>>54577209i'm going to have to stop you, the cartridges that gba and gameboy were able to function as ram, or have the entire game loaded into ram if it was small enough (pokemon clearly wasn't)
and keep in mind, gba was capable of full motion video playback as well. nintendo games, till they moved to gamecube, loaded stupidly fast compared to ps1 or other disc consoles should show how fat loading was on them, there is no reason to keep all the data in ram because of this.
That said, due to the cartridges being cartridges, they could also employ their own ram as well, I don't know how often this was used on gba specifically, but it was a function of nintendo cartridges.
