I mean the 3ds was way more powerful than the ds, and they just focused on 3d.
The Gameboy color was shockingly powerful compared to the Gameboy. And quite possibly a top contender for most powerful 8 bit game system ever made in a lot of metrics. Not only did it have a straight 4x increase in CPU power, large boosts to all memory, and access to much larger roms but it's feature of horizontal direct memory access blew away the old Gameboys then very powerful direct memory access feature by like 160X. Literally. Actually literally.
I don't think any 8 bit system can compete with the gbc's number of colors, tiles, or simultaneous sprites. Pretty sure it has those on lock and it's not close. Especially colors.
So, normal mode the Gameboy comes with 2 banks of 8 pallets with 4 colors each. Twice as many as the default gb and nes (though the nes could get more banks with in cart chips). Normally this nets you 56 colors on screen. Very good for an 8 bit system.
However, with HDMA, the system could access memory after each horizontal line is drawn. It can use that time to among other things, change pallets. After every horizontal line is drawn. So you get 2x8 Colors x 160 horizontal lines for access to up to 2,560 colors. Most 16 bit systems will balk at that.
This led to a criminally too small cluster of varying quality of surprisingly graphically impressive games.
Some stunk, like alone in the dark, or the toy story fmv racer, some made good with a psuedo mode 7 racer like VD Devs wacky racers.
But probably the best suited, were the game boy color point and click adventure games, the best of which literally delivered Lucas Arts PC adventure game style fidelity graphics and animation, onto the little 160x144 screen
Fish files swapped color pallets every line, allowing access to that up to 2,560 colors. It even doubled up using multiple sprites for each part of characters where just using separate sprites for head and torso alone was typically seen as fancy.
Gameboy
color indeed. Think Nintendo may have buried the lede on that one a little in the same vein as just 4k.