De-advanced Wars
The remake of Advance Wars has been the greatest cause for confusion I've had after completing a game in a very long time. I disliked just about every minute I played of AW1, but when I unlocked AW2's campaign I felt a weird sort of Stockholm Syndrome that I could not let up.
I don't have the attachment a LOT of people seem to have for Advance Wars. I never owned a Gameboy, and until Valkyria Chronicles 4 had never played a true tactics game. The nostalgia and know-how required to tackle AW, as opposed to Intelligent Systems' other marquee franchise in Fire Emblem, that so many seem to have is completely lost on me. Most of the friends I've conversed with and users on forums I've read online seem to be experienced with the original releases and how the game differs from its peers and predecessors. Maps are rather small in Advance Wars... which makes sense because its a tactics game on a system that wasn't designed to have sprawling maps or a display that could handle them. In theory this is alright, but worked against the way my brain wanted to think. In a typical new-gen Fire Emblem game, the maps are decently sized and transitioning from start to finish is an easily understood task in regards to the time it takes. In Advance Wars (Re-Boot Camp but I will just generalize it here,) the maps show small but take a LONG time to complete because of the various wrenches and roadblocks it throws at you. Often I would get to the middle and later stages of a map and throw my safe-turtle strategy aside so I could bee-line to the map objective, only to be met with a map ending spamalot of enemies that would take a plethora of turns to deter. Now you could recommend I adjust my strategy, and I did greatly from AW1 to AW2, but I felt generally annoyed that there was almost an artificial lengthening of maps. I guess the tl;dr of this paragraph is that all the levels seemed short but ended up much longer than I felt they needed to be because of random "gotcha" mechanics or endless enemy spawns. As the games went on, levels took on average thirty minutes to an hour and a half which is... sorta awful for trying to rewind after the gym and trying to make any progress before bed. To add on, I played the majority of AW1 on "Classic" difficulty, switching to "Casual" for the last few battles before going to "Classic" in the final battle and I'm... not really sure what the difference was? They felt equally difficult, which seems like a breakdown of the entire logic behind difficulty systems.
Poor map pacing aside, the mechanics of Advance Wars felt a little one dimensional and rather annoying. Missions start with your CO in a sticky situation; with a predetermined squad of units, bases in which you can spawn units to start the map, or a combination of both. This is a great departure from the tactics games I'd been used to (Tactics Ogre, Valkyria Chronicles, FE... to name a few,) where you have familiar heroes with special abilities. On paper this isn't an issue, but it leaves the game to become a sorta rock paper scissors matchup with random enemy spawns so you can never really exactly prepare for what the enemy is going to put out there. Having to half offensives for an extra ten to twenty minutes so you can ramp up your anti-air production to combat enemy bombers felt grating almost immediately, needing to stop your entire attack to direct funds into constructing cruisers to take out enemy submarines to protect your transportation landers was awfully annoying. This pattern continues across both games. Playing cat and mouse with the way the game wants you to play versus generating your own strategy made me feel like I was playing a puzzle game in which the developers wanted me to solve the way they made the game rather than play it in a way that I enjoyed.
Skip this if you're a fan of the GBA soundcard: the music in this game is genuinely horrible. I try not to make grandiose statements like that about the soundtracking of games because generally speaking, I find them inoffensive at worst. But outside of a very few CO themes (Sonya and Sensei,) the recycled crustyness of bad guitars and synths played like musical vomit in my head while I made my way through both of the repackaged Advance Wars titles. Thankfully there's a way in game to turn it off because Andy's battle theme was going to drive me up a series of several walls.
That all being said, there was a decent amount to like about the game(s.) Despite not having almost any narrative at all to them other than "bad men are bad," I enjoyed gallavanting about with my party of completely unalike CO's that have no feasible logic in regards to commanding an army. Only a few of the CO's seemed like plausible commanders which made the launching of large scale offensives and the gravity of war so hilarious to me. I came to appreciate how little the devs really cared about plausible motives/crafting a halfway decent narrative in the way of just saying "you're the good guys just do good guy things." The updated visuals give this title a LOT of charm, which is something that the greater playerbase seemed to be rather worried about when the trailers announced Reboot Camp. I liked the jovial drawings of each CO and the way they animated in dialogue and in game. I enjoyed the vibrant orange/green/blue/yellows of the units on the lusciously basic maps. It felt like a game that didn't take itself too seriously, and when coupled with the "plot," that is perfectly acceptable.
If you liked Advance Wars the first go around, it seems like the general consensus is that you'll like Reboot Camp quite a bit. As mentioned above, I didn't play the GBA titles but those that I've conversed with that did, have been rather high on 2023's take on the famous tactics franchise. I personally cannot recommend Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp, but hey if ya like it, ya like it.
