Advance Wars

[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...