Kururin Paradise Reaches the West for the First Time as Switch Online Adds Three GBA Games

Kururin Paradise, the 2002 Game Boy Advance sequel that Nintendo never released outside Japan, is now playable in the West. Nintendo added it to Game Boy Advance - Nintendo Classics on Wednesday 14 October, alongside SNK's Metal Slug Advance and Tecmo's Monster Rancher Advance. All three need a Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack membership, and the app runs on both Switch and Switch 2.

Nintendo of America's and Nintendo UK's listings for the service now include all three games. Nintendo of America's page lists 32 Game Boy Advance titles in total, from Densetsu no Starfy 1 to Yoshi's Island: Super Mario Advance 3. Nintendo's Japanese announcement, dated the same day, uses the games' Japanese names, so Monster Rancher Advance appears there as Monster Farm Advance.

Kururin Paradise, 24 years late

Kururin Paradise was developed by Eighting and published by Nintendo, and came out in Japan on 6 December 2002. A North American release was planned and shown at E3, then cancelled. A Wii U Virtual Console re-release in December 2015 was also limited to Japan, so Wednesday's addition is the game's first release anywhere else.

The idea is the same as in the first game. The player steers the Helirin, a stick that never stops rotating, through mazes without letting it touch the walls. Nintendo's announcement, written from the original box and manual, sets up the story: a travelling magic troupe comes to Kururin's village, Kururin oversleeps and is left behind by his family, and when he reaches the venue it is empty. When his family and his teacher, Teacher Hare, fail to come home, he takes the Helirin out to look for them.

According to Nintendo, the Adventure, Practice and Challenge modes from the first game return, and the sequel adds Mini-Game Paradise, a set of 16 minigames built around playing with a spinning stick. The sequel also lets the right shoulder button speed up the Helirin's rotation, and it hides keys that open alternate routes through finished levels and unlock new stages on the map. The Adventure mode has 34 levels and the Challenge mode 30. All 16 minigames support up to four players over the Game Boy Advance link cable, and one of them, In The Sky, takes Kururin out of the Helirin for a side-scrolling flight that recalls Balloon Fight's Balloon Trip mode.

The series behind it

Kuru Kuru Kururin, the first game, launched in Japan on 21 March 2001 and in Europe and Australia on 22 June as a launch title for the Game Boy Advance. It never came out in North America at the time. North American players first got it through the Wii U Virtual Console in February 2016, and it has been on Game Boy Advance - Nintendo Classics since February 2023, where it sits next to its sequel.

The concept came from director Masato Toyoshima, who remembered manoeuvring furniture while moving between apartments and pitched the idea to Nintendo. Yasunari Watanabe was the only programmer, and the characters were designed by Yoichi Kotabe. The game sold 265,250 copies in Japan.

The series ended on the GameCube with Kururin Squash!, released only in Japan on 14 October 2004, which makes Wednesday's release fall 22 years to the day after the last new Kururin game. Squash sold fewer than 20,000 copies, the lowest of the three.

Metal Slug Advance

Metal Slug Advance came out in 2004. It was developed by Noise Factory and published by SNK Playmore. Nintendo's summary describes recruits Walter and Tyra taking part in a survival exercise for the Peregrine Falcons unit on an island in the southern seas, with limited equipment and orders to escape the island on their own. General Morden's army turns the exercise into a real mission.

Two systems set it apart from the arcade games. A life bar replaces the extra lives the series normally uses, with food restoring health, and there are 100 collectable cards, which Nintendo says are earned by meeting certain conditions and change things such as item effects and character abilities.

Switch Online is not the only place it is heading. According to Anime News Network, the Metal Slug Ultimate Collection, due in 2027 for Switch, Switch 2, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC, also includes Metal Slug Advance.

Monster Rancher Advance

Monster Rancher Advance, called Monster Farm Advance in Japan, is a 2001 monster-raising game developed and published by Tecmo, now Koei Tecmo. The Monster Rancher series began on PlayStation in 1997, and its best-known feature was generating monsters from discs the player put in the console. A Game Boy Advance cartridge could not do that, so this version has the player type words instead. In Nintendo's summary, the player is a breeder invited to an island where monsters are restored from stone tablets carved with ancient script, and the word on the tablet decides which monster appears. Monsters can also be combined, as in the PlayStation games.

Playing them, and what is not known

The three games get the Game Boy Advance app's usual features. Nintendo of America lists a rewind function in single-player, held on ZL and ZR, online play for two to four players in compatible games, a retro-style screen filter, and the option to shrink the picture.

Nintendo's English-language pages do not say which language versions of the games the Western app uses, which matters most for Kururin Paradise, a game that has only ever existed in Japanese.