Advance Wars
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Advance Wars

Advance Wars is a turn-based strategy video game developed by Intelligent Systems and published by Nintendo for the Game Boy Advance. It is the seventh title in the Wars series of video games, and the first in the Advance Wars sub-series. The game takes place on a fictional continent, where two nations, Orange Star and Blue Moon, have been fighting each other for years. The conflict enters a new stage when an Orange Star commanding officer named Andy is accused of attacking the armies of two other nations, Yellow Comet and Green Earth, without reason, resulting in a worldwide war.

As with previous Wars titles, Advance Wars was not originally intended for release outside Japan, due to Nintendo feeling that Western consumers would not be interested in turn-based games because of their complex mechanics.[citation needed] In order to alleviate this, the developers made the mechanics easy to understand, adding in an in-depth tutorial that did not require players to read the manual. Designer Kentaro Nishimura commented that the game's success shifted Nintendo's attitude over Western tastes [citation needed], and that same success is frequently credited [citation needed] as a driving force for Nintendo bringing another Intelligent Systems franchise, Fire Emblem, outside of Japan beginning with the seventh installment.

Advance Wars was released in North America on September 10, 2001. Its release in Japan and Europe was delayed due to the release date in connections with the September 11 attacks in the United States. Although eventually released in Europe in January 2002, it would not be released in Japan until the Game Boy Wars Advance 1+2 compilation in 2004 alongside its sequel Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising, whose original Japanese release was cancelled. The game received critical acclaim from critics and has been declared as one of the greatest video games ever made. Advance Wars has been re-released for the Wii U Virtual Console simultaneously in Europe and North America on April 3, 2014. On April 21, 2023, the title was remade for the Nintendo Switch alongside its sequel Black Hole Rising in a compilation developed by WayForward titled Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp, which was announced by Nintendo at E3 2021. It was released in America and Europe, but not Japan.

The objective in each mission is to defeat the enemy army. There are two ways to defeat an opponent: destroy every one of the opponent's units on the map, known as routing the enemy, or capture the opponent's headquarters. However, some maps have specific objectives, such as capturing a certain number of cities to claim victory or survive a set number of days. The available modes of play include "Field Training" which offers tutorial missions, a campaign mode which carries the game's storyline, the "War Room" which is a collection of maps on which the player strives for high scores, as well as multiplayer modes and a map design mode. The "Campaign" and "War Room" modes both help to rank the player up (from Rank #100 to Rank #1) and to earn coins to unlock COs and maps in the "Battle Maps" shop. The modes also gives the player an additional rank for effort after winning a battle on that map, which assesses the player's speed, power, and technique in that battle; speed being the number of days spent trying to win the battle, power being how many enemy units were defeated, and technique is the number of the player's units that survived (in percentage).

The battles of Advance Wars are turn-based. Two to four armies, each headed by a CO (commanding officer), take turns building and commanding units on grid-based maps, while attacking enemy units, moving positions, holding ground, or capturing enemy/neutral properties (cities, ports, airports, bases, or HQ).

All units are limited in the types of units they can attack. What dictates a unit's ability to attack different targets are its primary and secondary weapons. For example, the Mech unit has a bazooka that can only be fired at land vehicles, but are more powerful for that purpose than their secondary weapons, machine guns, which Mechs can use against other Mechs, infantry, and helicopters.

Units that can attack do so either directly (can attack adjacent to another unit where standing or moved, but will be counter-attacked by the enemy unit), or indirectly (must remain still to attack, and have an enemy in firing range). The amount of damage done by a unit to an enemy unit in combat comes down to a number of factors: the number of hit points the attacker has, whether they can fire their main weapon (if not, they either cannot attack or will use their secondary weapon instead), the type of unit the attacker and the defender are, and the terrain the enemy unit is on; by contrast, if the enemy unit is directly attacked, the same factors determine the damage done when they counter-attack the attacking unit. The majority of units have main weapons with a limited supply of ammunition, with the amount of ammo depending on the type of unit. Units with secondary weapons will resort to these when their primary weapon's ammunition runs out until they are resupplied.

The terrain on a map affects unit movement, vision, and the defense attribute of units stationed in the terrain. The different types of terrain include: roads, plains, woods, bases, HQs (Headquarters), ports, cities, airports, the sea, reefs, shoals, rivers, and mountains. All units are affected by terrain, except air units, which gain neither an advantage or a disadvantage as a result. Weather conditions, when active, can affect the vision and movement of ground units, while fog of war, when active, can reduce a player's vision, making them depend on individual units' lines of sight, which varies from unit to unit; infantry can expand the vision when in mountains, while woods and reefs cannot be seen into unless a unit is adjacent (next) to it.

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