Why Advance Wars 2 is an ideal comrade to have on the frontlines
Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising (2003)
Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising (2003)
I hate to say it, but I think we may be due another World War. All of the classic signs are there - the population figure is getting too high, meaning there’s millions more wastrels being born every year.
Most unhelpfully, medical science also continues to improve, resulting in less and less deaths from natural causes and disease. Something’s gotta give. Also, and let’s be open here, aren’t teenagers getting just a bit too obnoxious and comfortable with their lives these days? Isn’t it high time we shipped them off to war?
No, of course not. What kind of madman are you, to want to ship minors to hell on earth? Can you really expect kids to lay down their lives for “their” country? Sounds like a glorious, grandiose idea. Even though in practical terms, it means getting torn apart and being left face down in a muddy patch of worthless land.
That piece of land that might be “your" country today. But it’ll go back to being the enemy’s country tomorrow, and that 10-feet patch of land will trade hands every day for the next number of years while the death count rises by thousands each day, another generation snuffed out.
As your desecrated body lays forgotten, abandoned, and buried by rubble and debris, you just have to hope that the generals ate heartily that night. Better still, perhaps your death has brought your side a bee’s dick closer to victory, not that you’ll be around to see it. That’s your best case scenario. But if you were to give your life in vain, only to be on the losing side anyway… it’s too tragic for words.
No, I don’t fancy that, do you? I pay taxes, for heaven’s sake. My country would be asking an awful lot of me here, shipping me off to war. And you know what happens if you say, “lads, I don't feel particularly safe, I’m off”? Your own country shoots you. What?! So much for solidarity, and this whole idea of "we’re all in it together."
And talk about a waste of ammo. See, this is why you should never ask what you can do for your country. You must always treat your nation like an indifferent employer. At every opportunity, you should rip them off and give them nothing extra. Take everything you can from them and give nothing back, that’s my motto.
Really though, if I were drafted into the army, I know what I’d do. I’d pay attention to the training and all that. Pretend I was interested. Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full, sir, that type of thing. Then at the earliest possible opportunity, I’d desert. And even if I was caught immediately, so what? Better to die against my own accursed country’s flag, than face down in a ditch a million miles from home.
There’s no point in taking chances out there. And you needn’t think you’ll survive armed conflict, either. Honestly, how do you think you’d do if you were suddenly transported to the front lines?
It’s a “fun” hypothetical scenario, but what really makes me laugh is when you get people saying they’d do really well, just because they were good at Call of Duty or something. Mate, please, if you and I were transported to the battlefield right now, you can forget about your tactical headset. We’d both be lucky to last five minutes, and we’d be absolutely cacking ourselves for each of those five minutes.
Let us hope we will never be in a global war again - they tend to be murder for investments and share prices, see. We’ll just have to find some other way to thin out the population. A third World War would certainly do it, although let’s face it, multiple wars and conflicts are happening right now anyway.
It takes a hell of a lot of killing to achieve official World War designation, you know. Were you aware that WW1 had around 40 million casualties? And WW2 had closer to 80 million? The figures don’t seem real or imaginable, do they? The Second World War really ramped things up, a big jump ahead of the first World War.
History would repeat itself 60 years later with Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising for Game Boy Advance, though perhaps a more fitting subtitle would have been The Quasi-Nazis Strike Back. You'll know about Godwin's Law, about how Nazis are never far from online discussion - well, they're never far from your mind during Advance Wars 2 either.
When the first Advance Wars game was released, it was and still is a brilliant game of strategy and tactics. Actually, it was our first localised look at the long-established Nintendo Wars franchise, which already had several instalments before the 2000s.
Advance Wars 1 brought the series into the mainstream though, and established several of the series’ characters, conventions and plotlines. The gameplay was fantastic, although if we’re being brutally honest, the story and dialogue were properly childlike, the game balance was all over the place and the unlockables were a real pain.
Advance Wars 2 fixed all of these issues, giving us a sequel that, remarkably, is even better than the first game. The main Campaign takes you on a tour of the four allied countries this time, so you’ll get to give nearly every Commanding Officer a whirl. Whichever CO you pick possesses different passive powers, strengths and weaknesses. They also have a lot of more interesting dialogue and flavour text, typical of Intelligent Systems games around that time - think Fire Emblem, and Paper Mario.
Every CO can charge up their special CO Power, which allows for even more advantage and options. But now, they can wait longer before throwing out a Super CO Power as well. These tend to be pretty devastating and battle-altering, so much so that even I’d be tempted to remain with the troops if my commanding officer could throw a tsunami at the enemy every few days. Anyway, the choice of which Power to save up for adds greatly to the strategy, and it’s a beautiful feeling when your plan all comes together and you finally get to steamroll your enemy.
The power is definitely starting to creep with this game, but it’s not one of those situations where everybody is overpowered and broken beyond belief (that would come later). Steer your attention away from the Campaign, and indeed the unlockable Hard Campaign, and you can then challenge tough maps in the War Room, or create some interesting new maps yourself in the Map Editor.
You’ve got a VS Mode as well, where you can take on AI characters or your pals, and of course you can take turns here by passing the GBA around, if you and your pals are still rolling with Game Boy Advances in this day and age. If you really wanted too, I reckon you could get hundreds of hours out of this game. I’d call Advance Wars 2 a timeless classic.
Finally, though you wouldn’t expect it, pretty much every music theme in the game is sensational. And that’s what a good war needs - a good soundtrack. Vietnam had Creedence and The Rolling Stones. The Gulf War probably had Nirvana and Pearl Jam. The War in Iraq had the Jonas Brothers, I’m led to believe. So what will World War 3 have, I wonder? BTS and Taylor Swift…?
11 October 2024