Game:

Advance Wars (2001)

Duration: 28:32

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2

Well! We've graduated! It's time to celebr-- wait, what? Is THAT where we're starting from? This is still WAY within Orange Star borders... man, I guess they really were desperate if it was my graduation exam to clean up the mere tip of the iceberg that Olaf's been driving through this country... yeesh, talk about some ugly stuff. The way Nell made it sound, Olaf had just set Blue Moon forces on a border skirmish, but this goes way beyond "brazen invasion shenanigans" and straight into "welcome new pseudo-Soviet overlords!" territory... (I... is the country at large going to be okay?)

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Mission 1: It's War!

...is it going to be okay with Andy leading our charge? I mean, obviously it WILL, because I'm standing right behind him with the electric cattle prod, making sure every move is the RIGHT move. (Or at least right-ish... or... right-adjacent... or something. Still an improvement!) I'm starting to see why Andy needs supervision and Nell was so keen on explaining things repeatedly while asking whether or not I understood what she had explained once again.

Anyway, as it happens... we're now in the REAL world... of Advance Wars. Things won't be like they were in Field Training! The maps are WAY bigger than one screen or so and the fronts will be more independent and sprawling. CO Powers will be let loose liberally... or at least more liberally by the enemy, because they're based on how big a beating they take. (Just don't let that beating be so severe you lose track of when the power will activate and then YOU take a beating...)

Anyway, from here on out, Olaf will no longer be... intentionally pulling his punches. If you leave something squishy open to one of his pointy units in this grand rock-paper-scissors battlefield, he WILL (probably) attack it properly... unless a tasty APC gets in the way and distracts him. Y'know, things like that.

I'm not completely happy with all the directions this battle took, admittedly riding a little high off the force-fed Olaf steaks Nell served up on a silver platter for me to feel all special for having seared to puzzle-pieced perfection... nothing will ever be quite that simple ever again, just because of the relative scale and size of deployments and the fact that they're... NOT pre-placed just to prove a point about how each unit works in a twelve-step program for unrepentant strategy game fans.

As a result, (re)gaining one's perspective on actual armies and incoming attacks of increasing complexity is a sense one must (re)build with time and experience... so while the fighting is now "real"... it's still not so cutthroat and demanding as to have no room for on-the-job training and self-improvement! (That comes later!)

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You'll also find, now that we're in the actual Campaign and not just learning the ropes as some faceless newbie, that our COs will be vastly chattier and not quite so keen to monologue without consequence or context... Y'know, in case you found it weird that Olaf and Nell were both talking and we could hear everything, but very little actually happened to connect the dots between the various bits of radio drama playing out to no one. (Must be static. You're breaking up!)

We're also acquainted with a whole new victory screen... particularly in how we're rewarded afterwards with... currency? We also get the curious recommendation that we seek out Hachi from the Battle Maps main menu option. Mysterious! ...but overall unrelated to what's going on here and now, so that will have to wait for a another time...

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