What's an airport, again? Let's play Advance Wars!

Welcome to Let's Play Advance Wars!

Advance Wars holds a unique place for me among video games. It's probably not one of my top 10 favorite games; I can think of several others that I'd call "better". Final Fantasy Tactics and the two Super Mario Worlds come immediately to mind. It's not a game that will immediately wow someone who looks over your shoulder for a few minutes; the graphics have personality but aren't really anything to write home about, the music is somewhat pedestrian, and the story is rather vestigial; it can't make up its mind as to whether it wants to be important or take a backseat to the gameplay.

Despite these shortcomings, Advance Wars is without a doubt the game that I have revisited the most often; I've probably put more total time into it than all but a handful of my childhood favorites. What Advance Wars does well, it does superbly: the gameplay is simple at heart, yet complex enough to allow different tactics and strategies to work equally well. It is fair enough that an experienced, skilled player will be able to win every battle without much trouble, but has enough randomness that a slightly different strategy is necessary every time, and in the more difficult battles, a step-by-step walkthrough can become useless in only a few turns.

The ability to provide a sense of accomplishment without becoming stale is the reason I keep returning to and thoroughly enjoying Advance Wars. I hope to convey that feeling to you with this Let's Play.



Advance Wars is a turn-based strategy game for the Game Boy Advance developed by Intelligent Systems (or IntSys). Intelligent Systems is responsible, among other things, for the Paper Mario series and the Fire Emblem games from the Super Famicom onwards. Advance Wars is part of a long-running series of turn-based strategy games often referred to as "Nintendo Wars", mostly developed by IntSys.

Advance Wars itself is the first GBA entry in the Nintendo Wars series. It was released in the US on September 10, 2001; its European and Japanese releases were delayed after the September 11th terrorist attacks in the US. Advance Wars wasn't released in Europe until early 2002; it wasn't released in Japan until late 2004, in a bundle with its sequel, Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising.

The action in Advance Wars takes place from a top-down perspective on a square grid, in a similar fashion to IntSys's other turn-based strategy series. There are a couple major differences between the two. Units in Advance Wars have no experience, levels, or inventories. A tank that has defeated 10 units is identical to a tank fresh out of the factory. Secondly, units in different armies are equivalent; there are no opposing forces more powerful than anything your army can field, which means that difficulty cannot be concentrated in a souped-up boss unit at the end of the battle. In fact, any differences between one of your units and the enemy's equivalent unit are wholly determined by the Commanding Officer (or CO) in charge of each army.

Enough talk! Let's begin.




The game opens on a quick animation showing a few of the game's COs. Get used to these three; we'll be seeing a lot of them.



This lady here gives us a quick welcome, then wants to know our name. What should she call us, Talking Time?


Main Menu Theme

The lady tells us her name is Nell, and inquires as to our experience with the game. No matter what we answer, she insists we go through Field Training with her before we're allowed to embark on a campaign.

Next Time: Field Training with Nell (or: Meet Olaf)!

(Aside: this is my first LP and I welcome all criticism, constructive or otherwise! Let me know if there's anything you'd like me to focus on more or less as we go on. For now, anything regarding image size or formatting would be particularly helpful.)

Warface

What is the character limit? It looks like 6 or 8, but I'm eyeballing.

Bugs. Because of course you know, this means war.

Well, since we're in the army, we need a suitable article of clothing.

BDU's

...that's all I got.

I concur.

Sun Tzu


Also, .pngs if you can. Those .jpgs are da worst.

It's variable based on which letters you put in. It fits 6 "M"s but 12 "i"s. It's generally 8 or 9 unless you're going all caps, in which case it's 6 or 7. Everything suggested so far works.

Everything but the box art is now a .png! Let me know if you think that's better. There are a bunch of options I haven't really fiddled with.

Every game in this history of forever should start doing this for everything.

I like this, and also concur on the advice about .pngs.

Fun fact: I originally bought this game based entirely on the recommendation of the (probably now defunct) games review column on the UK Teletext on ITV (basically, some text pages that were sent in the gaps between frames on old analog TV signals), who raved about how it was the best portable game ever for playing on long journies, especially with friends.

