Advance Wars Post-Mortem

[Now Experiencing] [Computer Gaming]

I'm a little late in coming to the Advance Wars party. Not only has the original GameBoy Advance game now passed into gaming history, but it has sequels on both the GBA and the DS which are similarly starting to show some age. Still, better late than never.

The popularity of the GBA led to a rennaissance for old-school gaming. Over the course of its lifespan, the spritely little GameBoy Advance saw a wealth of 2D platformers, isometric RPGs, and turn-based strategy games. Much as the PC remains the home of the first-person shooter and the real-time strategy, the GBA staked out its corner of the genre-verse and defended it tooth and nail.

Advance Wars is regarded by many as the pinnacle of GBA turn-based strategy, and admittedly for some very good reasons. It is superbly balanced, with a fantastic interface, an excellently designed learning curve, and pretty much all the bells, whistles and extras that you could ask from a turn-based strategy.

It's just a shame it's not very engaging.

Advance Wars places you in the role of an "advisor" to the Orange Star army, who are, as best I can tell, the good guys of the piece. From this position, you're tasked with, effectively, commanding a range of near-future military units ranging from rocket infantry through to tanks and helicopters, as you strive to defeat the predictably named Blue Moon, Green Earth, Yellow Comet, and Black Hole armies.

You go about this task with the aid of a CO, one of a range of cartoony personalities ranging from the cute Nell through to the sniper-cowboy Grit or the bumbling dictator Olaf. These individuals not only serve as the voice of the game's tutorial sections, but also are key figures in the plot (such as it is) and also bestow upon you a special power which can be activated every six turns or so which will give you a fairly apocalyptic edge over your opponent for the duration of a single turn.

The units you command don't have a lot of detail to them. Every unit has 10 hit points. As a unit takes damage, its capacity to deal damage to others is commensurately decreased. There's a kind of extended rock/paper/scissors mentality to the units, with bombers good against tanks, tanks good against anti-air, and anti-air good against flying units, and so forth. Infantry aren't really good against anything, but they're the only units that can capture cities and factories, so they're an essential part of your army.

Advance Wars imports a lot of real-time strategy conventions, including bases from which you can produce more units, and an (annoying) fog-of-war effect that restricts your visibility on some maps. It also captures the quick and fluid feeling of a real-time-strategy, lending a certain vitality to what traditionally is a very slow and deliberate style of gaming.

As far as the mission to mission gameplay goes, it's faultless. Advance Wars is exceptionally well balanced and crafted, with each unit type feeling both unique and worthwhile. The interfaces are intuitive and well-explained. The course of battle is easy to understand, and further rendered by short animated (skippable) battles between units when they fight.

But it's really difficult to care about what's going on. The cartoony presentation of the game leaves you feeling that there's no real significance to the story that supposedly links the missions. You don't carry any units over from one battle to the next, and none of the named characters ever actually appear on the battlefield. With such a disconnect between the gameplay and the narrative, you don't become in any way invested in the ongoing course of the game, and pretty soon each map becomes just another battle to slog through, just the same as the last one.

The game pulls out all the stops in multiplayer, though. There's an option for direct cable matchups (for those of you who still have actual GBAs) which can be played either between two cartridges, or via game sharing. There's also, in the grand tradition of turn-based games throughout time, a hot-seat option for two players on the same GBA (or in my case, DS). You can design and save your own maps, or just choose from the ridiculously lengthy selection of scenarios included with the game.

There's also a War Room option, with a further selection of non-story missions to test your skills against, in case the lengthy narrative didn't sate your craving for combat. Your progress in each mission is ranked, and victory rewards you with "coins", that can be spent to unlock even more maps.

All in all, Advance Wars is a fantastic gameplay achievement - it's just a shame that there's no really compelling reason to play it. Definitely worth a look if you're a strategy fan, particularly if you've got a friend with the patience to play you in a hot seat game. But if you need story with your strategy, then pass this one by and pick up the excellent Fire Emblem or Final Fantasy Tactics.