Advance Wars’ slick reboot makes 20 years of trouble melt away

polygon.com:

Before the Fire Emblem games claimed the crown as Nintendo’s premier turn-based strategy game, there was Advance Wars. First released stateside at a calamitous moment — on Sept. 10, 2001 —Advance Wars was a continuation of a series born on Nintendo’s Famicom, but it seemed perfectly at home on the then-new Game Boy Advance. The lengthy, turn-based battles were ideal for the pick up, play, and pause nature of the GBA.

But Advance Wars fans haven’t seen a new entry in the series since 2008’s Advance Wars: Days of Ruin, a Nintendo DS game that took the cute, colorful combat of the series in a much darker direction.

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Thanks to Shantae and River City Girls developer WayForward, a new generation of Nintendo fans have a chance to experience Advance Wars in a sleek, remade collection known (somewhat clumsily) as Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp. The Switch duology brings back the charming, cartoony roots of Advance Wars, and delivers the slickest versions of the first two GBA games.

Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp is, like the more popular Fire Emblem games, composed of turn-based battles on grid-based maps, in which players build and command military units across land, sea, and air. Players strategically move infantry, tanks, planes, submarines, and battleships to take control of cities and factories, as