Intelligent Systems or any other company with knowledge on turn-based strategy games should have been the ones making the remake. Not to bash Wayforward here but they're more known for their platformers than anything. Advance Wars is an extremely niche franchise and the right devs were needed in order to make a product to make the community happy and want to share the game with people who have never played it before.
Remember what Intelligent System has said about this topic. They weren't interested in returing to this franchise without reinventing it some way. And one of the things they were entertaining was the relationship mechanics from Fire Emblem. I honestly dread what IS would do if they took an interest in AW again. Because it certainly isn't going to be a simple remake with all the mechanics we trust.
@@slumburger1145 The thing is Fire Emblem gameplay design declined with the increased focus on relationships and that's a franchise that already had some mechanics for it in place. I can't see good things for it being stitched onto Advance Wars. If anything, I worry they change it so much that it no longer resembles AW anymore and it ends up being better off as a spin-off (like Battalion Wars).
The problem with remakes/reboots is that they're generally only done once. If someone has the idea of remaking Advance Wars, "It's already been done." It's a huge shame.
The characters aesthetics really managed to capture the 20 year old newgrounds amateur fangame look, while the units got the mobile shovelware one. Impressive.
@@DeadEndScreamer Honestly. Between the crappy CO art and the soldiers that now make it look like it's taking place in the Gocha Force universe, where kids battle with toy robots......there's NO charm like the original had in spades. Hell. AWDS is STILL the goat. AWBW also helped kill this, as people who were already into the game already had a free alternative that retained the art of the original, yet kept the multiplayer in a style more like Wargroove where you could take a day or two to make your moves, really think things out, or play it more actively. Either was possible and again, FREEEEEE.
@@flashbackfrank8781 I wanted to see more *_Aesthetic_* in regards to the factions, Black Hole was the only one who nailed the fucking vibe while the others in the reboot look like a typical Cartoon Network Korean Cartoon show dubbed in English (seriously the had a ton of those back then). I wanted there to be less bouncy happy go lucky and more on actual emphasis on the battle movement and style. What I mean by the last part is that, if we were to take a look at AW 1 and 2, movement wise the soldiers look like they're moving position and setting up fire paired with that serious look and grittiness of the pixels, meanwhile in Reboot Camp it's all just very bouncy movements and the metal looked more like plastic than actually sheet metal. I wanted the vehicles and models to atleast have like a more remastered version like as if they were retouched since, in general, the models already looked fine, the uniforms and weapons looked very sick with the pixelated stuff aswell as the vehicles (although the megatanks and that spherical wheeled tank could use abit more stylization for the nations.) Also also, I wanted the themes of the factions to be more clear i.e Orange Star having U.S Mil, Blue Moon Soviet, Yellow/Gold Comet Japanese, and Green Earth being German, I wanted it to be clear in the units themselves. TL;DR The only faction that looked good in the remaster was Black Hole and the plastic-like graphics make the game less about war and more on selling toys. Rant: Seriously, I preferred Collin's Advance Wars 2 Sprite over his Reboot, he looks like he just wants to get over it with his loose fitting uniform and with the power of bougie money, I also imagined his voice to be abit more....relaxed so to say or reserved.
The fact that they didn't fix Drake's Dilemma was weird. No Black Hole naval units, APCs still don't refuel, and that airport at the top of the map goes completely ignored.
Seeing Barbaric Blow *slowly* buff the troops really took all the cool out of it. If the buffs had been at the same speed as the original it would of been pretty cool.
I was struck by that- they cut to him for about the same amount of time, but in the original, it feels like a flurry, living up to the name "barbaric", while the new version feels like it's counting them- like they wanted you to see each individual unit. It's too long for the animation and effect to feel like one motion. I think they should have kept it quick, of course, but maybe also laid part of the animation over the map during the effect. But the most frustrating part of all of this is that "would've" is a contraction of "would" and "have", not "of".
You know the funny part about CO Power animation comparisons? In this remake they "technically" made Winter Fury, Squall/Typhoon, and Black Wave/Storm faster than the original since instead of it counting every enemy unit it just does it all at once instantly...with one exception... If there's like less than 10 enemy units on the field, then I would say that the original would be faster since it has less to count to beat the remake in finishing it's animation; anything higher than 10 units the remake will beat the original in finishing the animation every time. Of course, it's the global damage CO Powers that gets this treatment.
Man, I thought they took too long in AW2, at least over large maps going back and forth back and forth With just the right sound, like that thud-crunch in Reboot, played at the original speed would have sounded like an avalanche. Missed epicness. Hearing the original again, sounds like the boost up sound effect isn't even played for every unit, so it finishes faster so you get to using the power sooner.
I still don't think WayForward was the right choice. You're getting a company mainly known for Shantae, a game series with fluid and expressive character designs and animation, to remake games where most of the animations are vehicles shooting at each other. I mean, yeah, the CO power animations and most of the CO designs look good, but that's a really small part of the game, and I'd argue that WF was wasted on it.
Took the words out of my mouth. I looove WayForward but they have niche and AW was always far outside their wheelhouse. The toy box aesthetic works for many franchises but AW is one where it feels wildly out of place.
@@GabeSweetManeh? I mean the original AW had a very similar aesthetic, to the point where one of the most popular AW reviews on UA-cam praises the game for 'looking like a kid playing with his toys' and adomished every game past the first for 'making it too realistic' Not saying I agree with their overall thoughts but AW has always had a more cartoony and toy-like art style ever since the first game. The problem was just the way they decided to go about emulating that style by making everything monocolor and blocky.
@@Yuni-is-Schrodingers-Fox The soldiers, sure but the vehicles were always deliberately angular and rendered in official art to be more mechanical and realistic in the same way a scale model of a tank or plane would be. It has a toy-like quality, but the intent is to mimic the real thing as closely as possible. I guess saying "Toybox" is too broad a descriptor. I'll specify and say the "Fisher Price" aesthetic is awful. Rounded corners and shiny plastic. Like Mangs said, I literally confused units constantly due to their visual similarities. The intended style is akin to putting Lego men into your grandpa's 1/60 scale model of a B-52 Bomber. Yes, both are "toys" but the intent of their design is very different.
Let's not forget that 26 years ago Super Famicom Wars had MULTIPLE AIs with different behaviors for each CO which behaved somewhat smartly with animations for the CO thinking and acting.
I'm a graphics software engineer for video games and VR, so I wanted to add some insight into why the graphics are so bad. Tl;dr: the graphics were probably not intentional. It looks like they used basic graphics that any beginner uses as a placeholder in a game engine like Unity, likely ran out of time, and just kept the bad graphics. The biggest thing is the lighting and textures on the models. They didn't use a toybox aesthetic as much as they just made initial models with placeholder textures and basic lighting with no more advanced rendering techniques nor post-processing effects. The graphics look like simple models that game devs use to get base functionality working, like they just dragged and dropped a tank model into a Unity scene, colored everything red, or blue, or whatever, and set up one point light at the top to represent the sun. Making something look like a toy is not as easy as it seems. They could have fixed this by making the textures, well... textured. They could have tried to make the toys look like painted or colored metal by adding some small blemishes, slight variation in the color, i.e. not a flat paint job, but some parts slightly darker or splotchier than others. And if they chose metal, they could have used brushed metal that has striations that reflect light slightly differently. Moreover, they could have made the toys look well used. Slight scratches, paint chips missing, small parts broken off, etc. There is a technique called bump mapping where you can take a polygonal mesh with flat sides and still make it look bumpy by using images of bumpy surfaces in a certain way during lighting calculations, while still keeping the surface flat under the hood. This improves realism while keeping the models simple. With regards to lighting, they basically blew out the scene with bright light and didn't add any shadows, sun rays, reflections, ambient light from light bouncing off diffuse surfaces and subtly lighting other parts of models that would otherwise be in shadow, angling the sunlight to cast long shadows on the models as if it were sunset, doing some advanced rendering to mimic pink and orange shadows on clouds when the sun hits them at the right angle. Likewise, the plains tiles are basically solid green. They could have made a slight grass swaying effect; same with the trees on forest tiles. Lastly, they didn't need the grid lines. Those just made it look really cheap, clutter the composition, kill the realism of the terrain, and plus, they are just straight grey lines. At least make them more subtle and part of the terrain.
@@robertharris6092 Nah, other Switch games have great graphics. In order to have a high framerate though, you have to put time into making sure you properly utilize the resources you do have, and you also need talented and experienced engineers to pull it off. A great example of this is the first Crash Bandicoot for the PlayStation. Basically, the developers at Naughty Dog discovered that a whole bunch of memory wasn't being used in a part of the console that was for system operations (making the PlayStation operate, read and write data into memory, read different parts of the game disc, etc.), so they essentially hacked the console in a way to use that leftover operating system memory to store way more texture and mesh data than they should have been able to. The graphics on that game were way better than any of its contemporaries.
@@sebastianlucas704 Coding always takes way more time than even the engineers anticipate. There are almost always significant bugs, and those bugs get harder to diagnose the larger the scale and highly funded the project is. Also, as Mangs discussed, it seems like the team was poorly managed. They didn't focus on things they should have, they probably wasted a bunch of time, there was probably some corruption and leadership was giving themselves bonuses rather than hiring good employees who demand higher salaries, they probably laid a bunch of engineers off and overworked the remaining employees to save money, there was probably a lot of crunch time where employees get burnt out and can't work properly. There are all kinds of reasons. The game industry can be a real mess.
I didn’t care that it was delayed. I didn’t care that the art style was changed. I didn’t care that some of the music didn’t translate as well imo. All I wanted was to play Advance Wars, on real hardware, in multiplayer against other real human beings. I never had the opportunity to link up and play with friends on the original aw2. I thought this was going to be a breakthrough. I wanted to play against people online and show my skills as a player. Words cannot describe how disappointed I was regarding this game’s frustratingly strict online capabilities. Stupidly small map sizes, only 1v1 matches, only people on your Friends lists, no random/quick match making, no ranking system, no global tournaments or leaderboards, no replay saver, and no way to long play. This. This is what killed the excitement I had for this game. The fact that you have to use discord or other outside communication methods to literally arrange matches is nothing like I imagined.
This is what killed it for me as well, the rest of the game is fine but I think it is stupid a game like this in this age does not have a good online multiplayer
I’ve never played the Advance Wars series before, nor have I ever come across any fans of it in the wild. I kept waiting on this game to release and seeing it got a shadow-drop after a 2 year delay makes so much sense as to why I never saw any reviews or sales or anything. This randomly recommended video was a complete surprise to me for many reasons
It was popular on the GBA. However it came out at exactly the right time. SRPGs were few and far between, you'd literally get 1-2 every 3 years or so. Disgaea 1 sold like crazy for the simple reason that it was decent enough and there was no competetion whatsoever.
@@rook1196 Okay. Didn’t think it was that popular, but I did see that it got quite a few sequels. Same with Disgaea. It seems like that series has been putting out a new game every year (including spin-offs and remakes) but I have never heard a single person talk about them either. Not once.
@@dyll_pyckle ADV wars was a must have on the GBA, and got a lot of good press but never kept its momentum. ADV wars selling point was it was fresh and new at the time and ADV wars 2 just felt like more of the same. Disgaea 1 sold over 1M in the west, just scratched that anime/SRPG niche that was so neglected in the PS2 era (today not the case). It keeps getting sequels just bc they pump them out cheap but they are lucky to sell 1/10th of the 1st one these days.
I didn't even know it was delayed or came out. The way they handled everything after the Ukraine War broke out honestly strangled this game in the crib.
Wow I had no idea the artistic direction was so drastically different in the remake. As an illustrator myself, I think it maybe needed a different line weight to help distinguish the troops. A cell shading effect could've helped them "pop" better
As someone who's worked in Unity, getting decent cel shading on 3d models like these isn't easy, and takes more expertise than WayForward has. There are premade cel shading models out there but having tried them, believe me, it wouldn't have been an improvement.
@@BritBox777 Okay? What was lost in then last two decades? Because we had tons of gorgeous cel-shaded games in the early 2000s. Did they just… deal with it? Or did standard definition help the effect?
Because most of those used proprietary graphics engines and shaders. Not something less experienced devs have / would know how to make. Look up Bomb Rush Cyberfunk that came out a couple years ago, that was Unity, and looks gorgeous cel shaded. Because the devs are damn good at their job @@DijaVlogsGames
@iytdominotik they are decent. OP talks about their forte which are metroidvanias and other action platformers/beatem ups. So they haven't experience to create their tactical games, not even talking about revival of existing franchise.
No, they are actually a pretty decent developer. They are mainly known for the Shantae Half Genie games which is a series of beautiful 2d platformers. I'm just assuming the knowledge/experience gained from make 2d platformers does not transfer well to working on a turn based strategy game. A simple case of choosing the wrong people for the job.@iytdominotik
Something else that wasn't mentioned could be that it was sold for the $60 pricepoint which is understandable but a lot of remakes even if they're high effort like Reboot Camp was tend to go a little lower in their price. Just to use examples on the Switch: the upcoming Mario vs. Donkey Kong remake is selling at $50, the Live a Live remake is $50, Trials of Mana is $50, Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town is $40. These are all fairly high-development remakes that aren't asking for $60. Admittedly it's not uncommon for remakes to sell for full price but I think it does impact their overall sales figures and can't help but feel that if WayForward bumped the price down that it would have been easier to sell more copies. Prices set expectations.
@@nebulastar2130 Then you remember Crash and Spyro trilogy remakes, both priced at 40, and both have 3 fully remade games from scratch with much better graphics, animation and even some extra content. This honestly looks more like a lazy job hoping to cash in the nostalgia. Didn't seem to have worked though.
@@EWOODJ You could play any map + costom map with a friend online And it had good voice chat. Unlike the voice chat on the ds pokemon games you had to hold down Y for the mic to turn on. I played a lot of days of ruin with a cousin online and we talked online. The random online was basically trash in terms of feature but with friends it had everything you would want except saving the match in case of a disconnect.
"They didn't think multiplayer was important" In an Advance Wars game?! It's the soul of the game! Did the developers not even understand the franchise they were working with?
