Introduction

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Advance Wars Wiki (shout-out, I've been pinching their maps for this LP)
Advance Wars Net (used their maps for the AW2 LP)
Wars World News (used their maps for the first few missions of AW1 NC, and for the second half of AW1 AC)
Black Hole HQ (used some of their CO portrait graphics)

Oh hey, Advance Wars 1 this time.
Yep, we're going back to where it all started. Well, okay, no, because there's Famicom Wars and Super Famicom Wars and Game Boy Wars and... okay, start over. We're going back to where it all started assuming you aren't from Japan. Advance Wars was the first Nintendo Wars game released outside of Japan, and it was a massive hit, becoming a killer app for the Game Boy Advance. So far it's been followed by three sequels on the GBA and DS. Sadly there hasn't been an Advance Wars game confirmed for the 3DS yet. It's been about ten years now since the first Advance Wars was released in Europe, so in some ways this is something of an anniversary celebration.

What's Advance Wars, again?
The Advance Wars games are a series of turn-based strategy games developed by Nintendo studio Intelligent Systems (Fire Emblem, Paper Mario, Tetris Attack, WarioWare and others. Turns out they also made Golf for the Game Boy, one of the first games I ever owned. Fun times). Unusually for a war game, the style of the games is cute, bright and light-hearted and kind of at odds with the meat-grindery nature of the missions - Cannon Fodder minus the dark streak, perhaps. Unlike Fire Emblem there are no unique units, pretty much everything is disposable and on many maps you can just keep on churning out replacements for anything that dies. On the plus side, I feel that that this gives the games a greater sense of strategy rather than tactics, as with individual units being pretty frail, you have to think about the bigger picture.

An important aspect of Advance Wars is the CO system: armies are led by Commanding Officers (COs) who bring unique abilities to the game: perhaps they are strong with some units and weak with others, perhaps they have an affinity for certain weather conditions, perhaps they can even tilt the balance of luck in their favour. After dealing and taking (especially taking) enough damage, a CO can then use their CO Power, which can again have a variety of effects: it could boost their pre-existing strengths further, give mass healing to their troops or mass damage to enemy troops, or even let the army under their command attack twice in one turn. CO abilities and powers can easily sway the course of battle, often leading to highly game-breaking situations: you'll be seeing some of those situations soon enough.

What format will this LP take?
This LP comes in two halves: the first half is an exhaustive screenshot LP of Normal Campaign (and, briefly at the start of the LP, Field Training), showing off every mission in the various branching paths of Advance Wars' Campaign Mode and four different CO combinations for the final battle (conveniently called "The Final Battle"). The second half (not actually planned out when I started the LP!) is a semi-blind hybrid LP of Advance Wars' notoriously difficult Advance Campaign, with screenshot summaries complemented by post-commentary videos with guests. The Advance Campaign run also has another set of videos labelled with the letter S, showing off an alternate (and harder!) path through AC, played by my friend Sockerbagarn. Although he also plays semi-blind, Socker's just generally a lot better at videogames than I am, so he's perfectly suited to these harder missions. The goal of his run is to set up the even more notoriously difficult final bonus mission so that I have to play through it (oh boy).

It took me about eight months to LP Normal Campaign. And about three years to LP Advance Campaign. Says it all, really...

Any interactivity?
A little. The awkward thing about AW1 is that CO choices you make directly affect who you get to play with in the final battle. I want to try and show all the branching paths off, but I'll let you guys pick what I tackle first. One thing's for certain, I'm going to have to get used to juggling savestates!

Anyway, that's enough questions for now. Let's do as the title screen suggests and Press Start.

Hey, thanks, it's good to be here.

Now here's an interesting thing about Advance Wars 1 that doesn't happen in the other AW games: it asks you your name. In AW1, you actually get to be a character.

Sorry, no, I'm not calling myself Dongs or whatever

I'm Nell. I'm a CO in the Orange Star Army.

No. Sorry Nell, I'm kind of a veteran here by now.

Oh, I see. In Advance Wars, I give game play and strategy advice in Field Training. This includes explanations of all the game rules, too. If you really don't want to, I can teach you a way to pass through Field Training quickly, but...

I screwed up the screenshot a little here, sorry. I selected No.

Very well, let me explain a few things briefly. There are several different gameplay modes. Vs. Mode for multiplayer battle on one Game Boy Advance. To play Advance Wars on multiple systems, link up with friends and try Link Mode. Then there's Field Training, where I give game and strategy instructions. You must at least clear the final Field Training mission, Fog of War. Once you clear it, other modes will open up for game play.

Move out and good luck!

Darn. Looks like I'm going to have to do some field training either way, even if I say I've played the game before. Oh well, I'm going to adopt a two-pronged strategy here. On the one hand, I'm going to clear Fog of War offscreen and then start out on Campaign. But interleaved with that I'm going to be doing the Field Training missions three at a time. Hopefully this'll be a good way to spread the load out.

So yeah. Let's move out!

The Let's Play Archive

Advance Wars

by Paul.Power, Sockerbagarn

Introduction

Table of Contents