10 Best-Looking Game Boy Color Games

Wario Land 3 sends Wario into a magical music box, where a mysterious figure asks him to free it by recovering its lost powers. The world inside is split into four areas with 25 stages between them. Every stage holds four treasures, each locked in a colored chest that only opens with the matching key, and every level hides eight Music Coins on top of that. Grab a treasure and Wario is sent back to the overworld to pick his next stop.

The box called it "one of the largest, most dazzling adventures ever to hit Game Boy Color", and for once the box was not lying. It came out in Japan in March 2000 and in North America that May. Each area has its own look, and the stages are big and easy to read on that small screen, which matters in a game about poking into every corner.

Resident Evil Gaiden puts Leon Kennedy, one of the protagonists of Resident Evil 2, on a luxury ocean cruiser called the Starlight, which is rumored to be carrying a new type of bio-organic weapon. You explore from a top-down view. When a monster attacks, the game switches to a first-person view with a reticle that swings left and right, and you press the button when it passes over the enemy. Capcom published it in Japan and North America, and the later games ignore its story completely.

Critics gave it mixed reviews, and it plays nothing like the rest of the series. Its looks are the reason it made this list. Players who name it among the best-looking games on the system point to the first-person scenes, where a monster suddenly fills the screen in a way the top-down view never could.

Oracle of Ages is one of the two Zelda games made for the Game Boy Color, and of the pair it is the one built around puzzles. Like its twin, it keeps the graphics and the top-down view of Link's Awakening and spreads eight dungeons across a large overworld. The clever part comes after the credits. Finish one of the two games and you can link it to the other, which joins them into a single story with an alternate ending.

It sits a few spots below Oracle of Seasons on this list, and the gap between them is small. Players who love how Zelda looked on the Game Boy Color tend to name both Oracle games together, as if they were one game. In a way they are, since the best ending needs both cartridges.

Pokémon Crystal is an enhanced version of Pokémon Gold and Silver. You still explore the Johto region and fill out the Pokédex, but Crystal adds the option to play as a female character and gives the Pokémon animated sprites. Those extras needed the Game Boy Color's improved hardware, which made Crystal the first game in the series that would not run on the original Game Boy.

The Japanese version also worked with the Mobile Adapter GB, a peripheral that let players trade and battle over cell phones. The rest of the world never got that part, and critics noted that the extras meant less without it. Retrospective reviews have been much kinder. Pokémon fans still put Crystal among the best-looking games on the system, and the animated sprites are the first thing you notice.

Link's Awakening DX is the color version of the Game Boy Zelda. Reviewers at the time welcomed the color graphics and the new features, while noting that the additions were small next to the original game. Critics now call the DX version one of the best games for the Game Boy and Game Boy Color systems. It has since come back on the 3DS through the Virtual Console and on the Nintendo Switch.

It is the oldest game on this list, and it still holds its place. The color was added to a game that already looked great in green and gray, so nothing feels painted over. Players still name the DX version among the best-looking games on the Game Boy Color.

Oracle of Seasons is the action half of the Oracle pair, the more combat-heavy of the two Zelda games made for the Game Boy Color. It borrows a lot from Link's Awakening, including its graphics and its top-down perspective, and then builds its own large overworld with eight dungeons. Seasons and its twin, Oracle of Ages, were often credited as two of the top games for the Game Boy Color.

It is the highest Zelda on this list, ahead of Link's Awakening DX. Players single out the Zelda games as the Game Boy Color at its prettiest, and Seasons is the one they name first. If you only have time for one Oracle game, this is the one that gets you swinging a sword sooner.

Blue Sphere is a spin-off in the Star Ocean series and a direct sequel to Star Ocean: The Second Story on the PlayStation. Development began in 2000 and took about a year, and several core staff from the earlier games came back, series composer Motoi Sakuraba among them. The cast grew along the way. The first scenario had only three protagonists, and the finished game has sixteen.

It sold 130,000 copies in Japan by 2007, and players who know it say it never got the attention it deserved because it was only released in Japan. The ones who have seen it call it some of the best-looking work on the system and the peak of what the Game Boy Color could do. A fan translation exists for anyone who wants to play it in English.

Konami's European branch asked Konami Computer Entertainment Japan for a portable version of Metal Gear Solid. Ghost Babel is not a port, though. It is a new story set three years after Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake on the MSX2, in its own continuity. Everyone moves in eight directions, so guards can come at you on the diagonal. Snake can flatten himself against a wall to slip through tight passages, or knock on it to lure a guard over.

It came back in 2026 for the first time, in Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2, under its Japanese name. Players who rate the best-looking games on the system are struck by how much detail Konami packed into those tiny sprites. The flip side, as one player put it, is that "every pixel matters", so give it a good screen.

The Game Boy Color version of The New Nightmare was made separately by Pocket Studios, and it is a relatively faithful version of the console game. The cartridge had no room for the full-motion video cutscenes, and many areas were shrunk or cut entirely. Edward is the only playable character. What stayed are the pre-rendered backgrounds with the 3D characters moving on top of them, which is a lot to ask of a handheld this small.

Those backgrounds are why it ranks so high. Players single it out as the game that crammed the most onto a Game Boy Color cartridge, with rooms that look far more detailed and colorful than the system should allow. Infogrames released it in North America, and if you only ever saw it in a magazine screenshot, you could be forgiven for thinking it was a PlayStation game.

Shantae is a genie girl who guards Scuttle Town, a small fishing village, from a lighthouse. When the lady pirate Risky Boots attacks, she steals a prototype steam engine from Shantae's uncle Mimic. Shantae sets out across Sequin Land to find four magical elemental stones before Risky can turn the engine into a weapon. She fights by whipping her hair, and dancing is part of the job too.

WayForward first considered the game as far back as 1997 and tried for years to find a publisher before Capcom picked it up. The graphics engine Huey had built for Xtreme Sports was adapted for it. It launched a year after the Game Boy Advance replaced the Game Boy Color and struggled to find an audience, but it is now recognized as a cult classic. Players pick it as the best-looking Game Boy Color game more than any other, by a wide margin, and many say it looks like a Game Boy Advance game.