@@jj48 you could even play multiplayer in real time whit 2 DS connected side by side, or play on the same DS taking turn I remember loving playing that real time game mode Nintendo mentality was all about multiplayer / family / friends Like Wii or switch philosophy
the fact that Sturm could crash the game is pretty funny when I watched your videos especially the ones that mention how powerful Sturm his powers are now transitioning from the game into our world
I'd have bought the game regardless of what the issues, player count, whatever. If it came out on PC. I don't own a switch: there's literally one game on the Switch that I care about, and it's Advance Wars: Reboot Camp
@@alphamaccao5224 I mostly play tactical shooters, simulation games, and the like. Advance Wars carries a lot of nostalgia for me because I used to play Dual Strike as a kid. That's literally it.
12:28 if I had to take a guess, the programmer is doing something like putting a bunch of possible choices into an array but there’s so many choices he’s either overflowing it or making it too big from the outset and violating the stack. Source: I’m an embedded engineer so doing stupid stuff with memory is my job.
The thing is that with the Switch, they should have plenty of memory for things like this. I can only assume that they're allocating some dynamic memory, but then breaking those bounds, which is pretty amateur hour coding for something like this. Especially on a turn based game where speed isn't the most important thing.
Given how his Meteor works, I can only assume it's considering EVERY SINGLE POSSIBLE position it could strike. Not just on the opponent units, on the entire map
100% with you on the unit readability. One of the real standout but overlooked features of the older AV games, and one of the main reasons I never got into Wargroove. It really is a shame how badly they bungled things, and the effects that'll have going forwards.
What issue do you have with unit readability in Wargroove? I don't have enough experience in Advance Wars to say whether it's better or worse, but I certainly haven't had issues in Wargroove.
@@DanSutherland I can of course only speak for myself in this. My issues with readability in Wargroove came mostly from three factors. First, a lot of the sprite art overflows into neighboring tiles, leading to muddied outlines and hidden elements. Compare assets1.ignimgs.com/thumbs/userUploaded/2019/1/17/wargroovethumb-1547738997250.jpg?width=1280 to images.nintendolife.com/screenshots/57199/large.jpg . The WG Trebuchet is partially obscured by the HP counter, several units have parts covered by trees, and if there was someone behind the big yellow dude you'd barely be able to see them. In AW they strictly keep to their squares. This doesn't prevent being able to figure out what unit is what, but it _does_ make it slower and harder, especially at a glance. Secondly I had difficulties telling some units apart from one another in WG, like the archer and the cleric(?) guy in the pic above. They _are_ distinct, but share enough large features that it required me to take a closer look a lot of the time to make sure if it was one or the other. In an unfortunate way this comes from WG's more detailed art, the AW art is almost brutally simple and every unit is _significantly_ distinct from one another. The closest two would be the tank and medium tank, and the sheer bulk sets them very much apart. In that way the neotank is a genius design in that it's _completely_ different from everything else. My standouts would be the infantry and mech, where you can tell both are foot soldiers but the weapon (especially for the mech) is so prominent it's instantly obvious which it is. Hell, the mech's bazooka is the same size as the _medium tank cannon_. Third, I never quite got a hold of what unit did what in WG. Some were obvious (spears vs cavalry and in tight quarters), others I'd get wrong over and over, and it often wasn't apparent to me what a unit would do from its artwork. AW is again brutally straightforward in this. Rifle/MG is good vs infantry and little else, cannons are for vehicles, upward slanted weapons are either AA (shooting up) or ranged. As a result of those, coming from Advance Wars and being used to be able to tell the shape of the battlefield almost instantly at a glance, and having had a really easy time understanding what did what just from presentation back in the day, it always felt somewhat grating in Wargroove when I'd look over the field sometimes several times and still miss things or confuse what the situation was. It certainly didn't make the game unplayable, but along with other factors (I didn't like the writing, the controls I didn't find ideal and couldn't rebind, and I didn't like how the commanders worked) meant I put it down and went back to AW again for all that I do think it did some pretty neat things. Some of those 'issues' are probably inherent to a fantasy setting over a simplistic comical 'modern' wargame, though Fire Emblem has generally seemed to pull it off fairly well.
I know it was only a sideline pitch but Im really looking forward to the AI vs AI Video. Are you going to do it on both games (reboot/awbw) one match or two matches on AWBW while only copying the moves?
@mangs1337 were can i contact you? i am not a developer but i do have an idea for a wars game, in fact i made a table top game. it is inspired in the damage output from the Days of ruin, but its battle mechanic is solid.
You probably already know it but talking about indie game inspired by AW there's Warside coming out in the future. Not sure how much it differs but just to point it out
The deciding factor for us was its lack of save feature on the local versus mode. We never played it again. We had spent 3 hours the first day and had to come back to it for another 2 hours to finish it with 3 players. Also the lack of selectable options until you unlock them again from the campaign was also annoying. All we wanted was to play it local with other friends.
What makes it rather dumbfounding was the bugs regarding the Meteor Crash. I could accept inexperience in certain aspects, but what particularly seemed inexcusable even back with the streams is the fact that after 2 delays, the game pretty much crashing out of the blue was particularly bad. If the game had been released after the first delay, it could have been chalked down upon "we are working with patches". Still silly a mistake like that could happen, but the fact the second delay was caused by geopolitics rather than any technical aspect and still left the memory overflow intact was just downright insane.
For me they didnt add substantial new content to hook me back in. I will always see advance wars ds as being the best one. Also the one i put the most hrs in
The music was pretty bangin' though. Sensei's and Drake's themes were 2 of my fave themes. I didn't buy the game though because I don't believe in buying remakes of even games I love without new GAME content.
I played DS a lot and still do since I can save VS matches to continue later unlike in Reboot Camp. Outside of Campaign though, I’m not a fan of the dual COs, being able to get 2 full turns, maybe 3 in the case of also having Eagle. Is a bit busted- But you have the option for just 1 CO in Vs matches so that’s good.
I noticed something particular about the tanks in the old Advance Wars games. The cannons on the medium tank and light tank extends and retracts at different times. When the medium tank cannon extends, the light tank cannon retracts(6:45).
A thing I learned a lot of time ago, don't make your turn based combat slow, it's very boring. Besides that I basically forgot this game was going to come out after the first delay.
One positive thing that came from the remake was that it made people look into the games, just from the trailers alone. I should know because I was one of them. I would probably not have played AW at all of it wasn't for the reboot announcements. Also we goth gf Lash which validates the reboot completely, fite me.
Compaire Fuga Melodies of steel to Advance wars remake. An sure Fuga may seem limited and was a lose to cyber connect. Mostly because, Bandai namco is major a holes for game devs. But, if you copaire Fuga to Advance wars. As much of a money lose Fuga was. Fuga has better reviews and a tight controll gameplay with extras. As much as fans would love solatrobo to make a return. Bandai is a major d--k. But, you can see passion in Fuga unlike Adavance wars. To the point you can see new art based on tail concerto and other cyber connect 2 games. Which is something Advance wars lacks.
I wish they remade days of ruin as it was so much fun with deployable commanders and a lot better unit balance. The maps also looked a lot more amazing with different climates.
@@Slaanash Dude I would murder for a 1:1 remastered soundtrack of Days of Ruin, the songs are amazing, but the heavily compressed sound makes them feel like wasted potential
I have to agree a lot with this. Days of ruin was also the introduction of a lot of fans like myself. For me, the artstyle is what stuck out the most for me to pick it up Still is my personal favorite of the series as well
What sucks about coming across content like this is discovering how much better it not only could have been, but how much better it SHOULD have been. I’m a new player and started with reboot camp and absolutely adore it. I’m glad it introduced me to the series, just wish it was as beloved as it could have been
Mind as well just go back and play the originals. You can get them for free and even play them on your phone. And theres the later 2 games as well. The 4th game in particular beingcamIng but very different from the rest.
It feels like they purposefully set it up to fail to shut us up about the franchise. I can only hope if they ever dig up my beloved Golden Sun they do it with some pride and integrity.
For me, it was the fact that tanks vs. medium tanks are so difficult to tell apart sometimes. Like you showed with the classic graphics, medium tanks took up significantly more space on the tile than regular tanks, but with the reboot graphics, they are much more similar. I may be able to see a larger turret base or by paying attention to the projected damage numbers closer but if you don't have a medium tank and tank of the same enemy team side by side, this becomes even harder. Funny how the neat detail of the different armies having different designs for their vehicles, uniforms, etc, comes back to bite you here in a lot of ways. Iirc with Yellow Comet tanks/md tanks you're screwed trying to tell them apart. EDIT: After reviewing the unit designs, I can see that Blue Moon and Yellow Comet have more distinct tanks vs. md tanks compared to other armies. I have a memory of playing through the campaign of AW1 and having a problem telling enemy tanks as well as my own apart, but upon my revisit, I found that the most troubling similarity was with Orange Star. Perhaps I've a flawed memory but I distinctly remember struggles with enemy units and telling them apart, but this also could juat be my experience with the visuals of the rebootcamp being more fleshed out now.
This is an important issue, glance value in strategy games is VERY important. If you have to pay attention to the map to distinguish two units in two separate tiers, you might as well end up reading a text report
It's the silhouettes. Silhouette fail. Like those Black Hole airplanes. The colors are not sufficient, and are used for telling owners apart which is entirely different. Although I'm not sure yellow comet tanks are hard to tell apart, since the md tanks have armor plates covering their treads.
What are you guys talking about? Yellow Comet has the most differences between Tanks and Medium Tanks of any country. They're both uniformly yellow, but the design is based on actual period tanks and are very different.
@Pink.andahalf I re-examined the units, and I agree with you. I still have a problem with unit distinction, but it seems I remembered the wrong army having this problem to the extent I was having.
They delayed it for like an entire year for the dumbest reason possible not long before it was supposed to launch. The game then vanished into thin air. They didn't just kill any hype the game had, they went back in time and erased any hype from ever occurring whatsoever.
They tried to Chibi a game that was way more anime than they thought Like, they needed anime for AW Like, compare the Sonja theme with its original, and her design, they feel completely different Like, they made her feel a special girl and not an inocent girl that wished for peace and had to defend people Also, the redesigns destroyed a lot of the power of the characters Like, Max looks fat, Lash looks less crazy and Hawke looks less intimidating
For sales data, I think the best way to estimate the amount of sales would be using the UK physical copies sold data since that data is reported every week. With a quick google search I was only able to find relative rankings, but even that can be used to create a rough estimate. Based on a quick and dirty comparison with the Metroid Prime remasters sales, I think the estimate of Advance Wars selling around 400k copies could roughly be correct. The week of its release, Advance Wars was in third for boxed releases. But this dropped quickly, second week it dropped to rank 17, third week was 31 and the fourth week ended with rank 38. So most of its sales were only in the first week. Yet the sales in this first week was not enough to reach the top 10 sales of April. Metroid Prime remastered had the physical version released in the beginning of the month before. In this full month of sales, it managed to reach 9th in the monthly ranking of physical sales in the UK. It was reported in its first week that it sold half of the original sales. I was only able to find how much the OG sold in its first week in the USA, so I corrected that number by 20% since the UK market is roughly 1/5 of the USA market. So this means that the remaster sold 25000 copies in the first week. It had a 79% fall in sales in its second week but had a sales rise 24% in its third week. This means it sold 25000+5250+6510=36760 copies in its first 3 weeks of sales. The only data I could find for the fourth week was that it dropped out of the top 10, so it sold most of its physical copies in the first three weeks. This means roughly 40000 physical copies is enough to get in the top 10 monthly sales ranking in the UK, which Advance Wars was unable to reach in the week it sold the most copies. The first week of Advance Wars was definitely worse than what Metroid Prime remaster sold in in March. And since Advance Wars had a sharp drop every week after, I don't expect the overall sales to surpass the March Metroid Prime remaster sales. (As a side not, the 40000 number is not that important, since it is only used here establish that Advance Wars sold less than Metroid Prime remaster. You could make the UK market any x% of the USA market and still reach the same conclusion) The nice thing is that the Nintendo earning reports showed the total amount Metroid Prime remaster sold globally at the end of March, which you can use to extrapolate the upper limit of what Advance Wars sold (assuming that the distribution of sales across the world did not differ between the two games). Metroid Prime remaster sold 1090000 digital and physical copies. While the physical copies were only available for Match, the digital version of Metroid Prime was released a month earlier. This makes it difficult to estimate the sales for March only. Best case for Advance wars is that the sales in the two months was equal, which means that the number of physical and digital copies Advance wars sold is less than 545k. But for most games, the majority of sales are made in the first week. Tears of the Kingdom sold 10 million in its first week, but "only" sold 8.1 million more as of June 30th. So I expect the upper limit of 545k to be even lower. Of course all this is based on assumptions build upon assumptions, but the accuracy could be improved by adding more games to compare Advance Wars to. For example, Dead Island 2 released the same week, was first in the weekly ranking and second in the sales of April, and was reported to have sold 1 million in its first three days. Games that released earlier and had stable positions in the top 10 every week could also be used to narrow down the estimate by using their first week sales and the changes per week.
As someone who works retail in the UK, Nintendo games outside of their flagship series like Mario, Zelda, Pokemon etc. really don't sell well in boxed copies. We don't have the immense Nintendo fanbases of the USA who buy every new game. Stores also don't stock many copies and don't give them much shelf space as a consequence.
Everything said here I share the same sentiment on the game. Its a shame it turned out this way, but for what its worth, your content gave a lot of people great joy during the hype phase of the reboot and still continue to do so. While the Reboot Camp may not have delivered the results we desired, you still gave us passionate and enthusiastic content about one of your most beloved franchises. So thank you for all you do Mangs, I know it must've been difficult to make this video but all of this needs to be said from one of the most passionate creators I know
Remember when Call of Duty delayed literally any release over a real life war? Yeah, me neither. And that series has the fandom to afford it. Delaying Advance Wars for years is like doing that with an Ogre Battle sequel. You’re done
Sincerely the 3D graphics made me put a step back (they look like a fake phone game) and the fact that Dual Strike was not included was another point in not to buy it. I love Advance Wars I’m still playing sometimes with my friends with Dual Strike. Yes maybe the DS version may be broken compared to others but casually is amazingly fun.
I totally agree with the graphics part! So many times with foreign armies I couldn't tell between tanks and recons since the designs were so strange and inconsistent. It was nice to play through reboot but by the end I had a totally new appreciation for the OG graphics and soundtrack. Both have aged phenomenally well compared to the new release
No multiplayer. Literally everything else could have been excused if they had just added a matchmaking function and a leaderboard. Honestly, I haven't even played 2 hours of the game because of how much it killed my hype.
