I love me some Mario, Zelda, Fire Emblem but the games that get me most excited nowadays are the more obscure of Nintendo’s back catalogue. Older series that haven’t had new games in a decade, getting a new chance at life. The Switch gave us this first with Famicom Detective Club and now we are getting to see it once again with Advance Wars 1+2 Re-boot Camp, a remake of the two GBA Nintendo Wars titles with new HD graphics, enhanced music and more – all delivered to us by WayForward Studios of Shantae-fame. Has this series come back in a blaze of glory or is it a battle nobody wanted? Let’s find out.
Let’s start with the positives. Advance Wars is fun. Like really fun. The original was as well, that’s how it found success, and this new entry into the series has managed to keep that feeling and kept me engaged throughout both of its campaigns. The map variety is solid and the multiple different COs that the player can both use and battle against adds a ton of variety. The same map could be tackled from multiple different angles depending on who you are using.
With Grit you could bombard them from a safe distance and ensure the enemy can’t make anything without it immediately taking damage, or if you use Colin you can just flood the enemy with cheap units and overpower them through sheer number alone. There are options here which allow for a lot of replayability in the War Room as you figure out which CO is best for which map in order to earn that coveted S-Rank.
The War Room comes with every map from the first two games and the option to make your own custom maps also returns, allowing for essentially infinite experiences. Add in both local and online multiplayer to the mix and you aren’t likely to run out of content to play. This experience gets doubled when you factor in the addition of rulesets for Advance Wars 1 and 2, which change up the game slightly to match how that game functioned – basically the Advance Wars 2 rule set allowing for Neo Tanks and Super CO powers.
Although this is actually where my first complaint comes in. I think this reboot sticks too closely to the gameplay of the original. For the most part that is fie but where it annoys me is in the little details, like how COs who were introduced in Advance Wars 2 can’t be used in the Advance Wars 1 style. And Clone Andy, the only CO from Advance Wars 1 who never came back, feels absolutely useless here as even in the Advance Wars 2 style he doesn’t have Super CO power, as he never had one in the original. So, he’s just an objectively worse version of Andy, instead of being something interesting.
I kind of wish they had just abandoned the Advance Wars 1 style entirely and just had the, better, Advance Wars 2 ruleset and used that throughout. It would cause less confusions (like some COs powers changed between the two games and it’s easy to forget that when you jump between rulesets) and it would mean tutorials in the second campaign can be removed. Because it’s weird that after beating the entire first story campaign and unlocking the second campaign I am suddenly given the option to have the same tutorials as I had 10+ hours ago. There isn’t a world where the player won’t know the basics of the game by the time, they start campaign two, as they cannot be done out of order, so why even keep that here?
It’s especially odd as WayForward did go out of their way to rewrite the script and even add in animated cutscenes at key story moments, mainly towards the end of each campaign. The developers added to the personalities of the original cast, including more details around their personal stories and history with one another, something greatly appreciated. So why change that but keep in other things that aren’t really needed. It’s an odd choice for sure.
Another change that I didn’t mind personally but I know others did is the visual direction in this game. This is the first game in the Advance Wars series to have 3D models and with widescreen, and the developers decided to use this to lighten the general tone of this war game. The original Advance Wars had an odd tone to it as you watch countless soldiers die in battle while the CO’s laugh it up and treat it like losing a board game. But in Re-boot Camp, the battles are presented as if they are a board game, with the vehicles of mass destruction seeming almost toy-like.
It’s a cute change and I like it, it helps keep the tone of the game consistent, and to accompany this the characters have also had a more light-hearted redesign. The new art style of the game makes the characters look simpler and more cartoon-y, ironically more anime-inspired than their original appearance even though this is the first game made outside of Japan. It’s a style you’d expect to see from WayForward and I personally enjoy it, but this overall tone and style shift isn’t for every fan of the original series. New fans shouldn’t have an issue though, objectively the presentation is very nice.
That said, from a technical standpoint, I did have the game crash on me several times which did suck. Luckily an auto-save feature meant that I didn’t lose out on any progress and having this, instead of manual saves, also meant that save-scumming options have been reduced (although the reset turn option that replaces it can make fog of war maps a joke).
One aspect of the presentation that is an objective improvement across the board is the music. The soundtrack of this game slaps. All the songs from the original game are back and redone with much cleaner and crisper audio. The developers even included music from other games in the Wars franchise to be used in new scenarios like the world map and credits. But that best addition to the soundtrack are the Super CO themes.
In the original game, when players activated their CO powers it would play this one specific theme that was a banger, but played for every character. In re-boot camp this theme is now used for special missions only and for regular missions every CO now gets a more pumped-up remix of their own theme and they are all a bop. Whether it be a club remix of Andy’s theme or giving Sensei’s theme an electro swing, each one adds a new flavour that I greatly appreciated.
Overall, Advance Wars 1+2 Re-boot Camp is an excellent remake of two classic strategy RPGs that can’t decide how faithful a remake it wants to be. While the features it chose to keep are mostly inconsequential to the game’s overall enjoyment, they do make me raise an eyebrow, especially as all the changes Wayforward made to these games do nothing but improve upon it. With Zelda now out and a two month wait until Pikmin 4, Advance Wars is a perfect game to fill the gap, offering great strategy and fun characters that will keep you occupied for weeks.
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