Introduction to the Game and Series (Part 1)

Hello everyone and welcome to my beginners intro and guide to Advance Wars: Days of Ruin. My name is Terry Tran and I have played this game for many years of my life. I consider this as part of my childhood and haven't really found anything like it since. I wanted to talk about this game so that others may find enjoyment in it as I have even if its rather old (2008). One can access the game via buying old copies off internet stores like Ebay or emulation apps which runs the game outside of the DS. The future sections of this blog will discuss the game mechanics, at least some units, and other advanced topics. For now, it will be an intro to the series.

Advance Wars is a strategy video game series created by Intelligent Systems for the Nintendo Gameboy,  DS and now Switch. If you are familiar with the series Fire Emblem, then you may recognize the developer. The games in singleplayer are story driven which involve the player completing many levels of varying difficulty using the game mechanics and strategy to advance the narrative. The gameplay is turn based and can be compared to Chess but with way more pieces (called Units generally) and interactions. Each unit has its own distinct strengths and weaknesses to help you execute plans against the AI opponent(s). For example, some units are way better at taking damage while others are much more mobile (will be discussed in detail later on). 

However in this blog, I will be covering only Advance Wars: Days of Ruin (2008) which is one of the 5 games of the series so far (though some things that I cover may apply to all in some contexts). Days of Ruin is a spinoff of the main series which takes a more serious approach to its story by dropping the player into a post apocalyptic world where they work with or against the remnants of civilization as a military unit trying to survive. In contrast to the previous games where the setting is much more comedic, has more vibrant color to the art and does not involve an apocalytpic environment. You do not necessarily play as a single protagonist. Rather, you are a voyeur to a cast of characters' story and control their units in-game "as them". Each character has a distinct soundtrack that represents their turn in the game and brings their own strategic benefits. For example: vision, movement, attack, defense and so on. Those will be clearer when we get to the section on mechanics which is coming up in the next blog so stay tuned.