This was my first experience with Advanced Wars. I play Fire Emblem religiously, and the similar looking combat looked fun. Fire Emblem with tanks was a heck yes. I thought it was a fun time, but it wasn't hard to tell there was something off in certain places. I'm almost finished with the second campaign, and feel like it's something I could play again. Maybe I should find a *completely legal* copy of the original release and see how that one feels just for fun
I guess I’m just weird, because I actually like the graphics and animations of the game. The plastic, toy-like looks of the units stand out and make it look unique compared to other games, and still fits the series sort of light take on war. I don’t think they compare to the original graphics, which are timeless, but I don’t think they’re bad or awful.
Yes, of course it would be great if it weren't the laziest plastic appearance I've ever seen, it's not even the style they want to aim for, it's the maximum lowness that I haven't seen since Pokemon. Ugly models, ugly textures, ugly animations, the only thing that was saved were the OJ animations because thank God they didn't make them in 3D because I don't even want to imagine what they would look like with that apathetic style. I was happy that they "revived" the franchise, but as soon as I saw that I knew that they only took it out to try to throw a bait and make them fall like in Pokémon that they buy regardless of the quality. On the one hand it makes me happy that it's screwed, but on the other that will only make them not make more games and we will only have Wargroove... God, the section is fine but the mechanics are chaos
Just to be clear, I don't think anybody wants the visuals to look like most other games. I sure don't want more generic realism at all. Way too much of that already. I just don't want the units to look like cheap plastic either. Think of the original 2d sprites, which are both very cartoony and NOT plastic looking either. No reason the new 3d versions couldn't have done the same.
@@LuisMendez-ru7nj What about the animations are ugly to you? They look fine to me. I like the way the tanks recoil after firing, and the way infantry trudge across the rivers and mountainsides. I mean, the classic graphics never struck me as a particularly gritty, high realism game either. Days of Ruin is what happens when there’s no cartoonish aesthetics. I WILL admit that they perhaps could have had more shades of color for the units instead of monochrome
@@AtillaTheFun1337 The character animations aren't really animated they're using that technique where you draw an image in a program and the program allows you to slide the layers around and move arms and add effects to a 2D image as if it's a 3D model, it looks really lazy and bad and all the characters just look kind of fat to me at least in the face. The units don't look like plastic or like sarge's heroes to me they just look unfinished, they look like 3D models from an alpha of a game or one of those deleted scenes from an animated movie that has no textures or anything, there's no lighting on them, no shading, they're not shiny plastic they just have no shading at all. And the animations for these models are slow, I don't think people want Days of Ruin realism they just want colorful graphics that are well drawn and animated. In my opinion the 2D art is amateurish and the 3D models are below 3D modeling college student level.
As someone taking project management and operations management in college right now Its so interesting seeing those concepts in action (as in what not to do) in the real world. Also for some reason I'm really good at telling the new units apart, but thats just me.
What do you think wayforward should've done if we go back in time and they still had to make this game? If I was the manager, I would've made the developers complete both advance wars games to properly understand the series better. I would also try to make the game look "cooler", maybe not as far as Days of Ruin went, but more in line with modern fire emblem games (excluding engage) and xenoblade chronicles. Those games are still anime but they also don't look kiddy. I'd also try to let the team socialise and bond with each other, so there could be more genuine passion for making the game instead of it being purely for money. I'm not a manager and probably never will be, but it's fun to think about.
Did you play a lot of the GBA games? I wonder if it's pretty easy to tell if you're relatively new to the series, but hard for those who are very used to the sprites.
Personally I only struggle with the Tank and Medium Tank, but only for Orange Star and Blue Moon. The other 3 factions are sufficiently different in their sprite features that it's easy. But the shapes used to form Tanks and Medium Tanks are way too similar for Orange Star and Blue Moon.
Was this made in the case of the game losing Best Sim/Strategy in The Game Awards? I also want to add some notes that you left out: 1. You cannot save Versus matches midway; this was a feature present since Famicom Wars, but to exclude it in Local Multiplayer is baffling, especially when the CO power crashes and controls locking up happens. 2. Toning down difficulty in Challenge Campaigns should've been an option like Casual Mode to Normal Campaigns. The fact that Kanbei's Error?! adds a Bomber to your starting units really makes it much easier compared to the original, which was definitely why you abandoned your Challenge Campaign playthrough. 3. Some Quality of Life Improvements seen in Dual Strike are unfortunately missing. One example is the expanded End of Battle report, which tells you how many units were deployed and destroyed, how many properties were seized, and your total cost value of all your units, both current and overall, and all properties that were in your possession by the end of the battle. That was a handy way to determine how you lose a timed battle if units and property count wasn't the winning factor. 4. There will be no additional updates as WayForward has moved on to other projects. Without them, Nintendo cannot update this game in any way, so we will have to deal with those annoying glitches and obvious flaws. Plus, it's made in Unity, so any updates will cost Nintendo money per download due to Unity's recent policy changes, and they don't even know how Unity works, as they usually use their own proprietary engines, rather than common ones like Unreal and Unity.
"and they don't even know how Unity works, as they usually use their own proprietary engines, rather than common ones like Unreal and Unity." ok, thats just objectivly wrong. Nintendo (or studios afiliated with nintendo directly) used unity in several projects. And its a wellknown fact that they use Unity for prototyping of smaller scale projects internally. Super Mario Run is also famouslydone entirely in unity(and also a complete developed inhouse) Inteligent system(altough second party only) also uses unity (and used unity for fire emblem Engage). Like Nintendo has enough either inhouse teams, or second party studios that would be able ot take over if they really wanted to
Sad, but true and I agree with all your points. Hell, it was a bad enough that I didn't want to even buy it myself even if it meant contributing to future AW games. They really half-assed this one and maybe that was the whole point tbh. Similar to some profit-driven movies, spend 5 million and pray it makes a quick 20 mil instead of spending 200 million for a quality film. I'm hoping the AI programmer got paid in Subway gift cards cause the AI was schlop.
To be honest AI is the one hard thing in this kind of game, that being said nothing can excuse it to be both slow AND stupid, making stupid and fast AI is easy. Making a smart one is harder, but far from impossible if you take your time.
The AI oversight is such a shame. How incredible would it have been to have had two AIs to play against: (1) sort of stupid, but charming and exploitable like the original AI, and (2) a modern, very challenging AI? I would have settled for just (3) competent, though.
In an interesting example of history repeating itself, the original Advance Wars release in North America was delayed due to it originally going to come out right after 9/11.
You're wrong actually, it's weirder. It came out in North America on 10 September 2001. But was delayed in Europe until 2002 and released in Japan in 2004, bundled with the sequel. Ironically, it was initially going to be Japan only. And reboot camp isn't available in Japan.
Honestly i’m in a similar boat. I think they fit the theme as the original games. They could be better, but I feel like they did a decent job. I’m definitely not offended by them like most people.
Personally like the CO art but I am in agreement with unit designs. Green Earth for example can be difficult to tell the difference between some units at a glance.
@@Kylesico912x I agree to that. I found it somewhat difficult to differentiate Black Hole units. Bombers/Fighters and Tanks/MdTanks I believe were particularly tricky.
While it is sad that the Adcance Wars franchise won't grow as much thanks to the mediocrity of reboot camp, it is nice that the community has still stayed strong and continues to grow and remain a healthy community instead of toxic insult-fests
Hey we aren't the fire emblem fanbase going over waifu wars or saying you're a German WW2 soldier just cause you sided with Edlegard lmao (well in AW case play as a black hole CO) But yeah its crazy how toxic FE fans can get even after the whole 3ds era ended a new wave of toxic discourse took over
Okay I have a defense on the AI with the Sea Fortress: Hawke's AI basically wants to use both the HP and damage value. Since there aren't any units injured, it's not going to use it. This happened also in the old games where Andy DOESN'T activate his power cause there aren't any units to heal. As soon as they see the opportunity, then they use it. For example, I'm willing to bet on that battle with Hawke had his Fighter take damage at some point of his attack, he'll activate his power at the last moment. I know this cause in the Great Sea Battle, Hawke used it plenty of times on his turn at the very last moment after his unit attacked cause some were injured. The one I noticed, on my end, was the mission against Drake. I thought, maybe, they were saving it for the right opportunity, but I think because the AI doesn't cheat in FoW, they don't see your units, therefore, there's "nothing" to damage. Even the old games had the AI units behaved in a certai matter. In the Great Sea Battle, Hawke's naval forces on the south DIDN'T move because they were basically on patrol. Unless your unit is IN RANGE of the attack, they will never move. So the strategy there is to basically wait correctly before going. Something I will say for those that are planning to get all S ranks: SOMETHING CHANGED. This was personally my complaint. In the old games, outside of the Black Hole campaign, the CO of that nation is the one being judged on score. Always. Great Sea Battle, again I know XD, in the old games, you had to use Green Earth's main force. Yellow Comet was the killing blow, but Green Earth's army was the one being judged. NOT IN THE REBOOT CAMP, THOUGH. You can't do the same strategy. In the REBOOT CAMP, if you do the same thing, it's the GOLD COMET'S score, NOT GREEN EARTH. This may be seem trivial, but the idea behind the old games was for the Green Earth to pummel the Black Hole army after everything they did. That and you have a main base for the Green Earth. Gold Comet just starts with an island. You can stiill get the S rank (I did it on my stream), but to get there was a pain. I had to build up slowly and then execute it with the Gold Comet, NOT Green Earth. I still think the AI was fine. It was a bit of a challenge, especially getting all S on the harder campaign. But it's... a bit easier. For example, with Sonja vs. Adder, Adder's forces is TREMENDOUSLY big. He starts out with an army while Sonja only has like 4 units. First few turns is extremely crucial and with the AI cheating, it made the mission very intense. With the remake, though it is plains, it wasn't nearly as bad, but still a big force to get through. One of the most infamous missions, Kanbei's Error?, was.... not bad on the reboot. I... did it on my first try and got an S rank. In the old game, there was a SPECIFIC movement you had to do to get the S rank cause the AI cheats, but in the reboot, it was... honestly easy. Personally, I don't mind the graphics, BUT I do agree on being EXTREMELY hard to identify one another. When you use that example, I... honestly had to think REALLY hard which unit is which. Unrelated side note, Dual Strike is the ONLY game I can tell... WITHOUT looking. The really funny thing Intelligent Systems made a unique sound on the movement and destroyed units. So I can just basically close my eyes and tell what unit is being moved from the AI. Heck, that was my cheat in FoW since I can HEAR their movement XD I do have A BIG BIG BIG complaint about the graphics involving gameplay: YOU CAN'T TELL WHAT HP YOUR UNIT HAS IF YOU LOAD THEM. Yes. You have to remember EVERY SINGLE OF YOUR UNIT'S HP WHENEVER YOU LOAD. This was extremely stupid and unfair, especially on the first campagin. On that one, there were multiple times I had to evacuate a unit, but when I went to unload the same unit on a shore, yeah... I sent out the one that was damaged instead. Ooops... WHY IS THERE NO NUMBERS ON THE UNIT?! The old version had that! That was extremely stupid and unnecessary change they did and even should the old games suffered that, wouldn't it be best to, I don't know, ADD THAT? The delay on the CO powers... Good Lord... yeah that one sucked. I have animations turned off on my end, but I still got to sit on the animation for the CO power. The old games it was fast and snappy. But in the remake, they had to change it so it has a distinct difference between each CO. Some did help out like global damage/heal was almost instant, which was nice. But then you had... Gold Rush... You just gain money, but they felt the need to include EVERY SINGLE UNIT getting the coin buff, which... made no sense. Here's another: I know there's suppose to be personality on the COs since they are heavily involved as well, but... why is it that... in the mid- "It appears that my foe is doing well. I must not overstep my boundaries" -... MIDDLE OF THE BATTLE, AT TIMES, THEY THROW A DIALOGUE?! >< Sure I understand in the beginning, but the generic dialogues keep popping up on the COs and it gets... a bit annoying. This is one of the complaints I had with Duck Tales, actually, from the same company. Graphics look nice, but... they... just... won't... stop.... TALKING. I'm hopping on a FREAKING cane like a pogo stick! Why is it I have to hear that dialogue OVER AND OVER again?! Back in Advance Wars, it's on all maps... You do something and boom, mid dialogue. Generic as hell, too, depending on the CO. I don't know... maybe don't have them there? >< Oh and speaking of graphics and gameplay: Unit drops. Good lord... the foot soldiers take a BIT of time to do that. With the tanks and copters, it's BOOM instant. But the foot soldiers? Nah. They had to animate it where they hop off the thing and then land. I know it's minor, but... that's another time spend looking and going "Ooooh, aaaah..." and whatnot x.x Here's another personal gripe, but... it makes a bit of sense. In the Challenge mode... YOU CAN'T SAVE. I don't mean you can't quit, but... here's what happens in the old games: In the old version, you had the option to save. This is just in case you had a moved planned out and it's going to be the same thing over and over again, so why not save? Saves a bit of time. In the Reboot, however, unless you are playing normal/war room (which at that point, it's just rewind), you CAN'T save. So... good luck planning things out and having to do the same move over and over again cause the game didn't let you save. Normal/War Room, you can rewind, but... uh.... it's only for that one turn. So, again, good luck trying to redo THE ENTIRE MATCH IF YOU MESSED UP. Why does it make sense? Well, in hard mode, it's suppose to be harder, therefore, you can't mess up as much. But... having to do the same move over and over again just... puts you to sleep. I remember trying to find the right moves on the final missions of Gold Comet and Green Earth from that and had to basically start over, cause the opening didn't do that well. So back to the drawing board, I suppose... Another personal gripe: Why don't I have intel on the map I'm about to go to on the campaign? In the original, you press L and boom, there's your map. Why is it such a big deal? Well.... what if you need a SPECIFIC CO on that spot? You would really hate it if you have to start ALL OVER AGAIN just because you placed the wrong CO. I can't do that in the Reboot. There's... no option. Whew okay... With all that said.... there are a few things I like, but.... yes... The bad outweighs it, sadly. I did enjoy it and I liked it, but some of these changes were not good at all. That and... the delay? Come on, now... What was the cause of it since they just needed to take the old games, repolish it, test it, and see what's wrong. I wonder what they found that they needed to delay. Not worth it, nor was the wait because of an actual war. But... that's just me. EDIT: SORRY for the HUGE wall of text, but there you go XD That's my thought on it and if you read all of it (or skimped through it), personally, thank you! ❤
@@salamence6828 Oh it wasn't bad XD Maybe a few minutes. I do type fast and, oddly enough, I may not be a pro like the other guys, but I like the puzzle aspect of Advance Wars. For a background, I've played all three, Days of Ruin, and even the War Room Challenge (which WAS A PAIN, BY THE WAY XD). So it was really cool to be able to hear on what the other side was like on the game. One thing I haven't touched, though, was the AI going against each other. Most of the game involved on the campaign, but after playing through it again on stream, thought I would give my thoughts as well XD
This comes to show that Nintendo still haven’t learned their lesson after the GBA release. Video games DO NOT affect what’s going on the real world, nor does it save any lives. Not to mention, Call of Duty games was coming out constantly during war times happening outside of the States. I feel like some honorable members at WayForward did wanted the game to come out while it was ready to go despite the reboot’s flaws, but of course, Nintendo was being a buffoon for thinking holding a video game will “save lives and end wars” while Activision was already releasing Modern Warfare Remastered, then rushing out plans for its next 2 titles regardless if the Ukraine war was happening. I feel like if that weren’t to happened, the rebooted series would’ve been a good gaming classics on launch.
