GameBoy Induced Nostalgia, This Time with Japanese ROMS

10 Feb, 2025

I recently bought an Anbernic RG35XX35SP¹ and I have to say, I've been really enjoying it.

It's basically an emulator in the shape of a GameBoy Advance SP and can play most retro system up to PS1² pretty well, although I've only been using it to play GBA³ games. I had a GameBoy Advance SP growing up, so the silhouette carries a lot of nostalgia for me, and now, with the ability to play ROMS, I've been going through my childhood favorites and replaying them, but with the added benefit of them being in Japanese. Here's one of my favorite games of all time, Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories

I've lost my original SP a while ago but got my hands on another GBA back during my first trip to Japan. However, the only cartridge I had left was Super Mario Advance 4, and once I finished playing it, I had to get my hands on more games. Unlike in Japan, finding used cartridges here isn't the easiest of tasks and getting back into playing video games felt a bit hard to justify. But if I played them in Japanese, now it became study. So finding and playing Japanese games became my thing. Unfortunately, unless I was in Japan, finding a good deal on the cartridges was nigh impossible. There was also the fact that I still needed to mod by GBA with a backlight if I wanted it to be more usable.

In comes this Chinese emulation device. I had some Amazon credits so was able to get it at 15 bucks and it came preloaded with a ton of games⁴. None of them really mattered in my case though since the vast majority of them were in English⁵ and I planned on loading my own games in anyway. So in went my Japanese ROM for Kingdom Hearts and it's been a great time ever since.

I'm still debating whether I should get an original Game Boy Color to mod and a flash cart⁶ to play games—which would defeat the purpose of getting the emulation device lol—but for now, I'm pretty happy with it.