The remake of Advance Wars has been the greatest cause for confusion I've had after completing a game in a very long time. I disliked just about every minute I played of AW1, but when I unlocked AW2's campaign I felt a weird sort of Stockholm Syndrome that I could not let up.
I don't have the attachment a LOT of people seem to have for Advance Wars. I never owned a Gameboy, and until Valkyria Chronicles 4 had never played a true tactics game. The nostalgia and know-how required to tackle AW, as opposed to Intelligent Systems' other marquee franchise in Fire Emblem, that so many seem to have is completely lost on me. Most of the friends I've conversed with and users on forums I've read online seem to be experienced with the original releases and how the game differs from its peers and predecessors. Maps are rather small in Advance Wars... which makes sense because its a tactics game on a system that wasn't designed to have sprawling maps or a display that could handle them. In theory this is alright, but worked against the way my brain wanted to think. In a typical new-gen Fire Emblem game, the maps are decently sized and transitioning from start to finish is an easily understood task in regards to the time it takes. In Advance Wars (Re-Boot Camp but I will just generalize it here,) the maps show small but take a LONG time to complete because of the various wrenches and roadblocks it throws at you. Often I would get to the middle and later stages of a map and throw my safe-turtle strategy aside so I could bee-line to the map objective, only to be met with a map ending spamalot of enemies that would take a plethora of turns to deter. Now you could recommend I adjust my strategy, and I did greatly from AW1 to AW2, but I felt generally annoyed that there was almost an artificial lengthening of maps. I guess the tl;dr of this paragraph is that all the levels seemed short but ended up much longer than I felt they needed to be because of random "gotcha" mechanics or endless enemy spawns. As the games went on, levels took on average thirty minutes to an hour and a half which is... sorta awful for trying to rewind after the gym and trying to make any progress before bed. To add on, I played the majority of AW1 on "Classic" difficulty, switching to "Casual" for the last few battles before going to "Classic" in the final battle and I'm... not really sure what the difference was? They felt equally difficult, which seems like a breakdown of the entire logic behind difficulty systems.
Poor map pacing aside, the mechanics of Advance Wars felt a little one dimensional and rather annoying. Missions start with your CO in a sticky situation; with a predetermined squad of units, bases in which you can spawn units to start the map, or a combination of both. This is a great departure from the tactics games I'd been used to (Tactics Ogre, Valkyria Chronicles, FE... to name a few,) where you have familiar heroes with special abilities. On paper this isn't an issue, but it leaves the game to become a sorta rock paper scissors matchup with random enemy spawns so you can never really exactly prepare for what the enemy is going to put out there. Having to half offensives for an extra ten to twenty minutes so you can ramp up your anti-air production to combat enemy bombers felt grating almost immediately, needing to stop your entire attack to direct funds into constructing cruisers to take out enemy submarines to protect your transportation landers was awfully annoying. This pattern continues across both games. Playing cat and mouse with the way the game wants you to play versus generating your own strategy made me feel like I was playing a puzzle game in which the developers wanted me to solve the way they made the game rather than play it in a way that I enjoyed.
Skip this if you're a fan of the GBA soundcard: the music in this game is genuinely horrible. I try not to make grandiose statements like that about the soundtracking of games because generally speaking, I find them inoffensive at worst. But outside of a very few CO themes (Sonya and Sensei,) the recycled crustyness of bad guitars and synths played like musical vomit in my head while I made my way through both of the repackaged Advance Wars titles. Thankfully there's a way in game to turn it off because Andy's battle theme was going to drive me up a series of several walls.
That all being said, there was a decent amount to like about the game(s.) Despite not having almost any narrative at all to them other than "bad men are bad," I enjoyed gallavanting about with my party of completely unalike CO's that have no feasible logic in regards to commanding an army. Only a few of the CO's seemed like plausible commanders which made the launching of large scale offensives and the gravity of war so hilarious to me. I came to appreciate how little the devs really cared about plausible motives/crafting a halfway decent narrative in the way of just saying "you're the good guys just do good guy things." The updated visuals give this title a LOT of charm, which is something that the greater playerbase seemed to be rather worried about when the trailers announced Reboot Camp. I liked the jovial drawings of each CO and the way they animated in dialogue and in game. I enjoyed the vibrant orange/green/blue/yellows of the units on the lusciously basic maps. It felt like a game that didn't take itself too seriously, and when coupled with the "plot," that is perfectly acceptable.
If you liked Advance Wars the first go around, it seems like the general consensus is that you'll like Reboot Camp quite a bit. As mentioned above, I didn't play the GBA titles but those that I've conversed with that did, have been rather high on 2023's take on the famous tactics franchise. I personally cannot recommend Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp, but hey if ya like it, ya like it.