I personally went from a guaranteed buy the moment I saw the announcement trailer to A Hard pass the nanosecond I learned you could not do 4 player custom scenarios online. Playing this game with three of my buddies over a Link cable is what really made this game for me. I would have overlooked everything else.
I was shocked when I found out that a remake of 2 gba games was 60 dollars, meanwhile you have collections coming out at the same time on Switch like Megaman Battle Network Collection for 60 dollars, which included all 6 games each with online trading and battling that isn't frustrating to use. Also the Castlevania Advance Collection which KONAMI (notoriously penny pinchers) released for 20 dollars and includes settings like higher quality music options, save states, visual effects, and a replay system. Now look at Advance Wars, 60 dollars for a game that hardly has online (Can only play against friends, custom maps are limited to 19 x 19, 2 player online in a game that can be played with 4 players) instead choosing to focus on the art instead of the online. So let's look at the art, in my opinion, a lot of it is weird. A lot of the VA's seemed like they were choosing famous influencers instead of who had the best voice and some of the voices were really offputting in-game. The character art, again in my opinion, is weird. The characters look too much like they came out of an american cartoon in the early 2010's, its fine if other people like the voices and art but to me and seemingly to others that didn't buy the game or were disappointed, the character art and voices did not fit the theme at all. The best thing about the game is the music and that's really all I can say about it, should people pay 60 dollars for 2 gba games with remastered music? Not when there's so much better competition imo.
@@appletuntrainer Yeah I paid $60 for a new iteration of a series that's been waiting over a decade for a good remake or game and I got completely ripped off. I'm posting a comment about why I feel ripped off in a video about why the game is a rip off. If you don't want to see that then don't click on the video?
The aesthetic worked for me, the graphics didn't. The Wars games have always been a bit goofy, so the toy soldiers thing works with that. The execution on the other hand... well you said it all. What really kiled the remaster for me though is the slowness of everything. You said most of it, but to add on with the programming knowledge I do have it's clear that the game waited for unit moment animations to finish before it even began thinking about its next move, which is a problem solvable with basic multithreading. That's not something you need to often think about in something like a platformer, but it makes a big difference in a game like AW. This really was the wrong dev to handle this project.
Hey stopping by to let you know I discovered a little known turn based strategy game that Wayforward made for the 3DS called Transformers Rise of the Dark Spark. It's actually an amazing gem. Budget presentation but fun mechanics. A little like Fire Emblem with a rock paper scissors hierarchy, unique character skills and equippable mods that can break when damaged ala Metroid Federation Force.
About doing a reboot AI vs original AI match, I see two ways to solve the luck issue: - Modify both games to have a fixed luck value, this way no rng is involved. (Do we know if one of the games cheat by knowing the rng in advance?) - Keeping the luck is more difficult, but doable if someone programs a way to transfer a save from a game to the other.
Frankly I know this may be an odd choice, but I think the darker edgier choice of Days of Ruin may have actually done better as a reboot. Received better without the extra cartoony toybox graphics, know what I mean?
That would make more sense as a brand new game (which is what they SHOULD have done instead of a remake). I think it would have done even worse if it was a edgy game, especially if you consider the Ukraine-Russia timing.
That would've been a far better choice. Advance wars only appeals to adults who grew up with the gba originals. The series has almost no potential to market towards kids so it was objectively a poor decision to go in that direction.
I have no hard sales figures but I can confirm that both my local Gamestop and Target are still selling out their stocks of the game. While it had a slow start, I think the Re-Boot Camp has picked up steam.
@@therealjaystone2344 Yea $60 is cheap! Do you have any idea what it costs to pay humans to develop to create new animations and graphics and to make sure it runs on new hardware? It's pricey AF. But this game is a steal to be able to play it in the Switch because it has such a huge competitive scene along with Mega Man battle network.
They seem to have an hiperfixation on 3d models. Didnt learn a thing from tiny metal experience :(. I d rather have a hd pixel art master piece than the advance wars, disgaea 6, pokemon pearl, or similar 3d experience.
The aesthetic puts a lot of people off: The original was cartoony with a bit of grit, but the new toy-like aesthetic kiddifies it well beyond that. The lack of lack of advertising also played a roll; not only in not telling people it was still/now out, but I'm pretty sure the actions/shooting in the original reveal didn't have the same oomph as they seem to in your video. I remember looking around near release of what the game looked like but couldn't find anything/much which wasn't from before the delays.
It's very sad that the most hyped I was for this game was when Mangs was playing through the originals again The trailer was what got me into the games and through those I found Mangs' channel, and through Mangs I got better at AW and even got into fire emblem, So I thank Mangs and his community for being so welcoming and helpful.
The issue i see with the ingame graphics is that each faction uses their unique unit designs for overworld sprites, when they didn't in the GBA games. In the originals, all tanks use a default sprite (with different colors) but the battle animations showed something different for each faction. Going with unique overworld designs means you not only have to learn units, but the way each faction shows a unit.
Nah, thats a non issue at all, the reason the og sprites were good and readable at all is that they had distinct features Either being a clear distinc feature such as Missles's white missle-launchers and Recons being a literal car, or sometimes just size differance, just as Meduim Tanks being twice the size of tanks, or Bcopters being rounder than Tcopters You can do that WHILE having diferent factions, its all a matter of skill issue
I remember talking with you on one of your Nintendo Directs about how important multiplayer was, and the features it needed to be successful... NOT. ONE. WAS. IN. THE. GAME. Great video as always Mangs! Cheers!
Warside is an Advanced Wars esque turn based strategy curruntly being developed by LAVABIRD. Still very much in alpha stage but it looks like they want to carry the original AW design into a modern top down turn-based strategy. Basically what AW Re-Boot Camp should have been
@@tj12711 Wargroove is pretty good but suffers in how little the not-COs abilities impact the game. Having a small area heal is shameful. At least Days of Ruin let you put the CO on any unit to boost it, plus units around it, AND you also had the power. It allowed for proper assymmetry and actual spikes of power for pushing.
The reason i like the reboot camp is i get to experience the first two games in the series. My jumping on point was back when Days of Ruin came out, and i was lucky enough to get a copy of Dual Strike. So while its a lesser experience I am at least able to play the games.
Any time a publisher advertises a game and then delays it, they actively shoot themselves in the foot. Any hype I had for the remake was gone after waiting months.
I really wish there could be some way to offer incentives for developers to improve flopped games through patches. Sadly, there’s really no money to make in that :/
Considering nintendo cared so little about the remake that they were willing to massively delay it for a pr stunt, this project was probably doomed from the getgo.
@@dinar8749 I'm afraid to think the only reason why they released it is because they noted the IRL conflict was not gonna just end and was not worth just a game for that, or for a more cynical viewpoint, because after the conflict just stopped being a "trendy topic" then there was little reason to hold said game back.
Stop taking iconic pixel art games with incredible spritework and making them look like cheap mobile games with 3d. This ruined Mega man X, and the Zero series alone proves it. It ruined Golden Sun and games like Octopath Traveler, Cross Code, and Sea of Stars proves it. It ruined Metal Slug and the fact that theres nothing on the market to actually compare the quality and creativity of its animation to is a testament to the tragedy of capitalism not giving a shit about the passionate artistry that sticks with people over the re-sellable garbage they can pump out like an injection molded playskool toy that winds up in a landfill before your kid even hits puberty.
I was super hyped to get this game till they announced it was delayed because of a real war. Call of duty is released almost every year and nobody has a problem with it despite the fact that came out during various wars..
In Nintendo's defense, if you said 2000 ppl play it daily 20 years later, basically means 0 ppl play it and you can't make money from it for the cost of making the game.
I wonder if MattMcMuscles will make a _”Wha Happun”_ video on Reboot Camp and talk about how cursed the series is being delayed due to real world wars and the 9/11 Terroists Attacks, getting games cancelled like 64 Wars and the mismanagement like Days of Ruin not even being released in Japan until like 2013 where it was a Club Nintendo Reward if I’m remembering correctly? But yeah Advance Wars deserved better after just only getting Virtual Console re-releases on Wii U Eshop during the 2010s.
I am one of the new faces that this game brought in. I actually love the remake and the experience it gave me. I think I understand why this was not what people wanted but I am still happy we got it and that it brought me to the community!
There's a silent majority of people like you who just enjoyed the game for what it was - an accessible, casual remake of the games. It won't be a disappointment for you (and it wasn't for me as I got what I expected from the trailers to be honest), but for those who were looking for the potential of Advance Wars as basically a modern chess to be realised with a massive multiplayer capability on a modern platform, then... well, it was a colossal disappointment. So it's a good game for some; a terrible game for others. Very subjective.
Yeah me too. I never played advanced wars before but always thought it looked like a series I’d like. Didn’t know about reboot camp until shortly before it released, wasn’t aware of the delays. So there was nothing to be disappointed about for me. Found the campaigns to be fun and made several of my own custom maps. Feel like I got my moneys worth out of it. I do wish the multiplayer was better, a match maker would be great. I like the in game graphics, but again I never played any of the other advanced wars games so I got nothing to compare it to. I think making it look more like a game of pretend soldiers was also due to the war.
With the AI it sounds like the programmers wanted to mimic high level play, but where alot of AIs in games fail in that regard is they never switch to "Ok time to attack"
I wish the entire game kept the 2D asthetic that's shown in its cutscenes. It would have looked so much better. There's this weird notion that if an old game is 2D, then the remaster has to be 3D. There's nothing wrong with 2D graphics in 2024.
I can't express enough how much the graphics put me off. I played all the previous Advance Wars games. I played all the Fire Emblem games up to the 3DS. I'm a huge fan of turn-based strategy games in general (as well as real time ones). But man, those graphics are just absolutely awful. I commented this under the original trailer, and under every video I saw about the game: They better include a classic graphics mode. When it became clear that they didn't, there was no reason for me to get the game. As I write this, I am playing AW1 on a separate PC. I have absolutely no issue with playing through the original games again. But the remakes are just a worse-looking version. So why should I pay money for that?
Out of all the faults Reboot Camp has, not having any automated matchmaking is probably the worst part to me. I don't really have friends I play Nintendo games with so the online might as well not exist since I can't just be matched with a stranger to play against.
The price was pretty egregious imo. Not to devalue the franchise, but they were basically asking customers to fork out the original retail price of both games. Requiring people to buy both games at basically their original MSRP on the GBA boggles my mind (Link’s Awakening was price a little too high, though it arguably need more TLC than Advance Wars did.). $60 was too high for AW 1+2. Should have been $40, or at least list them as separate titles. I mean, look at Pikmin 1+2… even if it took less effort to port those games, just imagine it from a consumer value perspective. If they want to revive an old niche franchise like advance wars, they shouldn’t be pricing out customers new to the franchise. It’s just such a questionable move.
i can understand where your coming from, you've been playing this a lot longer than me and i was very young when i first played it on the gba, i also agree that the multiplayer could have been done better, but for me I've seen a lot of companies throw out games that have micro transaction, grind-athons, ultra high-specs that aren't needed etc, that just having a game like this with a story and replay-ability just makes me feel happy. so what if its just nostalgia, at the end of the day i sat down and played through this game from beginning to end and still find myself coming back to play it now and then. this game may get mixed reviews from fans but picking apart the good and bad might be what helps build a better advance wars in the future.
![Lp. Сердце Вселенной #60 РОЖДЕНИЕ ЛОЛОЛОШКИ [Финал] • Майнкрафт](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/YoR0pAV9FVQ/mqdefault.jpg)
Watch my interview with a WayForward Employee who worked on the game here:
ua-cam.com/video/uFkz818dUWo/v-deo.html
I look this game a for me is very old
I mean, Wargroove was good...nobody played it tho...
I feels like you're kinda biased. (No hate)
A cursed release date is an Advance Wars tradition. The GBA original was on US shelves on 9/10/2001
oof.
The release dates around the world got delayed cause of 9/11
:]
😨
*ah*
Intelligent Systems or any other company with knowledge on turn-based strategy games should have been the ones making the remake. Not to bash Wayforward here but they're more known for their platformers than anything. Advance Wars is an extremely niche franchise and the right devs were needed in order to make a product to make the community happy and want to share the game with people who have never played it before.
Remember what Intelligent System has said about this topic. They weren't interested in returing to this franchise without reinventing it some way. And one of the things they were entertaining was the relationship mechanics from Fire Emblem. I honestly dread what IS would do if they took an interest in AW again. Because it certainly isn't going to be a simple remake with all the mechanics we trust.
@@Teknanami mean I'd take a relationship mechanic if it meant the gameplay was actually good, tbh.
@@slumburger1145
The thing is Fire Emblem gameplay design declined with the increased focus on relationships and that's a franchise that already had some mechanics for it in place. I can't see good things for it being stitched onto Advance Wars. If anything, I worry they change it so much that it no longer resembles AW anymore and it ends up being better off as a spin-off (like Battalion Wars).
