"Like, real war, just more colorful"

You'd think cheerful, cartoon characters and heavily brain-absorbing game just won't cut out together. Like a Gregorian chant won't go along well with anything Hamasaki Ayumi. But here you go, the Advance Wars. If you're so into the game because of the kiddo character sprites and the bright, colorful graphics you once saw in some screenshots, be prepare for bitter disappointment. Nope, no animal sidekick that talks here, no musical adventure a-la Rhapsody, no flying carpets and rains of confetti. We're talking about war here. Real war.

Gameplay
Let's take a brief moment to ignore the graphics for a while, for I shall tell you how thing plays first. This here game you see is a pure war strategy game, with you controlling unit and with your enemy controlling another unit. Each one of you have a Headquarter to guard, and some types of army under command. You've got Troops, Mech (no, unfortunately not a shiny, Gundanium made Japanese robot. Think a better version of Troops with bazooka in the stead of machine gun), Tanks, Medium Tanks, Copters, Submarines, and all the sort of air, land and water war vehicles that I just can't seem to recall being not really a big fan of war thingamajig.

All the logic and plain Rock-Scissor-Paper rule applied over all these troupe: Tank beats Troops, Md Tank beats Tank, Bomber beats Md Tank, Anti-Air beats Bomber, and Troops beat Anti-Air. Like in all beautiful strategy games out there, no unit is actually superior and no other one is inferior. It's just how you place them on the chessboard.

Winning the battle is simple: You can beat the whole units, or you can send a Troop or Mech unit to take enemy's Headquarter. Most battlefields also let you have Factories, Harbors and Airports, each are needed to build new units once you have the money. You get the money by capturing cities, and only Troop or Mech can do that nifty stuff.

There are many features on the battlefield: to put it easy, each unit has its own advantage and sheer weakness. Fighter planes, despite having very wide range and is the strongest one in dogfight, can only do dogfights. It can never attack things on the land or water. Copters, while having the ability to attack anything, is pretty weak against Fighters and Anti-Airs. Common NPC can only carry one Troop/Mech at once, but some type of ship can load virtually anything but water units. That ship, however, needs beach to land the units it's loading before these units can blow stuff up on the land, where they should be.

Another welcome feature is the CO. There are many people you can choose to lead the battle, and these people has a special bar that gradually fills-up so they can show-off their CO Power. This is what makes the game more colorful and RPG-like: the Power varies between COs. It can be healing, power boosting, weather changing and overall, they can be a crucial help that can turn the table all in one turn. Yes, one turn. That's the time a CO Power last. Now hold that frown please, there's actually some sort of deep balancing consideration behind all this, so take the time to simply nod and try to love it.

This game uses turn-based philosophy, so each one of you (between you and computer, or up to four players linked) have a single time to coordinate everything and all your units at once, no real-time strategy allowed. The outcome, of course, is a take-it or leave-it situation, whatever you do, that's what you get. Uh, or maybe, take-it or load-it again, since this game allows you to save the game anytime during the battle (for as long as you still have the turn with you, of course).

The battle goes like this: you move a unit, then decide to attack some enemy. Now the screen will turn into a double window, one shows your unit and another for your enemy. Each unit has a HP range between 0 to 10, and every fresh one has 10. The battle will go automatically, and with all field defense dis/advantages (like, attacking from high places is more effective than on equal land) count, the damage is decided. All unit gone when losing all HP, but you can combine two weak units into one fully-healed unit.

The game itself has many mode to play. First there's this Campaign Mode, the story kind of thing where the game actually has some meat under itself and you've got some curiosity-attracting line that'll give you some reason to play. Or, like they often say, RPG element. It is highly suggested for you to choose the Field Training Mode first; it taught you so many thing about Advance Wars that you shouldn't miss. Once you can beat the Training, then the real war awaits in Campaign Mode.

For those of you who gives no damn about storyline and prefers pure strategy alone (like myself, sometimes), there's the War Room. It holds many maps where you and computer are battling each other for score and War Coins. Yes, War Coins. The shiny round thing. You can use these Coins to buy many other secret like new maps and stuff. Even COs. Collect them and spend them wisely since they're non-refundable and you can only have more by beating another War Room match.

You also have V.S. Mode (if you wanna play a share-GBA battle with your friends that haven't got the console), Link Mode (when you feel like making use of those expensive Link Cable) and Design Map feature where you can get creative and all.