As a consequence of playing it, I scoured 9 different game shops in an attempt to find a copy of Advance Wars 2. And then bought every other game in the Advance Wars series too (although not the other games in the Nintendo Wars series; Advance Wars is something of a beast of its own). This is a really good game series, people! (Even if it does reach something of a decline in Advance Wars DS.) Annoyingly, each of the games has its own problems and triumphs, and none of the games in the series gets everything right at once. (And it eventually turned out to not be suitable for serious competitive play; there are breaking strategies that can't be countered by anything other than trying to copy them, although Days of Ruin does better than the other entries and almost has some semblence of balance.)

I don't have any opinion on the character name, although I look forward to writing walls of text about the game more generally.


By the way, comparing it to TRPGs is probably a bad idea, even though the comparisons are obvious. Advance Wars is not a TRPG, even if it at first looks like one; it's a pure puzzle game. (There are also games in between the two extremes; something like Battle for Wesnoth gives a nice medium between Advance Wars and Fire Emblem. Not coincidentally, Battle for Wesnoth is also one of my favourite games.) Especially in hard mode. (Is this Let's Play on hard mode, or normal? I guess you could do both, because the branching paths mean that you can do two playthroughs with very few levels in common.)

Pure puzzle game? It's a streamlined turn based tactics game, but a tactics game nonetheless. It's got very little RPG in it, that is true.

Some of the maps in Hard Mode (and the final battle map in Normal Mode, I guess) could be classified as pure puzzle game, in a sense that you need to figure out the one (or at least, one of the very few) exact solution needed to finish them. But yeah, most other of them still contain enough micro aspects and room for improvisation that enables you to beat them in a multitude of ways. Especially with so many AI loopholes that you can abuse.

I do like this series a lot although I'm not really very good at it (*more of a Fire Emblem guy myself). Used to have a lot of fun playing three-player maps with just a single cartridge, hilarious lack of CO balance notwithstanding. Black Hole Rising's my favorite, it completely outdoes its predecessor in virtually every single aspect; even if it feels more like an expansion pack rather than a sequel.

How would you proceed with the CO choice? I want to see as much Sami use as possible

Yeah, the "puzzle" maps are my least favorite part of the series. They're only beatable by tedious micromanagement, which is the least fun thing I can think of.

I hope we get to see as many COs as possible!

Advance Wars DS is the BEST entry and I will not have you besmirch it young man!

Name him RETREAT.

Just play Sami and produce wave after wave of Mechs.

But yes, this is one of my favorite games ever, I'm looking forward to this LP.

I'm waffling between Bugs and Sun Tzu, because they're both pretty perfect fits. Ah, let's give it to Bugs, because nostalgia.

And you've gotta play Max! Tanks TANKS TANKS!

Advance Wars (and the little Fire Emblem I've played - need to get into that) are the only two strategy games I like. They're just so likeable.

Gonna have to go with Sun Tzu. Bonus points if you manage to work in quotes from The Art of War into your posts without forcing it.

It probably won't fit, but how about Silverberg?

I endorse Bugs.

Which one would you even use? Odessa, Mathiu, or Leon?

Meryl.

And maybe we can find out if love can bloom on the battlefield.

But they're not even spelled the same way! Looks like someone has got rookie eyes.

It's easy to forget how things are spelled in the middle of a battlefield.

The fun thing is, Sami's intended strategy is the best strategy in the game, and COs are tiered pretty much based on how well they can pull it off (unless they have something specific they can do instead to replace it). But she's not the best at pulling it off; there are better COs.

Doesn't the AW1 campaign only give you Orange Star COs, though?

If I remember correctly, you can play the other COs in multiplayer. I think you may need to unlock them somehow.

By the way, if you didn't play this multiplayer, you missed the best part of this game! Fuck, I have some good memories of Advance Wars.

I only played AW2, which, you know, is better. But I'm interested in reading about the first!

AW2 is basically the Brood War of the advance wars series. Meaning, yeah its definitely better.

There are ways in which AW1 is better (I prefer the graphics, some of the campaign level design is better, CO choice is actually an interesting decision and you get to do it in the majority of missions). But yes, AW2 is better in most respects.

And all the COs are playable outside the campaign (most of them require unlocking, though). You're limited to the three starting COs for the campaign itself.

I can't remember, was Nell playable in AW1!?