@@Teknanam i could see them using the DoR/DC CO powers and let them field multiple COs at the same time
Sami x Eagle when? 😳
The delays hurt the initial sales
The lack of a good multiplayer or new content made the experience finite, which hurt retention
yeah the lack of matchmaking is a deathknell imo. that would have given it a reason to exist.
The problem with remakes/reboots is that they're generally only done once. If someone has the idea of remaking Advance Wars, "It's already been done."
It's a huge shame.
Not if you're Sony.
The characters aesthetics really managed to capture the 20 year old newgrounds amateur fangame look, while the units got the mobile shovelware one. Impressive.
lmao, fucking nailed it.
@@DeadEndScreamer Honestly.
Between the crappy CO art and the soldiers that now make it look like it's taking place in the Gocha Force universe, where kids battle with toy robots......there's NO charm like the original had in spades. Hell. AWDS is STILL the goat. AWBW also helped kill this, as people who were already into the game already had a free alternative that retained the art of the original, yet kept the multiplayer in a style more like Wargroove where you could take a day or two to make your moves, really think things out, or play it more actively. Either was possible and again, FREEEEEE.
lmao so true
@@flashbackfrank8781 I wanted to see more *_Aesthetic_* in regards to the factions, Black Hole was the only one who nailed the fucking vibe while the others in the reboot look like a typical Cartoon Network Korean Cartoon show dubbed in English (seriously the had a ton of those back then).
I wanted there to be less bouncy happy go lucky and more on actual emphasis on the battle movement and style.
What I mean by the last part is that, if we were to take a look at AW 1 and 2, movement wise the soldiers look like they're moving position and setting up fire paired with that serious look and grittiness of the pixels, meanwhile in Reboot Camp it's all just very bouncy movements and the metal looked more like plastic than actually sheet metal.
I wanted the vehicles and models to atleast have like a more remastered version like as if they were retouched since, in general, the models already looked fine, the uniforms and weapons looked very sick with the pixelated stuff aswell as the vehicles (although the megatanks and that spherical wheeled tank could use abit more stylization for the nations.)
Also also, I wanted the themes of the factions to be more clear i.e Orange Star having U.S Mil, Blue Moon Soviet, Yellow/Gold Comet Japanese, and Green Earth being German, I wanted it to be clear in the units themselves.
TL;DR The only faction that looked good in the remaster was Black Hole and the plastic-like graphics make the game less about war and more on selling toys.
Rant:
Seriously, I preferred Collin's Advance Wars 2 Sprite over his Reboot, he looks like he just wants to get over it with his loose fitting uniform and with the power of bougie money, I also imagined his voice to be abit more....relaxed so to say or reserved.
The unit graphics are so ugly. I have no idea what they were thinking with that style.
The fact that they didn't fix Drake's Dilemma was weird. No Black Hole naval units, APCs still don't refuel, and that airport at the top of the map goes completely ignored.
Seeing Barbaric Blow *slowly* buff the troops really took all the cool out of it. If the buffs had been at the same speed as the original it would of been pretty cool.
I was struck by that- they cut to him for about the same amount of time, but in the original, it feels like a flurry, living up to the name "barbaric", while the new version feels like it's counting them- like they wanted you to see each individual unit. It's too long for the animation and effect to feel like one motion. I think they should have kept it quick, of course, but maybe also laid part of the animation over the map during the effect. But the most frustrating part of all of this is that "would've" is a contraction of "would" and "have", not "of".
@@-ism8153 Psch, grammar be for fancy people, not us barbarians
You know the funny part about CO Power animation comparisons? In this remake they "technically" made Winter Fury, Squall/Typhoon, and Black Wave/Storm faster than the original since instead of it counting every enemy unit it just does it all at once instantly...with one exception... If there's like less than 10 enemy units on the field, then I would say that the original would be faster since it has less to count to beat the remake in finishing it's animation; anything higher than 10 units the remake will beat the original in finishing the animation every time. Of course, it's the global damage CO Powers that gets this treatment.
Man, I thought they took too long in AW2, at least over large maps going back and forth back and forth
With just the right sound, like that thud-crunch in Reboot, played at the original speed would have sounded like an avalanche. Missed epicness.
Hearing the original again, sounds like the boost up sound effect isn't even played for every unit, so it finishes faster so you get to using the power sooner.
More like Barbaric Slow
I still don't think WayForward was the right choice. You're getting a company mainly known for Shantae, a game series with fluid and expressive character designs and animation, to remake games where most of the animations are vehicles shooting at each other.
I mean, yeah, the CO power animations and most of the CO designs look good, but that's a really small part of the game, and I'd argue that WF was wasted on it.
i think wayforward were the right people for the job i dont think it was the right choice to go toybox though as i really like wayforwards spritework
Took the words out of my mouth. I looove WayForward but they have niche and AW was always far outside their wheelhouse. The toy box aesthetic works for many franchises but AW is one where it feels wildly out of place.
It’s pretty safe to say that 2D Pixel Sprites will always age better than 3D Models that aren’t designed well or executed well.
@@GabeSweetManeh? I mean the original AW had a very similar aesthetic, to the point where one of the most popular AW reviews on UA-cam praises the game for 'looking like a kid playing with his toys' and adomished every game past the first for 'making it too realistic'
Not saying I agree with their overall thoughts but AW has always had a more cartoony and toy-like art style ever since the first game. The problem was just the way they decided to go about emulating that style by making everything monocolor and blocky.
@@Yuni-is-Schrodingers-Fox The soldiers, sure but the vehicles were always deliberately angular and rendered in official art to be more mechanical and realistic in the same way a scale model of a tank or plane would be. It has a toy-like quality, but the intent is to mimic the real thing as closely as possible. I guess saying "Toybox" is too broad a descriptor. I'll specify and say the "Fisher Price" aesthetic is awful. Rounded corners and shiny plastic. Like Mangs said, I literally confused units constantly due to their visual similarities.
The intended style is akin to putting Lego men into your grandpa's 1/60 scale model of a B-52 Bomber. Yes, both are "toys" but the intent of their design is very different.
It's almost like delaying something for ages when it was ready to release then shadow dropping it completely kills sales
Flak's power activated so slowly in the Reboot that a UA-cam ad popped up in thr middle of it.
😂
Let's not forget that 26 years ago Super Famicom Wars had MULTIPLE AIs with different behaviors for each CO which behaved somewhat smartly with animations for the CO thinking and acting.
you means 25 years right?....
@@herolink17So does reboot camp? You sure?
@@iamLI3
Woops Mangs Math moment xD
32 bit gba advance wars era was the best platform than today
@@ZeriousOOmissionsplayed the gba advance wars till days of ruin. I like rebootcamp more
I'm a graphics software engineer for video games and VR, so I wanted to add some insight into why the graphics are so bad. Tl;dr: the graphics were probably not intentional. It looks like they used basic graphics that any beginner uses as a placeholder in a game engine like Unity, likely ran out of time, and just kept the bad graphics.
The biggest thing is the lighting and textures on the models. They didn't use a toybox aesthetic as much as they just made initial models with placeholder textures and basic lighting with no more advanced rendering techniques nor post-processing effects. The graphics look like simple models that game devs use to get base functionality working, like they just dragged and dropped a tank model into a Unity scene, colored everything red, or blue, or whatever, and set up one point light at the top to represent the sun. Making something look like a toy is not as easy as it seems. They could have fixed this by making the textures, well... textured. They could have tried to make the toys look like painted or colored metal by adding some small blemishes, slight variation in the color, i.e. not a flat paint job, but some parts slightly darker or splotchier than others. And if they chose metal, they could have used brushed metal that has striations that reflect light slightly differently. Moreover, they could have made the toys look well used. Slight scratches, paint chips missing, small parts broken off, etc. There is a technique called bump mapping where you can take a polygonal mesh with flat sides and still make it look bumpy by using images of bumpy surfaces in a certain way during lighting calculations, while still keeping the surface flat under the hood. This improves realism while keeping the models simple.
With regards to lighting, they basically blew out the scene with bright light and didn't add any shadows, sun rays, reflections, ambient light from light bouncing off diffuse surfaces and subtly lighting other parts of models that would otherwise be in shadow, angling the sunlight to cast long shadows on the models as if it were sunset, doing some advanced rendering to mimic pink and orange shadows on clouds when the sun hits them at the right angle. Likewise, the plains tiles are basically solid green. They could have made a slight grass swaying effect; same with the trees on forest tiles. Lastly, they didn't need the grid lines. Those just made it look really cheap, clutter the composition, kill the realism of the terrain, and plus, they are just straight grey lines. At least make them more subtle and part of the terrain.
Basically, they phoned it in big time. Thanks for the insight, I was wondering why it looked so amateurish
Considering they were already getting frame drops could it be an issue for how weak the hardwear is?
With the over two years of delay, I don't see how they could've run out of time.
@@robertharris6092 Nah, other Switch games have great graphics. In order to have a high framerate though, you have to put time into making sure you properly utilize the resources you do have, and you also need talented and experienced engineers to pull it off. A great example of this is the first Crash Bandicoot for the PlayStation. Basically, the developers at Naughty Dog discovered that a whole bunch of memory wasn't being used in a part of the console that was for system operations (making the PlayStation operate, read and write data into memory, read different parts of the game disc, etc.), so they essentially hacked the console in a way to use that leftover operating system memory to store way more texture and mesh data than they should have been able to. The graphics on that game were way better than any of its contemporaries.
@@sebastianlucas704 Coding always takes way more time than even the engineers anticipate. There are almost always significant bugs, and those bugs get harder to diagnose the larger the scale and highly funded the project is. Also, as Mangs discussed, it seems like the team was poorly managed. They didn't focus on things they should have, they probably wasted a bunch of time, there was probably some corruption and leadership was giving themselves bonuses rather than hiring good employees who demand higher salaries, they probably laid a bunch of engineers off and overworked the remaining employees to save money, there was probably a lot of crunch time where employees get burnt out and can't work properly. There are all kinds of reasons. The game industry can be a real mess.
I didn’t care that it was delayed. I didn’t care that the art style was changed. I didn’t care that some of the music didn’t translate as well imo.
All I wanted was to play Advance Wars, on real hardware, in multiplayer against other real human beings. I never had the opportunity to link up and play with friends on the original aw2. I thought this was going to be a breakthrough. I wanted to play against people online and show my skills as a player. Words cannot describe how disappointed I was regarding this game’s frustratingly strict online capabilities. Stupidly small map sizes, only 1v1 matches, only people on your Friends lists, no random/quick match making, no ranking system, no global tournaments or leaderboards, no replay saver, and no way to long play.
This. This is what killed the excitement I had for this game. The fact that you have to use discord or other outside communication methods to literally arrange matches is nothing like I imagined.
Wait, they made you arrange matches! What is this the FGC in 2005
Kind of I guess? You can’t really message someone in game and ask if they’re up for a battle. You need external communication like discord
This is what killed it for me as well, the rest of the game is fine but I think it is stupid a game like this in this age does not have a good online multiplayer
Some of those problems are more so problems of the Switch itself like not having a dedicated way to communicate but either way that still sucks man.
Advance wars by web does multi-player way better
I’ve never played the Advance Wars series before, nor have I ever come across any fans of it in the wild. I kept waiting on this game to release and seeing it got a shadow-drop after a 2 year delay makes so much sense as to why I never saw any reviews or sales or anything. This randomly recommended video was a complete surprise to me for many reasons
It was popular on the GBA. However it came out at exactly the right time. SRPGs were few and far between, you'd literally get 1-2 every 3 years or so. Disgaea 1 sold like crazy for the simple reason that it was decent enough and there was no competetion whatsoever.
@@rook1196 Okay. Didn’t think it was that popular, but I did see that it got quite a few sequels. Same with Disgaea. It seems like that series has been putting out a new game every year (including spin-offs and remakes) but I have never heard a single person talk about them either. Not once.
@@dyll_pyckle ADV wars was a must have on the GBA, and got a lot of good press but never kept its momentum. ADV wars selling point was it was fresh and new at the time and ADV wars 2 just felt like more of the same.
Disgaea 1 sold over 1M in the west, just scratched that anime/SRPG niche that was so neglected in the PS2 era (today not the case). It keeps getting sequels just bc they pump them out cheap but they are lucky to sell 1/10th of the 1st one these days.
@@rook1196 Oh cool! Thanks for the history lesson :)
I didn't even know it was delayed or came out.
The way they handled everything after the Ukraine War broke out honestly strangled this game in the crib.
Wow I had no idea the artistic direction was so drastically different in the remake. As an illustrator myself, I think it maybe needed a different line weight to help distinguish the troops. A cell shading effect could've helped them "pop" better
As someone who's worked in Unity, getting decent cel shading on 3d models like these isn't easy, and takes more expertise than WayForward has. There are premade cel shading models out there but having tried them, believe me, it wouldn't have been an improvement.
@@BritBox777So, is it a problem with Unity specifically? Another reason not to use that engine…
No, cel shaders are notoriously awkward. Especially with hard edges and corners. @@DijaVlogsGames
@@BritBox777 Okay? What was lost in then last two decades? Because we had tons of gorgeous cel-shaded games in the early 2000s. Did they just… deal with it? Or did standard definition help the effect?
Because most of those used proprietary graphics engines and shaders. Not something less experienced devs have / would know how to make. Look up Bomb Rush Cyberfunk that came out a couple years ago, that was Unity, and looks gorgeous cel shaded. Because the devs are damn good at their job @@DijaVlogsGames
Asking Wayforward to make a turn based strategy is like asking Bioware to make a live service.
Which is wierd coz it happened twice)
I see what u did there.
@iytdominotik they are decent. OP talks about their forte which are metroidvanias and other action platformers/beatem ups. So they haven't experience to create their tactical games, not even talking about revival of existing franchise.
No, they are actually a pretty decent developer. They are mainly known for the Shantae Half Genie games which is a series of beautiful 2d platformers. I'm just assuming the knowledge/experience gained from make 2d platformers does not transfer well to working on a turn based strategy game. A simple case of choosing the wrong people for the job.@iytdominotik
@iytdominotikplay Shantae.