Once you dig into the game further, you'll see how smartly devised the gameplay engine was, and how it actually goes well as a long-lasting game. One should see how the challenge arises, and how the map is designed to be exploited. Truly, they put a lot of work into not only making battle fun, but also frickin' balanced you just won't win by having the most expensive units ready or old hat RPG stuff like that.

Graphics
Now speaking of graphics, this piece of game is excellent. It has brilliant, semi-Japanese-style characters outside the battle, and they wisely avoid the usage of too big sprites (compare: Rayman Advance, Rockman and Forte Advance) in the midst of the war. It's so little pixel they take for the units, but you can easily tell which Bomber is which and which Md Tank is which. While the effect is quite standard (boom! shoot! disappears!), the CO Power event goes kind of refreshing the way summoning Aeons is fun albeit you don't necessarily need them. And ah, we just gotta love the character designs. Gotta love the double-window battle animation. Yet surprisingly enough, we just not gotta catch them all.

Audio
I've heard some negative rants pointing through how this console (not particularly Advance Wars) sounds, and at some points I do agree. You don't get much from this game but the usual ''Boom, shakalaka!'' or ''Du, du, du, time to meet and war again'' kind of theme. Had they could somehow insert the game's Original Soundtracks (which I found surprisingly nice) into the game, things might be a bit different. But ah, I understand. I'm not a big frickin' l33t hardcore player that consider gaming as the only Thing on earth that deserves capital T.

Difficulty
You might hate to hear this, but you're going to put a lot of thinking into the game and piss-poor button mashing habits (like mine, no less) won't help at all. See, although having some certain AI skill that is easy enough to uncover, the enemy is still enemy: They hack and they slash your army like nothing else. These little people inside the cartridge are smart, my friends, let them have none of your attention and pathetic defeat comes after you for certain.

Um, oh yea. Each battle has a Ranking score once beaten. It goes from the worse (maybe E) to S. Uh, that's in the order of: E, D, C, B, A, S and not E, F, G, all the way through S. You can always rush the game and grab some D or C rating, but to get a solid S you've got to be hardcore.

Yes, you hear me. Even the very first maps on War Room will keep you occupied for hours if your aim is perfect Rating. Hours, for your poorly powered Gameboy Advance, mean temporary stop in the middle of battle to recharge batteries. And a stop is enough to destroy your whole concentration. So you need to be real hardcore to do stuff like, recording your gameplay and plots and tactics on paper. Or think of a way to connect your GBA with adaptors. Or heck, just buy a heckuva batteries and use another while recharging some. Your call.

As a last warning though: You might need more than FIVE friggin' hours to beat some of the hardest map on the game perfectly. During that time, you can also write some game reviews, ripping sprites off a game and making animation out of them, writing song lyrics, doing homeworks, working part-time and all. With all being said, after all, maybe you just NEED to be hardcore for better perfection of this game.

Replayability
This being non-RPG and/or side-scrolling game, possibility for wider replayability is high. One thing, you need to beat the game TWICE to get all the secret COs, and that's a lot of time. You need enormous War Coins to get all the maps, and that's a lot of time. You also have all the authority to build maps based on your neighborhood or remote Borneo jungle or Balamb Island (I really made one, where troops from Garden battle against people from Balamb city) or whatever it is in your mind, and that's a lot of time. Replayability is smiling generously upon this game, so stick your cartridge whenever you feel like to, and see new things that'll still surprise you even if this is your n-hundredth hours into the game.

Overall
Advance Wars. It surely will occupy a place in your heart, whether you are a common gamer, battle mastermind or common otaku. Advance Wars has all the charm needed to be, uh, charming: smart gameplay, stand-out graphic and, uh, understandable music. Of course, for some of you people who sort of hate any game on Earth without your idealism embodied in it (that idealism being you are the elitest gamer and thus no other lesser human may be granted with the wonders of videogaming), you will find something you can complain anyway.

Buy it, don't rent. The only way I could think about you for not liking the game (instead of because you're the people I mention just one paragraph above) is that you are lacking time, or you consider games are fun and calculus is better when in need of brain exercise. If that's your case (albeit I doubt so), then rent. And play BishiBashi Special instead.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 10/13/02, Updated 10/13/02