Aw man, this is gonna be my longest review and hottest take in a while. When I was a kid I played the first few missions of the original Advance Wars on emulator and remember thinking it was really cool! Well, either I didn't get far enough in to see the flaws or I was just too young to have developed my critical thinking skills because damn - Advance Wars kinda sucks!
Let me be upfront here; nothing that WayForward have done with this as a remake is even remotely a problem - in fact it's about the only stuff I like about the game. The UI and menus are gorgeous, character models and animations are full of personality and the remixed music is great too. No - I don't love the vomit-green colour of the grass and in-game textures, but I find that people who complain about a remake's visuals are often among the most insufferable people in the world and I don't wanna be lumped in with them, I'll get over it, we've got bigger fish to fry.
Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp is a very faithful remake of the original Advance Wars 1&2 and that might be the problem because what I've realised upon revisiting these games is that they are - in my opinion very fundamentally flawed! I'm about halfway through Advance Wars 2 right now and it's just starting to feel like a total slog that I'm not sure I'll finish.
Advance Wars' AI is dumb as a box of rocks. I'm playing on "Classic" (the more difficult) mode and find that the AI never reacts to you having a unit nearing the objective. You can have an infantry unit on literally the space next to the HQ you need to capture to win the match, and they still send their units off to fight your other guys halfway across the map. Only when you begin the active process of capturing an objective does that unit become a target, which is very exploitable because you can just send infantry/mech units in to capture an objective as a decoy, knowing they'll die and then send all your tanks and other guys round the ensuing chaos to win the game. The enemy AI will also frequently attack your units with sub-optimal units. Case in point: I've just had the enemy attack my battle copter with 2 separate tanks (which are highly ineffective against battle copters), get completely destroyed on the counter-attack and THEN after letting their tanks take completely unnecessary damage, send in their anti-air unit which was IN RANGE THE WHOLE TIME to one-shot my battle copter after the fact???
Advance Wars hones in on the strategy elements moreso than its Intelligent Systems-counterpart Fire Emblem - yet you rarely ever feel like you won a match through genuine strategy, instead you feel like you won because the AI kept being fucking stupid. And yet - despite the AI being so dumb, battles - especially ones later in the game take AGES. Fire Emblem I'd say never lets its chapters take upwards of an hour or so on average, it has a pretty clean curve. Battles in Advance Wars start off at a pretty fair Fire Emblem-length, and yet they snowball like you would not believe to the point that the final battle of Advance Wars 1 took me 5 hours. This shit goes from feeling like Fire Emblem to Civilization real quick, it's astonishing how quickly the average battle length spirals out of control, and this didn't take me 5 hours because I had to keep resetting or anything! I don't know if I was doing something hugely wrong but I was only playing the game in the way that made sense and yeah, I did win! But it took me 5 HOURS!
(The battle just before that also took about 3, so.)
Advance Wars is like rock, paper, scissors if there were 8 choices and 5 of those choices only interacted specifically with 4 of those other choices and the remaining choices had extremely niche and specific interactions with everything else and also there were terrain bonuses and special powers and over 50% of the game's maps threw this annoying ass fucking fog of war at you that further slowed the game's pace to a halt and also felt like it eliminated a lot of the strategy in the game and instead just had you fuckin firing blindly in the dark for half an hour trying to find the bastard-ass rocket unit that's been firing on you from 6 spaces away the whole time
It does not tell you what the opponent's CO power does when they use them on you, you only find out what they do once you play as them yourselves late into AW1 or 2 (when that knowledge has long stopped being useful) and it poorly communicates which unit is attacking you by frequently leaving the camera on the unit which has just moved while another unit is attacking you - frequently leaving me in moments of utter confusion where I could swear an artillery unit had just moved and attacked me in the same turn. It is a very complex game that never feels particularly deep. It never justifies just how many different units and niche interactions there are, partially because so many mechanics are exactly that - niche and forgettable and partially because you win almost every match by exploiting the dumbass AI!
Late in Advance Wars 1, when former enemy officer Eagle and literal child protagonist Andy are celebrating a victory, Eagle tells Andy they should "spar" again sometime.
