Boy Advance games aren't part of the base Nintendo Switch Online plan. The standard tier covers NES, Super NES, Game Boy and Game Boy Color games. The GBA library sits behind the Expansion Pack tier, which costs $49.99 for a 12-month individual membership in the US. That tier also adds Nintendo 64 and Sega Mega Drive/Genesis games on both Switch consoles, plus the GameCube library on Switch 2.
If you already have the Expansion Pack, there's nothing to buy or download separately. The three games appear in the existing Game Boy Advance – Nintendo Classics app on Switch and Switch 2, alongside the rest of the GBA lineup. Like other Nintendo Classics titles, they support the app's rewind and suspend features, which take some of the sting out of Metal Slug's harder stretches and Kururin's narrowest corridors.
Why this batch stands out
Most monthly Nintendo Classics drops are reissues of games that were already easy to find in the West. This one has more range: a licensed third-party action game from SNK, a Tecmo monster-raising game, and a Nintendo-published puzzle game that has never had an official release outside Japan. Kururin Paradise in particular could only be played in the West through import cartridges until today. For a series that never became a household name, that is a better outcome than most Japan-only games of its era have had.