Something else that wasn't mentioned could be that it was sold for the $60 pricepoint which is understandable but a lot of remakes even if they're high effort like Reboot Camp was tend to go a little lower in their price. Just to use examples on the Switch: the upcoming Mario vs. Donkey Kong remake is selling at $50, the Live a Live remake is $50, Trials of Mana is $50, Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town is $40. These are all fairly high-development remakes that aren't asking for $60. Admittedly it's not uncommon for remakes to sell for full price but I think it does impact their overall sales figures and can't help but feel that if WayForward bumped the price down that it would have been easier to sell more copies. Prices set expectations.
Metroid Prime Remastered was only $40 too
Maybe they thougt "yeah, there are both AW1 and AW2 so $60 means that you pay only $30/game"
@@nebulastar2130 Paying $30 for a gba game with a worse art style and worse AI in 2023....
@@nebulastar2130 Then you remember Crash and Spyro trilogy remakes, both priced at 40, and both have 3 fully remade games from scratch with much better graphics, animation and even some extra content.
This honestly looks more like a lazy job hoping to cash in the nostalgia. Didn't seem to have worked though.
It’s why I didn’t buy it.
I can't believe Days of Ruin had more online funcionality than a game released 15 years later
Did it?
@@EWOODJ You could download random maps from the servers (although 10x10). You could play co-op with a friend vs the CPU.
@@EWOODJ
You could play any map + costom map with a friend online
And it had good voice chat. Unlike the voice chat on the ds pokemon games you had to hold down Y for the mic to turn on. I played a lot of days of ruin with a cousin online and we talked online.
The random online was basically trash in terms of feature but with friends it had everything you would want except saving the match in case of a disconnect.
15 years..... Dang 👴
Yet another thing that shows why Days of Ruin is the best of the series
"They didn't think multiplayer was important" In an Advance Wars game?! It's the soul of the game! Did the developers not even understand the franchise they were working with?
It's like making a Battlefield game without multiplayer
I'll confess, I was rather surprised to learn that the older Advance Wars games had multiplayer.
@@jj48 you could even play multiplayer in real time whit 2 DS connected side by side, or play on the same DS taking turn
I remember loving playing that real time game mode
Nintendo mentality was all about multiplayer / family / friends
Like Wii or switch philosophy
I don't know, I've always played them only single player.
the fact that Sturm could crash the game is pretty funny when I watched your videos especially the ones that mention how powerful Sturm his powers are now transitioning from the game into our world
The artstyle was the first filter for some
The delay smothered most remaining interest
And the online ensured the last customers would not stay
My exact opinion.
The 2D artstyle isn’t a problem
It’s the 3D models
I'd have bought the game regardless of what the issues, player count, whatever.
If it came out on PC. I don't own a switch: there's literally one game on the Switch that I care about, and it's Advance Wars: Reboot Camp
ONLY one? that's a pretty limited interest set there. I kinda feel bad for you. @@VynalDerp
@@alphamaccao5224 I mostly play tactical shooters, simulation games, and the like. Advance Wars carries a lot of nostalgia for me because I used to play Dual Strike as a kid. That's literally it.
The inability to save games outside of campaign/war room is insane.
12:28 if I had to take a guess, the programmer is doing something like putting a bunch of possible choices into an array but there’s so many choices he’s either overflowing it or making it too big from the outset and violating the stack. Source: I’m an embedded engineer so doing stupid stuff with memory is my job.
What would you have done differently code wise? Assuming that was the real issue with the ai?
The thing is that with the Switch, they should have plenty of memory for things like this. I can only assume that they're allocating some dynamic memory, but then breaking those bounds, which is pretty amateur hour coding for something like this. Especially on a turn based game where speed isn't the most important thing.
@@deanolium im sure the fact the company that made this only made platformers before (atleast thatscall i know of from them) plays a factor.
Given how his Meteor works, I can only assume it's considering EVERY SINGLE POSSIBLE position it could strike. Not just on the opponent units, on the entire map
Imagine not investing into online multiplayer for a franchise that basically has been kept alive by its online multiplayer scene.
100% with you on the unit readability. One of the real standout but overlooked features of the older AV games, and one of the main reasons I never got into Wargroove. It really is a shame how badly they bungled things, and the effects that'll have going forwards.
What issue do you have with unit readability in Wargroove? I don't have enough experience in Advance Wars to say whether it's better or worse, but I certainly haven't had issues in Wargroove.
@@DanSutherland I can of course only speak for myself in this. My issues with readability in Wargroove came mostly from three factors.
First, a lot of the sprite art overflows into neighboring tiles, leading to muddied outlines and hidden elements. Compare assets1.ignimgs.com/thumbs/userUploaded/2019/1/17/wargroovethumb-1547738997250.jpg?width=1280 to images.nintendolife.com/screenshots/57199/large.jpg . The WG Trebuchet is partially obscured by the HP counter, several units have parts covered by trees, and if there was someone behind the big yellow dude you'd barely be able to see them. In AW they strictly keep to their squares. This doesn't prevent being able to figure out what unit is what, but it _does_ make it slower and harder, especially at a glance.
Secondly I had difficulties telling some units apart from one another in WG, like the archer and the cleric(?) guy in the pic above. They _are_ distinct, but share enough large features that it required me to take a closer look a lot of the time to make sure if it was one or the other. In an unfortunate way this comes from WG's more detailed art, the AW art is almost brutally simple and every unit is _significantly_ distinct from one another. The closest two would be the tank and medium tank, and the sheer bulk sets them very much apart. In that way the neotank is a genius design in that it's _completely_ different from everything else. My standouts would be the infantry and mech, where you can tell both are foot soldiers but the weapon (especially for the mech) is so prominent it's instantly obvious which it is. Hell, the mech's bazooka is the same size as the _medium tank cannon_.
Third, I never quite got a hold of what unit did what in WG. Some were obvious (spears vs cavalry and in tight quarters), others I'd get wrong over and over, and it often wasn't apparent to me what a unit would do from its artwork. AW is again brutally straightforward in this. Rifle/MG is good vs infantry and little else, cannons are for vehicles, upward slanted weapons are either AA (shooting up) or ranged.
As a result of those, coming from Advance Wars and being used to be able to tell the shape of the battlefield almost instantly at a glance, and having had a really easy time understanding what did what just from presentation back in the day, it always felt somewhat grating in Wargroove when I'd look over the field sometimes several times and still miss things or confuse what the situation was. It certainly didn't make the game unplayable, but along with other factors (I didn't like the writing, the controls I didn't find ideal and couldn't rebind, and I didn't like how the commanders worked) meant I put it down and went back to AW again for all that I do think it did some pretty neat things. Some of those 'issues' are probably inherent to a fantasy setting over a simplistic comical 'modern' wargame, though Fire Emblem has generally seemed to pull it off fairly well.
It gives me no joy to make this video, but this had to be said.
Even if real sales numbers are found I don't think they will be accurate because AW Boot Camp was an option in the Nintendo Voucher system.
I know it was only a sideline pitch but Im really looking forward to the AI vs AI Video.
Are you going to do it on both games (reboot/awbw) one match or two matches on AWBW while only copying the moves?
You're mostly right. I'm glad we got something but, we only got something we already had, and it was worse than the original.
@mangs1337 were can i contact you? i am not a developer but i do have an idea for a wars game, in fact i made a table top game. it is inspired in the damage output from the Days of ruin, but its battle mechanic is solid.
You probably already know it but talking about indie game inspired by AW there's Warside coming out in the future. Not sure how much it differs but just to point it out
And the fact that this game released when Tears of the Kingdom was less than one month away, was the final nail in the coffin.
for real dude. smdh nintendo 🤦♀️
nah, nintendo fans are willing to pay
The deciding factor for us was its lack of save feature on the local versus mode. We never played it again. We had spent 3 hours the first day and had to come back to it for another 2 hours to finish it with 3 players. Also the lack of selectable options until you unlock them again from the campaign was also annoying. All we wanted was to play it local with other friends.
What makes it rather dumbfounding was the bugs regarding the Meteor Crash.
I could accept inexperience in certain aspects, but what particularly seemed inexcusable even back with the streams is the fact that after 2 delays, the game pretty much crashing out of the blue was particularly bad. If the game had been released after the first delay, it could have been chalked down upon "we are working with patches". Still silly a mistake like that could happen, but the fact the second delay was caused by geopolitics rather than any technical aspect and still left the memory overflow intact was just downright insane.
Maybe the second delay as a fake excuse for more technical problems.
For me they didnt add substantial new content to hook me back in. I will always see advance wars ds as being the best one. Also the one i put the most hrs in
Amen, AWDS is fantastic
The music was pretty bangin' though. Sensei's and Drake's themes were 2 of my fave themes. I didn't buy the game though because I don't believe in buying remakes of even games I love without new GAME content.
Truthfully the only meaningful addition this game gave us was clone Andy as a playable CO
I played DS a lot and still do since I can save VS matches to continue later unlike in Reboot Camp.
Outside of Campaign though, I’m not a fan of the dual COs, being able to get 2 full turns, maybe 3 in the case of also having Eagle. Is a bit busted-
But you have the option for just 1 CO in Vs matches so that’s good.
I'm not a fan of comm towers so this is a blessing for me.
Finally this video is out. Sadly I have to agree with the video. The announcement of reboot camp made AW more popular than the actual release
But the real questions is when is the Barth video coming out?
Soon(tm)
And then any popularity was squandered by the stupid two year delay.
Even as someone who enjoyed the game says the same thing, at least with some points.
I noticed something particular about the tanks in the old Advance Wars games. The cannons on the medium tank and light tank extends and retracts at different times. When the medium tank cannon extends, the light tank cannon retracts(6:45).
I mean
The main reason that definitely comes to mind is the lack of online multiplayer, in terms of matchmaking and whatnot.
A thing I learned a lot of time ago, don't make your turn based combat slow, it's very boring.
Besides that I basically forgot this game was going to come out after the first delay.
One positive thing that came from the remake was that it made people look into the games, just from the trailers alone.
I should know because I was one of them. I would probably not have played AW at all of it wasn't for the reboot announcements.
Also we goth gf Lash which validates the reboot completely, fite me.
Did you ever hear the tragedy of Sami’s toned down CO Power animation?
@@nlaldStop, No horni, they arent even that big
Compaire Fuga Melodies of steel to Advance wars remake. An sure Fuga may seem limited and was a lose to cyber connect. Mostly because, Bandai namco is major a holes for game devs. But, if you copaire Fuga to Advance wars. As much of a money lose Fuga was. Fuga has better reviews and a tight controll gameplay with extras. As much as fans would love solatrobo to make a return. Bandai is a major d--k. But, you can see passion in Fuga unlike Adavance wars. To the point you can see new art based on tail concerto and other cyber connect 2 games. Which is something Advance wars lacks.
@@dn2064 That's sizeist, let the gazongas go free!
@@dn2064 not anymore they're not... 🥺
I wish they remade days of ruin as it was so much fun with deployable commanders and a lot better unit balance. The maps also looked a lot more amazing with different climates.
At least there's the web version and the playable days of ruin units in commander wars
Agreed! It was by far my favorite game of the series.
Also a killer soundtrack.
@@Slaanash Dude I would murder for a 1:1 remastered soundtrack of Days of Ruin, the songs are amazing, but the heavily compressed sound makes them feel like wasted potential
I have to agree a lot with this. Days of ruin was also the introduction of a lot of fans like myself. For me, the artstyle is what stuck out the most for me to pick it up
Still is my personal favorite of the series as well
Asking 60 bucks for this was the real problem
What sucks about coming across content like this is discovering how much better it not only could have been, but how much better it SHOULD have been. I’m a new player and started with reboot camp and absolutely adore it. I’m glad it introduced me to the series, just wish it was as beloved as it could have been
Mind as well just go back and play the originals. You can get them for free and even play them on your phone. And theres the later 2 games as well. The 4th game in particular beingcamIng but very different from the rest.
Advance Wars can't catch a break man.
It feels like they purposefully set it up to fail to shut us up about the franchise.
I can only hope if they ever dig up my beloved Golden Sun they do it with some pride and integrity.
@@Lucrei.Honestly it looks like they gave it a tiny budget and short time to work on. Then just held it for release for like 2 or 3 years.
For me, it was the fact that tanks vs. medium tanks are so difficult to tell apart sometimes. Like you showed with the classic graphics, medium tanks took up significantly more space on the tile than regular tanks, but with the reboot graphics, they are much more similar. I may be able to see a larger turret base or by paying attention to the projected damage numbers closer but if you don't have a medium tank and tank of the same enemy team side by side, this becomes even harder. Funny how the neat detail of the different armies having different designs for their vehicles, uniforms, etc, comes back to bite you here in a lot of ways. Iirc with Yellow Comet tanks/md tanks you're screwed trying to tell them apart.
EDIT: After reviewing the unit designs, I can see that Blue Moon and Yellow Comet have more distinct tanks vs. md tanks compared to other armies. I have a memory of playing through the campaign of AW1 and having a problem telling enemy tanks as well as my own apart, but upon my revisit, I found that the most troubling similarity was with Orange Star. Perhaps I've a flawed memory but I distinctly remember struggles with enemy units and telling them apart, but this also could juat be my experience with the visuals of the rebootcamp being more fleshed out now.
This is an important issue, glance value in strategy games is VERY important. If you have to pay attention to the map to distinguish two units in two separate tiers, you might as well end up reading a text report
It's the silhouettes. Silhouette fail. Like those Black Hole airplanes. The colors are not sufficient, and are used for telling owners apart which is entirely different.
Although I'm not sure yellow comet tanks are hard to tell apart, since the md tanks have armor plates covering their treads.
They were never hard to tell apart you sound so pathetic it's easy to see the difference between the tanks
What are you guys talking about? Yellow Comet has the most differences between Tanks and Medium Tanks of any country. They're both uniformly yellow, but the design is based on actual period tanks and are very different.
@Pink.andahalf I re-examined the units, and I agree with you. I still have a problem with unit distinction, but it seems I remembered the wrong army having this problem to the extent I was having.
They delayed it for like an entire year for the dumbest reason possible not long before it was supposed to launch. The game then vanished into thin air. They didn't just kill any hype the game had, they went back in time and erased any hype from ever occurring whatsoever.
