Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp

[OCH]

 

Presentation hiccups?

Already played this for ..a while. I've beaten the Olaf missions and I'm onto Blue Moon's next CO. Apart from the forced* tutorial being obnoxiously patronising, something else has been bugging me already: the visuals. I'm not entirely sure the visual style of the CO's is better than the GBA original sprite work. Some of them are vaguely animated. There is some voice work. But their mouths don't move at all, and only the first word or two of any given dialogue/exchange is spoken. It seems really half-hearted.  Either animate or don't. Give full speech or none. The middle ground here just makes it seem unfinished/cheap. The gameplay however, is as good as it's ever been. But the overall presentation seems disappointingly lacklustre. Hopefully something improves as the game progresses. But we'll have to wait and see at this point.

 

*As the tutorial begins, they ask you if you've played Advance Wars before? The dialogue seemed to acknowledge my "yes", so I thought I'd get to skip the tutorial. Turns out ..not. So I don't know why they asked in the first place?

[OCH]

Mission 8 ..I'm still torn on the aesthetic

 

The in-game engine looks really clean and sharp. The animated work for the CO's however, I'm starting to think looks worse with the introduction of every new character. On the mechanics side, I am being allowed to skip tutorials on new buildings and vehicle deployments now. Maybe this is tied into the earlier question? So far, I've got an S rank on all but one mission. That was an 'A' rank. Speed is one of the criteria you are judged on at mission end. Mine was deemed to be slower than expected? I didn't really see how, but unless S rank throughout unlocks something good later. I doubt I'll come back to it. 

 

Worth noting: Advance Wars 2 is not unlocked from the outset. Whether this is a completion reward or a in-game shop purchase. At the moment, I don't know. I'm not looking up anything online for this. I don't really feel that is necessary. I was very much addicted to this series, back in the GBA days.

[Maryokutai]

Just for the record if anyone is reading this, AW2 is indeed unlocked from the start but you have to manually unveil it and accept a warning message, because they want to block you off from Spoilers. It's a good compromise.

 

I think I know the answer, but do you have NSO @OCH ?

I'd really love to play this against another human at some point. I'm through with the original campaign (not at 100% though) and around midway through AW2, so I'm missing a few CO's, but bar Jessie I have my favourites unlocked for multiplayer.

 

Still two fantastic games btw. Balance in the first game is a bit sketchy at times (Max is completely overpowered, Kid and Sonja are awful), but if you play with the ruleset of the second game there's still very little turn-based strategy on console that can keep up. I hope this did well enough for Nintendo to reconsider bringing the series back, or just doing another Double-Pack remake bundle, though the circumstances around it most likely result in them moving away from it as far as possible.

[OCH]

1 hour ago, Maryokutai said:

I think I know the answer, but do you have NSO

Possibly in answer to your question, I had to look up what that even meant😅

For some of my usual reasons, I'm only on Mission 8 of AW1 (Max first full encounter against Grit). 

1 hour ago, Maryokutai said:

just doing another Double-Pack remake bundle

While I would buy that. There would be a lot of tonal whiplash, pairing Dual Strike and Days of Ruin together. That said, I might even get around to finishing DoR if it were re-released as such.

 

[Maryokutai]

Uh, yeah, when I said Kid I meant Grit. I'm playing this in German for nostalgia reasons. Voice acting is a bit sketchy, I wonder if it's better in English or if it was an afterthought in every language.

[OCH]

12 minutes ago, Maryokutai said:

if it was an afterthought in every language.

Definitely an afterthought in every language, sadly. Ironic given how long the "finished" game had been delayed.

[spatular]

Been playing this a week or 2 and just finished the first game. Have played it before on gba (or maybe a ds) but only got to level 10 or so for whatever reason. I think there were some big difficulty spikes which seemed to require doing exactly the right moves, at the start anyway, but i was mostly enjoying it and positive about it. The last 2 levels were a big slog, took ages and not much fun imo, which sort of shows why i usually play this sort of game on easy mode - played this on the default classic mode, although apparently you can change that mid game. Ending like that im quite down on the game at the moment. Some of the earlier levels could be an hour long and id fail at the end and got a bit annoyed at having to retry a few times on some of the harder ones, but looking back those were alright, were a good challenge and much preferable to the last 2 levels.

 

as the second game i think is supposed to be better ill maybe give it a go, or maybe leave it for a bit, not sure.