Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp is the latest in a string of remasters from Nintendo that cement the notion that video games were simply better in the early 2000s. It’s wild to me that I’m now going to review an Advance Wars game in 2023. It’s one of those Nintendo properties that seemed as if it had been retired a long time ago, sent to live in the memory with games like F-Zero. I first played it when I was 17 years old. Playing it in 2023, at almost 40, though still a pleasurable experience, is nevertheless a different one.
For a game that turns the act of armed warfare into toy box clashes between expendable army men, Advance Wars is linked to gravely serious real-world conflict through pure happenstance. 22 years ago, the original Advance Wars launched for the Nintendo DS on September 10, 2001, a day before the 21st Century’s most defining moment of international conflict to date. In 2022, this reboot would also be delayed by the outbreak of another real-world war.
War — what is it good for?
Though it drapes itself in the trappings of real-world war, Advance Wars has had few meaningful things to say about it (at least, not its original incarnations packaged here — the franchise did develop an appetite for darker, greyer material as it went). In the world of Advance Wars, conflicts that run on for days and result in horrendous casualties end in the arrogant smiles and glasses-gleaming-in-the-light theatrics of a shonen anime. It’s hard to concentrate on the end-of-game backslapping when I think about how many people of the Orange Star Nation died, and how the leader of their forces doesn’t seem to care a jot about their sacrifice. It’s one of those little things that, once noticed, are very hard to un-notice. When I say these original games approach war like children playing with army men, I mean that that is truly the extent of their thinking. All of the commanding officers are, effectively, children themselves, overseen by a seemingly-kind blonde woman named Nell. There’s honestly a whole Ender’s Game type of situation at play here I’m not sure I’m comfortable with.
The original game in the series feels the most like a product of its time in this regard — it is uninterested in addressing the cost of, or motivation behind, its characters’ long and deadly military campaign. It doesn’t even bother to send the message that war is bad. Rather, it depicts its central conflict, and the characters within it, in a manner concerningly close to propaganda. They’re just fun-loving kids fighting to protect their homeland and massively expand the territory it controls through military might alone! What could be wrong with that?
Lucky for Advance Wars, then, that it lays an extremely sturdy and enjoyable tactics game on top of all this moral quicksand.
The enemy’s gate is down
Unlike its Intelligent Systems stablemate Fire Emblem, which incorporates aspects of Japanese RPG design as a bookend to its tactics game, the Advance Wars series has always stuck strictly to tactics. In Advance Wars 1+2: Reboot Camp, developed by Wayforward, units can’t be upgraded or levelled up over time, and they don’t carry bolstered stats from scenario to scenario. Every new mission has you start fresh, with an army in situ, your units selected for you and already on the board. It’s a bit like joining a chess match in progress. ‘We’re on Move Four. Figure it out from here.’ You’re given your objective, some intel on what to expect, and then it’s over to you to secure the win condition. Most battles in Advance Wars 1+2 can be won in one of two ways — by clearing all the enemy units off the board or by capturing the enemy’s capital, both of which are often easier said than done. A handful of missions demand more specific objectives — racing to capture more cities than your foe, holding out for a set number of turns with diminished forces, or fighting through oppressive fog of war without knowing where your enemy’s forces are hiding.
There’s no upper limit on turns taken during the campaign, nor time taken during each turn, allowing every battle to go on as long as it needs to. Advance Wars gives players the space to review their options before making any move and even reset their entire turn if things haven’t played out the way they expected. Though players have their tactical efficiency ranked at the end of each round, it’s not the focus. Advance Wars is often happy to let you figure things out for yourself, though this approach can occasionally lead to a slog or a stalemate. Units are designed using a rock-paper-scissors system, so knowing where each is strongest and weakest is vital. Tanks are great for punching through other tanks, but are in danger if they get caught in artillery scopes. Choppers are great at attacking heavy ground vehicles, but are weak against anti-air flak guns and missiles. There’s a right way and a wrong way to use every single unit and, once you learn how to get the best out of them, you’ll be on the march to victory in no time.
