When I first played Advance Wars on the Game Boy Advance, I simply went euphoric at the grid structure, the potential of the strategies and the turn based gameplay similar to rock, paper and scissor, as well as towards playing chess.
It has a war theme playing, although comically making stereotypes of 4 nations, in this case Orange/Red Star resembles the U.S.A., Blue Moon Mother Russia, Green Earth Nazi Germany and Yellow Comet Imperial Japan.
The three main battle fronts you will be fighting on directing your units are by land, by sea and by air. While playing on the various and many maps, you will have to produce units, capture properties, scout out ahead and defeat the enemy either by killing all of the troops, or by capturing their HQ.
What really sealed the deal with Advance Wars are two things; the original sound track and the powers of the commanding officers or CO's. Each nation has CO's that further stereotype particular war elements, and have strengths in various factors, while bringing along memorable and addictive themes.
The powers can range from damaging all enemy units, towards increasing the range of your indirect units, towards capturing properties in 1 turn. All of these powers can be devastating, and depending on the maps you choose, your CO advantages or disadvantages can change.
Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising sees the revenge sequence of the villain Sturm taking a turn, by bringing in his own nation Black Hole in full circle, a futurized army, bringing along the rest of his subordinate CO's named Flak, Lash, Adder and Hawke.
The other nations got new CO's to play with as well, a fiersome new unit called the NeoTank was introduced and that's about it in regards to content. What really changed the most was the balance of the CO tier list, making Black Hole Rising simply a better sequel.
Dual Strike for the Nintendo DS then got along, introducing towards us the radical feature of tagging or combining CO's and their powers, thus allowing for devastating results to happen on maps, making it arguably the most broken title yet. It did not matter, because it was so much fun once again.
A handful of new units such as Piperunners and Ooze units, as well as a new face of Black Hole antagonism made Dual Strike even more interesting, as the graphics had changed in a more pseudo 3D'ish like way. A minor dissapointment is that the tunes of the old CO's had inferior sounds playing.
Finally, and for now, Dark Conflict kicked the old atmosphere of goofy warfare out of the way, and went for a completely different setting, making it darker and more dramatic, as it has the best plot seen yet.
It's my favorite Advance Wars yet so far because it introduced a plethora of new units for all three fronts, it's easily the most balanced one yet and I completely digged this new direction and mood it was bringing out.
All of these four titles also have huge replayability not only because of their notorious difficulties in the later maps, but also because of a map editor being present. First, only 3 maps could be archived, but with the latest title, up to 50 maps could be done the same.
It is now 2015, and Dark Conflict, or Days of Ruin depending on your region got released in 2008, while the Japanese version of that only got recently released in 2013, a most unfortunate move made by Nintendo.
Fire Emblem is more popular in Japan than Famicom Wars, which is why a handful of FE titles have instead been released, and while Awakening's popularity is certainly much welcomed, it seems that Code Name S.T.E.A.M., Intelligent System's new IP, hasn't been critical similarily.
This, alongside the long wait is why Advance Wars should return for either 3DS, the Wii U, or both. Advance Wars is a very strategic and fun game series which could work great with either control schemes, with online functionality such as VS. and map sharing, and it simply has such a charm to it, making it the best multiplayer turn based strategy franchise for me.
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