"What is war good for? Quite a lot, apparently..."

''Let's see here...hmmm...according to Tanto's Sliding Scale of Justice, the penalty for not owning Advance Wars is...being tied to a parking meter and slapped repeatedly in the face with a sea bass.'' ~Me, to some guy on LUE asking for an evaluation of his GBA collection during the ''Evaluate my game collection or I'll kick you in the nuts!'' period

Okay, I admit it. I'm an addict. Advance Wars has ruined my life, and I like it.

Playing AW for the first time is like getting your first high off a drug that will someday cause you to keel over in a gutter somewhere. You play it for a while, you learn the rules and complete a few missions...and you're hooked. Just like that. You won't be able to put it down. There are more hooks in this game than in most sporting goods stores. It has virtually unlimited replay value, so it's never over, and it's portable, which means you can't run away from it. Once you have it, you're stuck with it, like AIDS.

I swear, I nearly failed three classes my sophomore year because of this game. Playing AW was always infinitely preferable to doing homework, and it always found its way into my hands during class. I only escaped with my GPA intact due to the inevitable death of batteries.

It has a map editor! And it's portable! I mean, who can argue with that?

At first glance, AW doesn't look like the kind of game that will soon become your overbearing, slave-driving master should you trip the ''On'' switch while it happens to be in your GBA. It's rated E (not that that means anything). It has cute anime characters and stylized weapons of war. For a game about war, it almost seems that the designers chose that medium because they couldn't think of anything cleaner to make the game about.

Don't let it fool you. Just because the game doesn't drive the old ''war is hell'' maxim to its fullest doesn't mean it isn't good. It is good.

And now I get to tell you why.

''I don't know why you still play those turn-based strategy games. Either it's because you don't have any reflexes or because you just can't think fast enough to win.'' ~A bunch of people, more or less

Sigh. If I had a dollar for every time that charge has been leveled against me in the past few years, I'd have enough money to buy...well, a lot of copies of Advance Wars. The reason I don't (usually) play real-time strategy games is because of what I perceive to be some fundamental design flaws in the genre, but when it comes to turn-based strategy, it's all good. And AW possesses that golden attribute among TBS games -- it's easy to learn, but hard to master. That sentence is used so often these days that it's a cliche, but it holds true here. Your units can move a certain amount of spaces during your turn, sometimes less depending on terrain, and if they come within range of enemy units, they can attack with damage being calculated on a rock-paper-scissors basis. You can send your weak little infantry to capture cities, which serve double duty in that they provide money for the construction of new units as well as being defensible territory that you can (slowly) heal damaged units in. Sometimes you'll run out of fuel or ammo, but this happens rarely enough to not even be worth worrying about in most missions. When you're done doing everything you have to do, you end your turn and then your opponent does the same during his turn.

And that's the beauty of it, really. The mechanics of the game are simple, but they're usually all you need. Far too often strategy games increase their complexity just because they can by adding more units, more types of buildings, and just in general more things you can do -- but this comes at the cost of making the learning curve much steeper just for a bit of extra fluff. You have everything you need in AW. In the beginning you'll wish you had more of a variety of units -- because let's face it, compared to some other games AW just doesn't have very many -- but you soon realize that the units are very carefully designed so that each has its own unique function, and adding more would just create unneeded redundancy.

Your units are led by a Commanding Officer, or CO. Each CO has his or her own special attributes. For example, the musclebound Max has lots of strength, so his close-range units, like Tanks and Fighters, are stronger than the average. To counterbalance this, his distance units like Rockets are ass when compared to those of a more moderate CO like Andy. Some of the COs are quite powerful, and others blow, but none of them are dominating or overbalanced. Each CO also has a special ability that can be unleashed when enough units have been destroyed. These powers range from beefing up your own units for a turn to damaging or hindering your opponents', and each feels ''right'' for the CO who uses it. Unlike the individual units, the COs don't operate on a rock-paper-scissors system, so any CO can beat any other if you're good enough.

The COs, while seeming like a minor aspect, add a lot to the game because each has his or her own unique personality, allegiances, and backstories. They add needed flavor to the missions, making them feel more like real battles involving real people instead of simply puzzles to be solved, which can sometimes be the case with the ''floating head'' commanders in other strategy games.

There are tons of levels in this game, which may well be its most alluring attribute. The main one-player game is long, with over twenty missions along branching paths, most of which will require multiple tries to complete. Once you've finished that, you can go back and try to better your score, which is a much more attractive proposition than it seems because you will be playing through again, believe you me, so why not try for a better score? And once you've finished that, you can take on a second, harder version of the main mission, with the odds even more overwhelmingly against you. And once you've finished that, you can try your hand at some of the hundreds of extra maps not part of the main one-player game, and don't even get me started on multiplayer and the basically-unlimited map editor. You will basically never run out of things to do. I've been playing the game for more than a year and a half and I still feel like I've only scratched the surface.

There's only a few charges I can reasonably make against the game, and that is the AI of the computer. It's fine at first, but a player of any intelligence will quickly pick up on a set of ''rules'' that the CPU adheres to almost constantly, and can exploit them. In fact, in many of the later missions, you are so outnumbered that the only way you can possibly beat the CPU is by punishing it whenever it follows one of its predictable patterns. This is annoying as a player gets more skilled at the game, since it means the only way to really up the difficulty is by increasing the CPU's initial advantage until it is overwhelming. However, if the CPU didn't have these flaws, it would be so good (since it's actually very skilled otherwise) that a player just starting the game wouldn't be able to beat it, and that would be incredibly frustrating, so this doesn't really count.

Also, the game feels ''swingy'' sometimes -- since losing a unit means a loss of money and tempo in addition to the usual inconviences, and losing cities means you lose both the money and the healing from that location, when you start losing in Advance Wars, you start losing big. The opponent can simply take all your money and build more forces, and since you lose money, you have less to fight back with. There are almost no ''come-from-behind'' victories in Advance Wars unless you're playing in multiplayer (where politics is much more important), or one player is really careless.

Advance Wars is simply a great game. It's easy to learn, fun to play, and its staggering number of levels and complexity of play will keep any gamer satisfied for a long, long time. It's a reason to get up in the morning. It's a reason to go on living even after your dog dies, your wife leaves you, and you get fired from your job. Advance Wars could easily win the 2004 election against George W. Bush, but it's too pure for politics.

Testify, if thou hast understanding.

Advance Wars. Live it. Love it. Buy it.

Story: 8
Graphics: 9
Gameplay: 10
Value: 10
Overall: 10

And if you didn't see that coming, you need to take a long walk.

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 06/13/03, Updated 06/13/03