It’s hard to say how much of the regard in which we hold Advance Wars is down to it being the first Nintendo Wars game to be released in the west. The 2001 GBA title came as an out-of-the-blue shock – a turn-based military strategy game from Nintendo, of all companies – yet arrived with a full 13 years’ development behind it. Intelligent Systems had been making these games, virtually unkown outside Japan, since Famicom Wars in 1988, and no less than two home console versions and three Game Boy iterations had already been produced. Advance Wars and its sequels even cherry-picked some of the best maps from their predecessors. Opportunities like this don’t come along that often: the chance to experience a game, entirely fresh and in a slick new wrapper, that has nevertheless been subject to more than a decade’s refinement by one of Nintendo’s most talented development partners. No wonder it seemed so perfect.
Subsequent experience suggests that it’s not a distorted view, however. Advance Wars 2 and Dual Strike could add nothing to its formula, although heaven knows they tried. They couldn’t break it either, and are excellent and only very slightly over-egged games. But the first Advance Wars remains the unassailable, impregnable peak of the series, and one of very few games on this list or anywhere that it is impossible to imagine being able to improve.
Part of that is down to a rare synergy between hardware and software – all too rare in handheld gaming. If turn-based strategy was on the point of death at the turn of the century, it’s because few developers outside Intelligent Systems had realised how perfect a fit it was for gaming on the move. Totally devoid of time pressure, interruptible at any point, easy to support multiple players on a single handset, and so flexible that it could fill a spare five minutes or fully absorb your attention for an eight-hour flight. It was a revelation. Intelligent Systems complemented it with a superb, streamlined and ultra-fast interface, the GBA brought a large and colourful screen that could be densely packed with map information, and the deal was done.
To celebrate our 20th anniversary last year, we awarded seven games a retrospective 10. Advance Wars was one of those games – you can find out why here.
Well, not quite. If one thing sets Advance Wars apart from any of its scarce peers, it’s presentation. Intelligent Systems’ stroke of genius with this series rebirth – the one thing, above all others, that carried it to international success and wide accessibility – was to do the utterly implausible, and make war cute, and strategy cool. Every aspect of the art is perfectly judged: the clean-cut sex appeal of the manga characters; the vehicle designs, irresistibly chunky retro-futuristic toys, showed off in a brisk illustrative cutscene at every confrontation; the on-map unit icons that pack immense charm and character into a handful of pixels; the excitingly brash dynamism of the frontend. It’s everything strategy games aren’t – immediate, youthful, and energetic.
Of the balance of air, sea and land units, their ranges and effects and strengths and weaknesses, it’s hard to say anything other than ‘perfect’. Advance Wars takes scissors-paper-stone and explodes it into a complex, cascading web of units that somehow always comes full circle – fighter-copter-mech-tank-rocket-cruiser-fighter, for one. The positional interplay of direct and indirect units is exquisite, and the extremely strict grid format renders this supremely intelligent system with total clarity. Advance Wars recognises its immense debt to that greatest of military strategy games, chess, and it’s not about to discard its most basic building block.
What’s perhaps more of a surprise is the depth of tactical advantage to be squeezed out of the very simple terrain rules. This becomes paritcularly apparent when under the fog of war, Advance Wars having one of the most sophisticated yet easy-to-grasp applications of this concept in the entire strategy genre. The use of high-ground spotters and forest cover can lead to a single turn in a complex match meriting endless contemplation.
Extremely rarely among strategy games, Advance Wars’ design adapts perfectly to both carefully crafted, objective-based scenarios with pre-deployed units, and a more traditional capture, build and fight mode. The latter arguably has longer legs, both in multiplayer and in the standalone War Room maps (the pursuit of S-ranks in which has become the obsessive goal of many a player). But it’s Advance Wars’ ability to deliver concise, intriguing, dramatic, sometimes even funny pre-scripted scenarios that makes it so accessible to the strategy novice.
The complexity and subtlety of ideas Intelligent Systems can pack into a single 10×15 grid is a lesson in game design economy few can afford to ignore. And, on a Game Boy Micro, Advance Wars is a genuine best-in-genre and a life-consuming, long-haul game you can fit in the palm of your hand. Sometimes less really is more.
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