...Spar...?
...What the fuck do you mean...Spar? When a helicopter bursts into flames and explodes with screaming men inside it, is he aware of what's happening? He does realise what war is and what it entails, right? Why is he suggesting "sparring" with the game's child protagonist as if sending men to their deaths in large-scale armed combat is a fucking anime training montage? Why does every Japanese game lately seem to have dialogue like this? Those are people, with guns and explosives, Eagle! You fucking freak! Why has everything gotta be so fucking anime all the time?? It's POISON!!! IT'S BRAINROT I TELL YOU!!! BRAINROT!!!!!!!!!
The world of Advance Wars is canonically called "Wars World". Clearly, the biggest loser in this review is me, who has written up this entirely-too-lengthy diatribe about a videogame where anime teens wage literal war against eachother in a place called "Wars World." Fucking Wars World. Genuinely, I can not stop thinking about the ramifications of a place called "Wars World" that seems to exist for the sole purpose of being a place where wars happen.
By the way - what's the deal with the voice acting? Like, it's fine don't get me wrong but why are characters only ever saying 30-40% of what's on-screen at most? I understand having a budget or time constraints but like, none of the VOs who got into their studios or whatever had the time at any point to just read all of the dialogue in any given textbox? This isn't like a Fire Emblem situation where they're using grunts or noises to actively convey the characters' emotions consistently because every character has like, 2 noises max and the lines/words that they do choose to read out I just find really weird! I don't know how else to describe it, you'd have to see it for yourself! It's just really weird what they did and did not record! The plot fucking sucks by the way! I played through the entire first game and still genuinely have no idea what happened! It's a mess and it feels like they barely even tried!
I'm really disappointed to return to Advance Wars and think it's actually pretty bad. I wanna reiterate that I don't think much of the fault lies with WayForward - who inject a lot of personality and charm into this thing, and just faithfully recreated what I think is a deeply flawed pair of games. I wanted to like it a lot more because I love its vibe and aesthetic but damn, I only have so much time on this beautiful green planet, bro. I can only spend so much of it exploiting AI and mashing through mid-map stalemates in fuckin Wars World for hours on end. I'm gonna go outside and see if I can get my ass ate
Let me be upfront here; nothing that WayForward have done with this as a remake is even remotely a problem - in fact it's about the only stuff I like about the game. The UI and menus are gorgeous, character models and animations are full of personality and the remixed music is great too. No - I don't love the vomit-green colour of the grass and in-game textures, but I find that people who complain about a remake's visuals are often among the most insufferable people in the world and I don't wanna be lumped in with them, I'll get over it, we've got bigger fish to fry.
Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp is a very faithful remake of the original Advance Wars 1&2 and that might be the problem because what I've realised upon revisiting these games is that they are - in my opinion very fundamentally flawed! I'm about halfway through Advance Wars 2 right now and it's just starting to feel like a total slog that I'm not sure I'll finish.
Advance Wars' AI is dumb as a box of rocks. I'm playing on "Classic" (the more difficult) mode and find that the AI never reacts to you having a unit nearing the objective. You can have an infantry unit on literally the space next to the HQ you need to capture to win the match, and they still send their units off to fight your other guys halfway across the map. Only when you begin the active process of capturing an objective does that unit become a target, which is very exploitable because you can just send infantry/mech units in to capture an objective as a decoy, knowing they'll die and then send all your tanks and other guys round the ensuing chaos to win the game. The enemy AI will also frequently attack your units with sub-optimal units. Case in point: I've just had the enemy attack my battle copter with 2 separate tanks (which are highly ineffective against battle copters), get completely destroyed on the counter-attack and THEN after letting their tanks take completely unnecessary damage, send in their anti-air unit which was IN RANGE THE WHOLE TIME to one-shot my battle copter after the fact???