They tried to Chibi a game that was way more anime than they thought
Like, they needed anime for AW
Like, compare the Sonja theme with its original, and her design, they feel completely different
Like, they made her feel a special girl and not an inocent girl that wished for peace and had to defend people
Also, the redesigns destroyed a lot of the power of the characters
Like, Max looks fat, Lash looks less crazy and Hawke looks less intimidating
"Everyone thought the war would be over in a few weeks" 😂😂😂 Man, people really are out of touch these days
For sales data, I think the best way to estimate the amount of sales would be using the UK physical copies sold data since that data is reported every week. With a quick google search I was only able to find relative rankings, but even that can be used to create a rough estimate. Based on a quick and dirty comparison with the Metroid Prime remasters sales, I think the estimate of Advance Wars selling around 400k copies could roughly be correct.
The week of its release, Advance Wars was in third for boxed releases. But this dropped quickly, second week it dropped to rank 17, third week was 31 and the fourth week ended with rank 38. So most of its sales were only in the first week. Yet the sales in this first week was not enough to reach the top 10 sales of April. Metroid Prime remastered had the physical version released in the beginning of the month before. In this full month of sales, it managed to reach 9th in the monthly ranking of physical sales in the UK. It was reported in its first week that it sold half of the original sales. I was only able to find how much the OG sold in its first week in the USA, so I corrected that number by 20% since the UK market is roughly 1/5 of the USA market. So this means that the remaster sold 25000 copies in the first week. It had a 79% fall in sales in its second week but had a sales rise 24% in its third week. This means it sold 25000+5250+6510=36760 copies in its first 3 weeks of sales. The only data I could find for the fourth week was that it dropped out of the top 10, so it sold most of its physical copies in the first three weeks. This means roughly 40000 physical copies is enough to get in the top 10 monthly sales ranking in the UK, which Advance Wars was unable to reach in the week it sold the most copies. The first week of Advance Wars was definitely worse than what Metroid Prime remaster sold in in March. And since Advance Wars had a sharp drop every week after, I don't expect the overall sales to surpass the March Metroid Prime remaster sales. (As a side not, the 40000 number is not that important, since it is only used here establish that Advance Wars sold less than Metroid Prime remaster. You could make the UK market any x% of the USA market and still reach the same conclusion)
The nice thing is that the Nintendo earning reports showed the total amount Metroid Prime remaster sold globally at the end of March, which you can use to extrapolate the upper limit of what Advance Wars sold (assuming that the distribution of sales across the world did not differ between the two games). Metroid Prime remaster sold 1090000 digital and physical copies. While the physical copies were only available for Match, the digital version of Metroid Prime was released a month earlier. This makes it difficult to estimate the sales for March only. Best case for Advance wars is that the sales in the two months was equal, which means that the number of physical and digital copies Advance wars sold is less than 545k. But for most games, the majority of sales are made in the first week. Tears of the Kingdom sold 10 million in its first week, but "only" sold 8.1 million more as of June 30th. So I expect the upper limit of 545k to be even lower. Of course all this is based on assumptions build upon assumptions, but the accuracy could be improved by adding more games to compare Advance Wars to. For example, Dead Island 2 released the same week, was first in the weekly ranking and second in the sales of April, and was reported to have sold 1 million in its first three days. Games that released earlier and had stable positions in the top 10 every week could also be used to narrow down the estimate by using their first week sales and the changes per week.
As someone who works retail in the UK, Nintendo games outside of their flagship series like Mario, Zelda, Pokemon etc. really don't sell well in boxed copies. We don't have the immense Nintendo fanbases of the USA who buy every new game. Stores also don't stock many copies and don't give them much shelf space as a consequence.
@@cattysplati live in america and have only met one person in person that even knows what advance wars is.
Everything said here I share the same sentiment on the game. Its a shame it turned out this way, but for what its worth, your content gave a lot of people great joy during the hype phase of the reboot and still continue to do so. While the Reboot Camp may not have delivered the results we desired, you still gave us passionate and enthusiastic content about one of your most beloved franchises. So thank you for all you do Mangs, I know it must've been difficult to make this video but all of this needs to be said from one of the most passionate creators I know
Yeah, you absolutely cannot say that Mangs did not give this game a fair go. He very clearly tried hard to love it.
It's literally Javiover
Things are definitely looking Grimm
Remember when Call of Duty delayed literally any release over a real life war? Yeah, me neither. And that series has the fandom to afford it. Delaying Advance Wars for years is like doing that with an Ogre Battle sequel. You’re done
Sincerely the 3D graphics made me put a step back (they look like a fake phone game) and the fact that Dual Strike was not included was another point in not to buy it. I love Advance Wars I’m still playing sometimes with my friends with Dual Strike. Yes maybe the DS version may be broken compared to others but casually is amazingly fun.
I totally agree with the graphics part! So many times with foreign armies I couldn't tell between tanks and recons since the designs were so strange and inconsistent. It was nice to play through reboot but by the end I had a totally new appreciation for the OG graphics and soundtrack. Both have aged phenomenally well compared to the new release
No multiplayer. Literally everything else could have been excused if they had just added a matchmaking function and a leaderboard. Honestly, I haven't even played 2 hours of the game because of how much it killed my hype.
Leaderboards are pointless. And wargroove has issues, but multiplayer is a modern necessity.
This was my first experience with Advanced Wars.
I play Fire Emblem religiously, and the similar looking combat looked fun. Fire Emblem with tanks was a heck yes.
I thought it was a fun time, but it wasn't hard to tell there was something off in certain places.
I'm almost finished with the second campaign, and feel like it's something I could play again. Maybe I should find a *completely legal* copy of the original release and see how that one feels just for fun
You should play the originals, you'll quickly notice the difference
AW2 GBA and AW:Dual Strike are masterpeices imo, so they are well worth checking out! :)
I say you should continue your advance wars journey with either dual strike or Days of Ruin/Dark Conflict
The second game being my favorite AW
@@thomasquesada7248 I never played Days of Ruin but seeing Mangs play it, it seems like a really fun game.
There was 3 legal copies of days of ruin in the "book-off" near my mall but they be asking 40 bucks for it
I guess I’m just weird, because I actually like the graphics and animations of the game. The plastic, toy-like looks of the units stand out and make it look unique compared to other games, and still fits the series sort of light take on war.
I don’t think they compare to the original graphics, which are timeless, but I don’t think they’re bad or awful.
Yes, of course it would be great if it weren't the laziest plastic appearance I've ever seen, it's not even the style they want to aim for, it's the maximum lowness that I haven't seen since Pokemon.
Ugly models, ugly textures, ugly animations, the only thing that was saved were the OJ animations because thank God they didn't make them in 3D because I don't even want to imagine what they would look like with that apathetic style.
I was happy that they "revived" the franchise, but as soon as I saw that I knew that they only took it out to try to throw a bait and make them fall like in Pokémon that they buy regardless of the quality.
On the one hand it makes me happy that it's screwed, but on the other that will only make them not make more games and we will only have Wargroove... God, the section is fine but the mechanics are chaos
Just to be clear, I don't think anybody wants the visuals to look like most other games. I sure don't want more generic realism at all. Way too much of that already. I just don't want the units to look like cheap plastic either. Think of the original 2d sprites, which are both very cartoony and NOT plastic looking either. No reason the new 3d versions couldn't have done the same.
@@LuisMendez-ru7nj What about the animations are ugly to you? They look fine to me. I like the way the tanks recoil after firing, and the way infantry trudge across the rivers and mountainsides.
I mean, the classic graphics never struck me as a particularly gritty, high realism game either. Days of Ruin is what happens when there’s no cartoonish aesthetics.
I WILL admit that they perhaps could have had more shades of color for the units instead of monochrome
@@AtillaTheFun1337 The character animations aren't really animated they're using that technique where you draw an image in a program and the program allows you to slide the layers around and move arms and add effects to a 2D image as if it's a 3D model, it looks really lazy and bad and all the characters just look kind of fat to me at least in the face. The units don't look like plastic or like sarge's heroes to me they just look unfinished, they look like 3D models from an alpha of a game or one of those deleted scenes from an animated movie that has no textures or anything, there's no lighting on them, no shading, they're not shiny plastic they just have no shading at all. And the animations for these models are slow, I don't think people want Days of Ruin realism they just want colorful graphics that are well drawn and animated. In my opinion the 2D art is amateurish and the 3D models are below 3D modeling college student level.
Changing the art style is the worst change.
As someone taking project management and operations management in college right now Its so interesting seeing those concepts in action (as in what not to do) in the real world.
Also for some reason I'm really good at telling the new units apart, but thats just me.
What do you think wayforward should've done if we go back in time and they still had to make this game?
If I was the manager, I would've made the developers complete both advance wars games to properly understand the series better. I would also try to make the game look "cooler", maybe not as far as Days of Ruin went, but more in line with modern fire emblem games (excluding engage) and xenoblade chronicles. Those games are still anime but they also don't look kiddy. I'd also try to let the team socialise and bond with each other, so there could be more genuine passion for making the game instead of it being purely for money.
I'm not a manager and probably never will be, but it's fun to think about.
Did you play a lot of the GBA games?
I wonder if it's pretty easy to tell if you're relatively new to the series, but hard for those who are very used to the sprites.
Personally I only struggle with the Tank and Medium Tank, but only for Orange Star and Blue Moon. The other 3 factions are sufficiently different in their sprite features that it's easy. But the shapes used to form Tanks and Medium Tanks are way too similar for Orange Star and Blue Moon.
Was this made in the case of the game losing Best Sim/Strategy in The Game Awards?
I also want to add some notes that you left out:
1. You cannot save Versus matches midway; this was a feature present since Famicom Wars, but to exclude it in Local Multiplayer is baffling, especially when the CO power crashes and controls locking up happens.
2. Toning down difficulty in Challenge Campaigns should've been an option like Casual Mode to Normal Campaigns. The fact that Kanbei's Error?! adds a Bomber to your starting units really makes it much easier compared to the original, which was definitely why you abandoned your Challenge Campaign playthrough.
3. Some Quality of Life Improvements seen in Dual Strike are unfortunately missing. One example is the expanded End of Battle report, which tells you how many units were deployed and destroyed, how many properties were seized, and your total cost value of all your units, both current and overall, and all properties that were in your possession by the end of the battle. That was a handy way to determine how you lose a timed battle if units and property count wasn't the winning factor.
4. There will be no additional updates as WayForward has moved on to other projects. Without them, Nintendo cannot update this game in any way, so we will have to deal with those annoying glitches and obvious flaws. Plus, it's made in Unity, so any updates will cost Nintendo money per download due to Unity's recent policy changes, and they don't even know how Unity works, as they usually use their own proprietary engines, rather than common ones like Unreal and Unity.
"and they don't even know how Unity works, as they usually use their own proprietary engines, rather than common ones like Unreal and Unity."
ok, thats just objectivly wrong.
Nintendo (or studios afiliated with nintendo directly) used unity in several projects. And its a wellknown fact that they use Unity for prototyping of smaller scale projects internally.
Super Mario Run is also famouslydone entirely in unity(and also a complete developed inhouse)
Inteligent system(altough second party only) also uses unity (and used unity for fire emblem Engage).
Like Nintendo has enough either inhouse teams, or second party studios that would be able ot take over if they really wanted to
Sad, but true and I agree with all your points. Hell, it was a bad enough that I didn't want to even buy it myself even if it meant contributing to future AW games. They really half-assed this one and maybe that was the whole point tbh. Similar to some profit-driven movies, spend 5 million and pray it makes a quick 20 mil instead of spending 200 million for a quality film.
I'm hoping the AI programmer got paid in Subway gift cards cause the AI was schlop.
They don't even deserve subway giftcards Deej.
they dabbled too much and lost at the end.
To be honest AI is the one hard thing in this kind of game, that being said nothing can excuse it to be both slow AND stupid, making stupid and fast AI is easy. Making a smart one is harder, but far from impossible if you take your time.
As far as I know, the programmer was an indean 13 years old
The AI oversight is such a shame. How incredible would it have been to have had two AIs to play against: (1) sort of stupid, but charming and exploitable like the original AI, and (2) a modern, very challenging AI?
I would have settled for just (3) competent, though.
In an interesting example of history repeating itself, the original Advance Wars release in North America was delayed due to it originally going to come out right after 9/11.
You're wrong actually, it's weirder.
It came out in North America on 10 September 2001. But was delayed in Europe until 2002 and released in Japan in 2004, bundled with the sequel. Ironically, it was initially going to be Japan only. And reboot camp isn't available in Japan.
I love the remaster’s visual style so much. I might be in the minority but I’ll die on that hill
Honestly i’m in a similar boat. I think they fit the theme as the original games. They could be better, but I feel like they did a decent job.
I’m definitely not offended by them like most people.
Personally like the CO art but I am in agreement with unit designs. Green Earth for example can be difficult to tell the difference between some units at a glance.
@@Kylesico912x I agree to that. I found it somewhat difficult to differentiate Black Hole units. Bombers/Fighters and Tanks/MdTanks I believe were particularly tricky.
While it is sad that the Adcance Wars franchise won't grow as much thanks to the mediocrity of reboot camp, it is nice that the community has still stayed strong and continues to grow and remain a healthy community instead of toxic insult-fests
Hey we aren't the fire emblem fanbase going over waifu wars or saying you're a German WW2 soldier just cause you sided with Edlegard lmao (well in AW case play as a black hole CO)
But yeah its crazy how toxic FE fans can get even after the whole 3ds era ended a new wave of toxic discourse took over
*THE IRON LEGION LAUGHS AT YOUR OPINIONS!*
Okay I have a defense on the AI with the Sea Fortress: Hawke's AI basically wants to use both the HP and damage value. Since there aren't any units injured, it's not going to use it. This happened also in the old games where Andy DOESN'T activate his power cause there aren't any units to heal. As soon as they see the opportunity, then they use it. For example, I'm willing to bet on that battle with Hawke had his Fighter take damage at some point of his attack, he'll activate his power at the last moment. I know this cause in the Great Sea Battle, Hawke used it plenty of times on his turn at the very last moment after his unit attacked cause some were injured.
The one I noticed, on my end, was the mission against Drake. I thought, maybe, they were saving it for the right opportunity, but I think because the AI doesn't cheat in FoW, they don't see your units, therefore, there's "nothing" to damage.
Even the old games had the AI units behaved in a certai matter. In the Great Sea Battle, Hawke's naval forces on the south DIDN'T move because they were basically on patrol. Unless your unit is IN RANGE of the attack, they will never move. So the strategy there is to basically wait correctly before going.
