Two of the best platform-signifying games of the Game Boy Advance, are still two of the best strategy games yet made, with Intelligent Systems’ charming sprite-work cartoonized by WayForward.

Several Quality of Life changes make this an essential try even for series veterans. That enough has been changed, points to everything that has not been changed, and even new changes which newly get in the way. Some of the new unit visuals, which change based on faction, are hard to tell from other units, now, and the overall refresh to the style, while initially pleasing, is not as form-fitting for the grid-based movement and precision of the first two Advance Wars.

There are other caveats which are regular Nintendo caveats: there is multiplayer if you connect directly with a friend, but no open online lobbies or public play. There is a map creator but the sharing is even more limited than Mario Maker, you can only send your creations to a friend who plays the game (for me, one person), so that’s a creative dead-end for what remains a pretty clean-cut mapmaker (but still limited to one size, odd).

There are baked in things, that feel more urgent to address now. The animations for CO Powers, in particular, are very long. Some in-game days you’ll see as many as three powers, meaning you’re watching long cutscene animations you’ve seen many times and when you progress with more troops, those times get longer, as it must touch every unit the power has influenced. There are filters for other game-specific animations like capturing and watching the battles, so it’s hard to imagine this did not especially occur to anyone while reimplementing those.

What the style does do is scale pretty well and allow a more readable format that can now be zoomed way out using the stick. Good. There are also changes to scoring, making S-ranks relatively easy, and even some formal changes to how certain battles progress, specifically changing many of the fastest routed strategies you may be able to look up for some levels.

While on the whole it felt significantly easier, whether by age and growing a big brain or because they’ve really made certain missions more accessible… There is one mission that took me about six of my 55 hours to complete, which is an absurdity, when everything else was cleared in a few tries. There is maybe some imbalance and someone else may get hooked up somewhere else. I do feel some of the instinctive changes are not considered whole cloth for how they change the course of a battle.

This is a terrific value and two of the best games. Given the extra year of development due to ongoing conflicts in Ukraine, it’s a major downer every rough edge wasn’t smoothed out, all the options expanded, and online worked on. There could be the definitive Advance Wars here, but you cannot really say that for either version, and this far on, you still need to play those original games — and if you love them — only then do you need to play these games.