Advance Wars hones in on the strategy elements moreso than its Intelligent Systems-counterpart Fire Emblem - yet you rarely ever feel like you won a match through genuine strategy, instead you feel like you won because the AI kept being fucking stupid. And yet - despite the AI being so dumb, battles - especially ones later in the game take AGES. Fire Emblem I'd say never lets its chapters take upwards of an hour or so on average, it has a pretty clean curve. Battles in Advance Wars start off at a pretty fair Fire Emblem-length, and yet they snowball like you would not believe to the point that the final battle of Advance Wars 1 took me 5 hours. This shit goes from feeling like Fire Emblem to Civilization real quick, it's astonishing how quickly the average battle length spirals out of control, and this didn't take me 5 hours because I had to keep resetting or anything! I don't know if I was doing something hugely wrong but I was only playing the game in the way that made sense and yeah, I did win! But it took me 5 HOURS!
(The battle just before that also took about 3, so.)
Advance Wars is like rock, paper, scissors if there were 8 choices and 5 of those choices only interacted specifically with 4 of those other choices and the remaining choices had extremely niche and specific interactions with everything else and also there were terrain bonuses and special powers and over 50% of the game's maps threw this annoying ass fucking fog of war at you that further slowed the game's pace to a halt and also felt like it eliminated a lot of the strategy in the game and instead just had you fuckin firing blindly in the dark for half an hour trying to find the bastard-ass rocket unit that's been firing on you from 6 spaces away the whole time
It does not tell you what the opponent's CO power does when they use them on you, you only find out what they do once you play as them yourselves late into AW1 or 2 (when that knowledge has long stopped being useful) and it poorly communicates which unit is attacking you by frequently leaving the camera on the unit which has just moved while another unit is attacking you - frequently leaving me in moments of utter confusion where I could swear an artillery unit had just moved and attacked me in the same turn. It is a very complex game that never feels particularly deep. It never justifies just how many different units and niche interactions there are, partially because so many mechanics are exactly that - niche and forgettable and partially because you win almost every match by exploiting the dumbass AI!
Late in Advance Wars 1, when former enemy officer Eagle and literal child protagonist Andy are celebrating a victory, Eagle tells Andy they should "spar" again sometime.
...Spar...?
...What the fuck do you mean...Spar? When a helicopter bursts into flames and explodes with screaming men inside it, is he aware of what's happening? He does realise what war is and what it entails, right? Why is he suggesting "sparring" with the game's child protagonist as if sending men to their deaths in large-scale armed combat is a fucking anime training montage? Why does every Japanese game lately seem to have dialogue like this? Those are people, with guns and explosives, Eagle! You fucking freak! Why has everything gotta be so fucking anime all the time?? It's POISON!!! IT'S BRAINROT I TELL YOU!!! BRAINROT!!!!!!!!!
The world of Advance Wars is canonically called "Wars World". Clearly, the biggest loser in this review is me, who has written up this entirely-too-lengthy diatribe about a videogame where anime teens wage literal war against eachother in a place called "Wars World." Fucking Wars World. Genuinely, I can not stop thinking about the ramifications of a place called "Wars World" that seems to exist for the sole purpose of being a place where wars happen.
By the way - what's the deal with the voice acting? Like, it's fine don't get me wrong but why are characters only ever saying 30-40% of what's on-screen at most? I understand having a budget or time constraints but like, none of the VOs who got into their studios or whatever had the time at any point to just read all of the dialogue in any given textbox? This isn't like a Fire Emblem situation where they're using grunts or noises to actively convey the characters' emotions consistently because every character has like, 2 noises max and the lines/words that they do choose to read out I just find really weird! I don't know how else to describe it, you'd have to see it for yourself! It's just really weird what they did and did not record! The plot fucking sucks by the way! I played through the entire first game and still genuinely have no idea what happened! It's a mess and it feels like they barely even tried!
I'm really disappointed to return to Advance Wars and think it's actually pretty bad. I wanna reiterate that I don't think much of the fault lies with WayForward - who inject a lot of personality and charm into this thing, and just faithfully recreated what I think is a deeply flawed pair of games. I wanted to like it a lot more because I love its vibe and aesthetic but damn, I only have so much time on this beautiful green planet, bro. I can only spend so much of it exploiting AI and mashing through mid-map stalemates in fuckin Wars World for hours on end. I'm gonna go outside and see if I can get my ass ate