Advance Wars

[Dark Jaguar]

So, the upcoming remaster has been all but cancelled, and with good reason.  I don't think Nintendo wants to give the wrong impression.  Let's face facts.  The Advance Wars games are pretty... casual and playful about all these soldiers murdering each other.  More so than any strategy game I've ever played, in fact.  It's almost like they're a bunch of toys.

Anyway, that said because it was cancelled I went and completed my collection of the GBA games myself.  So, I now have Advance Wars 2 and "Advance" Wars Duel Strike (technically, it should have been called DS Wars to match how the rest of the games in the series are named.  I already had the other two.  I'll go ahead and enjoy them at some point, but not right now...

[A Black Falcon]

I don't think it has been cancelled, just delayed "in light of recent world events".  There are always wars though, it's just that this one gets more attention than, say, wars in Africa (which there are several of ongoing, most notably the one in Ethiopia), because this war involves white European nations.  So while I get why they made that decision I don't think I agree with it.  If it ends up being a delay but the game still releases like this year though that's fine.

I will say though, excluding Days of Ruin, the stories in the Advance Wars series always were ... really really stupid.  I mean, I love the gameplay in these games a whole lot, but the stories?  It's basically "how about we have a war for fun".  Sure, eventually there is also war against evil badguys, but before that it's mostly just "war is a fun afternoon exercise!" which is tonally utterly bizarre and wrong.  But I almost always care more about gameplay than story in games.

[Dark Jaguar]

You're absolutely right both about how we only often focus on wars where white people are involved (though admittedly, Russia the now downgraded mere major power is kind of important to pay attention to), and also that the Wars series tends to have very "killing is fun" storylines.  I mentioned that above.  I do love good storytelling in the right kind of game, and Elden Ring is absolutely amazing in that regard, but Wars is a series I play purely for the strategy.

But here's why I say it's cancelled.  This is not a temporary conflict, and it isn't the last.  China is not really Russia's ally for all the pretending both sides do.  China does however have a vested interest in conquering territories of it's own, and thus don't want to call out Russia for doing that.  Yes, the US is guilty of invasions too.  In any event, we're entering the second cold war, and we're going to be seeing a LOT more of these proxy wars between China and the US, and Russia maybe if they can manage after the sheer damage they did to themselves with this failure of an invasion.  There isn't going to be a good time to publish a "isn't war fun?!" game for a good long while, and the game was being developed by a third party (Wayforward) that may prefer to bow out of the project and move onto other things anyway.  So, I'd say there's a good chance this is going to be quietly cancelled altogether.  I'm treating it that way.

[Dark Jaguar]

I was wrong about it being cancelled.  The war is still going on but Nintendo went and released it anyway.

https://kotaku.com/advance-wars-re-boot-...1850395313

And, that may have been a mistake because the major gaming news sites are openly criticizing just how utterly tone-deaf the games are about their own subject matter, making war seem like a fun time for the generals with not a thought spared for the soldiers.

[A Black Falcon]

Yeah, re-releasing a pair of games with the message "war is fun! Isn't bombing people and conquering their cities a nice afternoon entertainment?" message is definitely somewhat questionable.  I mean, that message was bad enough back when the games were new, when I loved Advance Wars 2 (and then AW DS) for its fantastic gameplay, but the story was always problematic.  I don't know what Nintendo could have done to make Advance Wars 1, 2 (and DS) less troublingly "War is happy and fun! Go out and kill your neighbors!", though; that's the core of the plot, after all.  You can't remake those games without that element of them, right?  It was always a bad message but it's what the games are.

With that said, I haven't gotten this collection yet but I probably will eventually, I never did play the original game... but yeah it's definitely a "try to not think about the real-world implications of how horrible these people are if what they were doing is real" situation.  A lot of games are like that, though.  It's not real, just a videogame.  A very good strategy series.  But still, maybe they should have changed something?  I just don't know how to do that without dramatically changing the games...

[Dark Jaguar]

Maybe, DO dramatically change the games?  As an aside, these are more than rereleases now.  They completely redid the game in modern 3D polygon graphics and with much higher quality sound.

Funny thing is, Days of Ruin (The last of the DS Wars games) was a whole new timeline that treated war like war.  Maybe instead of remakes, we should have gotten a new game entirely?

Keep in mind Japan as a whole are still struggling with facing their war crimes during WW2 head on.  Of course the current generation are not the generation that did said war crimes, but not teaching that reality especially with such horrible things as abducted "comfort" women and so on which they still officially deny even happened is not going to help.  Indeed, there's a growing sentiment that they should alter the constitution to allow them to declare war and keep an invading force instead of their purely defensive one.  That constitution was one the allies forced them to sign in the closing of WW2 of course, but it's not a good sign that there's political pressure to undo that and ignore what led to it.

Glass houses mind you.  The U.S. is going through it's own war crime denial phase right the heck now.  It really goes to show that even a cute little strategy game like Advance Wars is inescapably political.