Each commanding officer, or CO, has a unique power that will grant them some measure of single-turn control over the battlefield. Andy, the game’s primary protag, can heal any of his damaged units. Max powers up his heavy vehicles for a brutal bullrush. Sami gives her infantry a kick up the backside, making them much harder take down. Every enemy CO has powers of their own, and many battles become a matter of waiting for the right moment to use yours. Pick the right moment, and it can be the turn that ultimately tips the scales, winning you the fight.
In a way, I’m grateful for this willingness to cut the cruft and get to the point, because it makes Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp much easier to play for review. However, I can also see some players who’ve grown used to Fire Emblem‘s more complex approach come away from this feeling it’s all a bit anaemic. Again, there’s an argument to be made that this is another element of Advance Wars that makes it a product of its time. These were games created for the Game Boy Advance in the early 2000’s. There was only so much they could do with the constraints of the hardware at the time and, placed against modern turn-based tactics games like XCOM 2 and Fire Emblem: Three Houses, it’s easy to see why it might seem overly simple on its face.
Gather round the war table
Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp contains the full campaigns from both Advance Wars and Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising. Though it locks the Advance Wars 2 campaign off by default, playing through the original is a great way to reacquaint yourself with its systems. The first third of the game’s campaign is spent introducing all its systems, mechanics, and unit types. When you finally encounter Yellow Comet’s forces and their leader Kanbei, the training wheels quickly come off and, outside of some broad, lay-of-the-land intel at the top of the scenario, you are very much left to strategise yourself. Both campaigns come in Casual or Classic difficulty flavours, with Classic scenarios putting more units on the board than in Casual, introducing many complicating factors and ratcheting the stakes on every move you make. The Casual difficulty has been slightly tinkered with from the original — some missions add an extra unit to your forces, others remove an enemy that used to be there — in ways that let them breathe a little, but still present a challenge to those new to tactics games. For the old heads who feel like an old fashioned comp stomp, Casual is where it’s at.
But there are more modes on offer than just the campaign. Long-time fans will remember that the GBA versions contained turn-based competitive local multiplayer, which returns here. This makes sense! The Switch is the perfect system for a game and a mode like this one. You can also battle it out against the computer, and adjust its level of cleverness to your liking. I appreciate the Skirmish mode’s reappearance — sometimes you just want to clobber the computer and feel really smart, and sometimes you actually want the tussle. It would have been easy to drop a mode like this to make way for online multiplayer, but it’s still here, and I’m grateful. Online multiplayer does appear though, in case your friends are a little too far away for couch combat, and has worked just fine over the course of this review period. The benefit of playing a turn-based strategy game online is that, often, even if it was lagging, you mightn’t know. Online multiplayer allows for three friends to duke it out on the same map, with a fourth CPU army on the board.
The Design Room is also back, a mode that allows players to create their own maps and challenges. Of all of Advance Wars‘ little anachronisms, this stuck right out to me as a relic of 2001. Every strategy game at that time launched with a map editor. It was just The Way, it was How Things Were Done. That was how you built an online community back then — you gave players the tools to make their own stuff, and chances were your game would take on a life of its own as a result. Just ask Blizzard, watching Riot eat its modern-day lunch thanks to a custom Warcraft 3 mode called Dawn of the Ancients.
Final thoughts
Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp is a successful revitalisation of a pair of beloved early 2000’s classics. It understands that the core gameplay was and remains strong, and makes few changes to help it along. Instead, it pours a lot of its time and energy into upgrading the visuals, layering strong modelling and animation onto a game with an already unique look. Full credit to Wayforward for knowing what to touch and what to to leave be. The tactics are as strong as ever, and its multiplayer package remains a solid bonus. They are, more or less, as you remember them.
Even with the 20 years of real historical winds that have altered its contours, to review Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp has been a treat. This was a chance to return to a series I’ve loved for years but thought I might never get to write about again. Though its often cheerful ignorance of conflict’s bloody cost raises a few eyebrows in 2023, it is nevertheless a jewel in Intelligent’s crown, and now in Wayforward’s too.
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