As I mentioned earlier, it was my birthday recently, and while most of the money I spent on myself to celebrate went towards my newly erected soldering station to finally start learning how to do that, I did, of course, buy some proper gamey stuff. Chief among them was a GBA model I've been quietly lusting after for the better part of two decades: the 20th anniversary Famicom SP. I only ever had an original GBA growing up, which served me perfectly fine, but is definitely hard to go back in this day and age, especially when the only lights I readily have in this apartment are all Japanese-style ceiling lights, which makes it pretty arduous to find a position where screen glare isn't an issue. And while I also have a GameCube Game Boy Player and accompanying homebrew setup to play those games on my TV with razor sharp pixels, which I don't regret getting, over time, I just found myself craving the singular experience that you can only readily get by playing on real hardware, which is what ultimately made me decide to go out and get this. Although the front light itself still doesn't do the best job of bringing the screen to life (Japan never got the backlit AGS-101 for whatever baffling reason), it remains a marked improvement and will be rectified with a screen mod soon enough anyway. Really, compared to the anniversary NES edition that Nintendo also put out in North America and Europe, which aims to replicate the controller design, rather than the console colors per se, I just think this is a more subdued design and color scheme that holds up better 20 years later.
But the other secret reason I went for this over a cheaper vanilla SP? The packaging. I'm normally not fussy about getting used consoles with their boxes because of how much of a premium they can add in such extreme cases. But look at this little guy! It just wouldn't feel complete in this instance unless I went out of my way to get the box as well, and I'm glad I did, because it's genuinely fun to just pick up and rotate to admire the contiguous art printed all around it. The fact that the bottom of the box not only has an underground level, but also properly links up to a pipe on the surface is a real nice touch. Apparently this design was also used for the Europen NES edition, as well, but it just doesn't hit quite the same way seeing that comparatively busier design placed against the otherwise clean background imagery.
Anyway, I'm happy and it's already renewed my lifelong love for WarioWare: Twisted, so money well spent in my book. My quest to slowly augment my entire console library with local Japanese versions either out of vanity or sheer convenience continues unabated. 