Something I will say for those that are planning to get all S ranks: SOMETHING CHANGED. This was personally my complaint. In the old games, outside of the Black Hole campaign, the CO of that nation is the one being judged on score. Always. Great Sea Battle, again I know XD, in the old games, you had to use Green Earth's main force. Yellow Comet was the killing blow, but Green Earth's army was the one being judged. NOT IN THE REBOOT CAMP, THOUGH. You can't do the same strategy. In the REBOOT CAMP, if you do the same thing, it's the GOLD COMET'S score, NOT GREEN EARTH. This may be seem trivial, but the idea behind the old games was for the Green Earth to pummel the Black Hole army after everything they did. That and you have a main base for the Green Earth. Gold Comet just starts with an island. You can stiill get the S rank (I did it on my stream), but to get there was a pain. I had to build up slowly and then execute it with the Gold Comet, NOT Green Earth.
I still think the AI was fine. It was a bit of a challenge, especially getting all S on the harder campaign. But it's... a bit easier. For example, with Sonja vs. Adder, Adder's forces is TREMENDOUSLY big. He starts out with an army while Sonja only has like 4 units. First few turns is extremely crucial and with the AI cheating, it made the mission very intense. With the remake, though it is plains, it wasn't nearly as bad, but still a big force to get through. One of the most infamous missions, Kanbei's Error?, was.... not bad on the reboot. I... did it on my first try and got an S rank. In the old game, there was a SPECIFIC movement you had to do to get the S rank cause the AI cheats, but in the reboot, it was... honestly easy.
Personally, I don't mind the graphics, BUT I do agree on being EXTREMELY hard to identify one another. When you use that example, I... honestly had to think REALLY hard which unit is which. Unrelated side note, Dual Strike is the ONLY game I can tell... WITHOUT looking. The really funny thing Intelligent Systems made a unique sound on the movement and destroyed units. So I can just basically close my eyes and tell what unit is being moved from the AI. Heck, that was my cheat in FoW since I can HEAR their movement XD
I do have A BIG BIG BIG complaint about the graphics involving gameplay: YOU CAN'T TELL WHAT HP YOUR UNIT HAS IF YOU LOAD THEM. Yes. You have to remember EVERY SINGLE OF YOUR UNIT'S HP WHENEVER YOU LOAD. This was extremely stupid and unfair, especially on the first campagin. On that one, there were multiple times I had to evacuate a unit, but when I went to unload the same unit on a shore, yeah... I sent out the one that was damaged instead. Ooops... WHY IS THERE NO NUMBERS ON THE UNIT?! The old version had that! That was extremely stupid and unnecessary change they did and even should the old games suffered that, wouldn't it be best to, I don't know, ADD THAT?
The delay on the CO powers... Good Lord... yeah that one sucked. I have animations turned off on my end, but I still got to sit on the animation for the CO power. The old games it was fast and snappy. But in the remake, they had to change it so it has a distinct difference between each CO. Some did help out like global damage/heal was almost instant, which was nice. But then you had... Gold Rush... You just gain money, but they felt the need to include EVERY SINGLE UNIT getting the coin buff, which... made no sense.
Here's another: I know there's suppose to be personality on the COs since they are heavily involved as well, but... why is it that... in the mid-
"It appears that my foe is doing well. I must not overstep my boundaries"
-... MIDDLE OF THE BATTLE, AT TIMES, THEY THROW A DIALOGUE?! >< Sure I understand in the beginning, but the generic dialogues keep popping up on the COs and it gets... a bit annoying. This is one of the complaints I had with Duck Tales, actually, from the same company. Graphics look nice, but... they... just... won't... stop.... TALKING. I'm hopping on a FREAKING cane like a pogo stick! Why is it I have to hear that dialogue OVER AND OVER again?!
Back in Advance Wars, it's on all maps... You do something and boom, mid dialogue. Generic as hell, too, depending on the CO. I don't know... maybe don't have them there? ><
Oh and speaking of graphics and gameplay: Unit drops. Good lord... the foot soldiers take a BIT of time to do that. With the tanks and copters, it's BOOM instant. But the foot soldiers? Nah. They had to animate it where they hop off the thing and then land. I know it's minor, but... that's another time spend looking and going "Ooooh, aaaah..." and whatnot x.x
Here's another personal gripe, but... it makes a bit of sense. In the Challenge mode... YOU CAN'T SAVE. I don't mean you can't quit, but... here's what happens in the old games:
In the old version, you had the option to save. This is just in case you had a moved planned out and it's going to be the same thing over and over again, so why not save? Saves a bit of time. In the Reboot, however, unless you are playing normal/war room (which at that point, it's just rewind), you CAN'T save. So... good luck planning things out and having to do the same move over and over again cause the game didn't let you save. Normal/War Room, you can rewind, but... uh.... it's only for that one turn. So, again, good luck trying to redo THE ENTIRE MATCH IF YOU MESSED UP.
Why does it make sense? Well, in hard mode, it's suppose to be harder, therefore, you can't mess up as much. But... having to do the same move over and over again just... puts you to sleep. I remember trying to find the right moves on the final missions of Gold Comet and Green Earth from that and had to basically start over, cause the opening didn't do that well. So back to the drawing board, I suppose...
Another personal gripe: Why don't I have intel on the map I'm about to go to on the campaign? In the original, you press L and boom, there's your map. Why is it such a big deal? Well.... what if you need a SPECIFIC CO on that spot? You would really hate it if you have to start ALL OVER AGAIN just because you placed the wrong CO. I can't do that in the Reboot. There's... no option.
Whew okay... With all that said.... there are a few things I like, but.... yes... The bad outweighs it, sadly. I did enjoy it and I liked it, but some of these changes were not good at all. That and... the delay? Come on, now... What was the cause of it since they just needed to take the old games, repolish it, test it, and see what's wrong. I wonder what they found that they needed to delay. Not worth it, nor was the wait because of an actual war. But... that's just me.
EDIT: SORRY for the HUGE wall of text, but there you go XD That's my thought on it and if you read all of it (or skimped through it), personally, thank you! ❤
Holy tanks... How long did this take you to write?
@@salamence6828 Oh it wasn't bad XD Maybe a few minutes. I do type fast and, oddly enough, I may not be a pro like the other guys, but I like the puzzle aspect of Advance Wars.
For a background, I've played all three, Days of Ruin, and even the War Room Challenge (which WAS A PAIN, BY THE WAY XD). So it was really cool to be able to hear on what the other side was like on the game.
One thing I haven't touched, though, was the AI going against each other. Most of the game involved on the campaign, but after playing through it again on stream, thought I would give my thoughts as well XD
Agreed. While I enjoyed seeing the actual unit models on the map, the lack of multiplayer destroyed this game.
Biggest issue for me was the 60 bucks pricing. This is a redo of a GBA game, 40 bucks max for me on principal.
This comes to show that Nintendo still haven’t learned their lesson after the GBA release. Video games DO NOT affect what’s going on the real world, nor does it save any lives. Not to mention, Call of Duty games was coming out constantly during war times happening outside of the States. I feel like some honorable members at WayForward did wanted the game to come out while it was ready to go despite the reboot’s flaws, but of course, Nintendo was being a buffoon for thinking holding a video game will “save lives and end wars” while Activision was already releasing Modern Warfare Remastered, then rushing out plans for its next 2 titles regardless if the Ukraine war was happening. I feel like if that weren’t to happened, the rebooted series would’ve been a good gaming classics on launch.
I personally went from a guaranteed buy the moment I saw the announcement trailer to A Hard pass the nanosecond I learned you could not do 4 player custom scenarios online. Playing this game with three of my buddies over a Link cable is what really made this game for me. I would have overlooked everything else.
I was shocked when I found out that a remake of 2 gba games was 60 dollars, meanwhile you have collections coming out at the same time on Switch like Megaman Battle Network Collection for 60 dollars, which included all 6 games each with online trading and battling that isn't frustrating to use. Also the Castlevania Advance Collection which KONAMI (notoriously penny pinchers) released for 20 dollars and includes settings like higher quality music options, save states, visual effects, and a replay system. Now look at Advance Wars, 60 dollars for a game that hardly has online (Can only play against friends, custom maps are limited to 19 x 19, 2 player online in a game that can be played with 4 players) instead choosing to focus on the art instead of the online. So let's look at the art, in my opinion, a lot of it is weird. A lot of the VA's seemed like they were choosing famous influencers instead of who had the best voice and some of the voices were really offputting in-game. The character art, again in my opinion, is weird. The characters look too much like they came out of an american cartoon in the early 2010's, its fine if other people like the voices and art but to me and seemingly to others that didn't buy the game or were disappointed, the character art and voices did not fit the theme at all. The best thing about the game is the music and that's really all I can say about it, should people pay 60 dollars for 2 gba games with remastered music? Not when there's so much better competition imo.
WaaaAaaaaa WaaaAaaaaa
@@appletuntrainer Yeah I paid $60 for a new iteration of a series that's been waiting over a decade for a good remake or game and I got completely ripped off. I'm posting a comment about why I feel ripped off in a video about why the game is a rip off. If you don't want to see that then don't click on the video?
The aesthetic worked for me, the graphics didn't. The Wars games have always been a bit goofy, so the toy soldiers thing works with that. The execution on the other hand... well you said it all.
What really kiled the remaster for me though is the slowness of everything. You said most of it, but to add on with the programming knowledge I do have it's clear that the game waited for unit moment animations to finish before it even began thinking about its next move, which is a problem solvable with basic multithreading. That's not something you need to often think about in something like a platformer, but it makes a big difference in a game like AW. This really was the wrong dev to handle this project.
Hey stopping by to let you know I discovered a little known turn based strategy game that Wayforward made for the 3DS called Transformers Rise of the Dark Spark. It's actually an amazing gem. Budget presentation but fun mechanics. A little like Fire Emblem with a rock paper scissors hierarchy, unique character skills and equippable mods that can break when damaged ala Metroid Federation Force.
About doing a reboot AI vs original AI match, I see two ways to solve the luck issue:
- Modify both games to have a fixed luck value, this way no rng is involved. (Do we know if one of the games cheat by knowing the rng in advance?)
- Keeping the luck is more difficult, but doable if someone programs a way to transfer a save from a game to the other.
Frankly I know this may be an odd choice, but I think the darker edgier choice of Days of Ruin may have actually done better as a reboot. Received better without the extra cartoony toybox graphics, know what I mean?
100% Agree
Honestly, considering how seriously AW2 takes war. That probably would have translated pretty well.
That would make more sense as a brand new game (which is what they SHOULD have done instead of a remake). I think it would have done even worse if it was a edgy game, especially if you consider the Ukraine-Russia timing.
That would've been a far better choice. Advance wars only appeals to adults who grew up with the gba originals. The series has almost no potential to market towards kids so it was objectively a poor decision to go in that direction.
I have no hard sales figures but I can confirm that both my local Gamestop and Target are still selling out their stocks of the game. While it had a slow start, I think the Re-Boot Camp has picked up steam.
Still three copies on my shelf at the local Walmart. Maybe GameStop did better.
@@a-s-greigThose local copies sitting on the shelf could be a third or fourth restock. I hope you realize your logic doesn’t make sense.
It still cost $60 without a single deal
@@therealjaystone2344 Yea $60 is cheap! Do you have any idea what it costs to pay humans to develop to create new animations and graphics and to make sure it runs on new hardware? It's pricey AF. But this game is a steal to be able to play it in the Switch because it has such a huge competitive scene along with Mega Man battle network.
That's unfortunate, I really don't want this game to sell well, I'd rather never get another AW game again rather than get another AW game like this.
They seem to have an hiperfixation on 3d models. Didnt learn a thing from tiny metal experience :(.
I d rather have a hd pixel art master piece than the advance wars, disgaea 6, pokemon pearl, or similar 3d experience.
While I don't hate Disgaea 6/7 art style, Disgaea characters felt so much more alive on the 2D sprites
not sure these companies have many people who still can make pixel art like they could 20 years ago sadly, 3d is cheap and reusable.
If that's what Nintendo asked for/approved then that's what we get regardless of the studio's strengths
The aesthetic puts a lot of people off: The original was cartoony with a bit of grit, but the new toy-like aesthetic kiddifies it well beyond that.
The lack of lack of advertising also played a roll; not only in not telling people it was still/now out, but I'm pretty sure the actions/shooting in the original reveal didn't have the same oomph as they seem to in your video. I remember looking around near release of what the game looked like but couldn't find anything/much which wasn't from before the delays.
The lack of a save feature in multiplayer was a bummer for me.
It's very sad that the most hyped I was for this game was when Mangs was playing through the originals again
The trailer was what got me into the games and through those I found Mangs' channel, and through Mangs I got better at AW and even got into fire emblem, So I thank Mangs and his community for being so welcoming and helpful.
Several delays and nonsensical censorship pretty much sealed this remaster's fate, it's that simple.
I can't tell which delayed/anticipated game is worse: Kingdom Hearts 3 (even including the Re:Mind DLC) or this?
The issue i see with the ingame graphics is that each faction uses their unique unit designs for overworld sprites, when they didn't in the GBA games. In the originals, all tanks use a default sprite (with different colors) but the battle animations showed something different for each faction.
Going with unique overworld designs means you not only have to learn units, but the way each faction shows a unit.
Nah, thats a non issue at all, the reason the og sprites were good and readable at all is that they had distinct features
Either being a clear distinc feature such as Missles's white missle-launchers and Recons being a literal car, or sometimes just size differance, just as Meduim Tanks being twice the size of tanks, or Bcopters being rounder than Tcopters
You can do that WHILE having diferent factions, its all a matter of skill issue
I remember talking with you on one of your Nintendo Directs about how important multiplayer was, and the features it needed to be successful... NOT. ONE. WAS. IN. THE. GAME. Great video as always Mangs! Cheers!
Tbh though, Sturm's power literally nuking the game is pretty funny. Once.
Warside is an Advanced Wars esque turn based strategy curruntly being developed by LAVABIRD. Still very much in alpha stage but it looks like they want to carry the original AW design into a modern top down turn-based strategy. Basically what AW Re-Boot Camp should have been
Also Wargroove was really good. I haven't got Wargroove 2 yet, although I've heard some fans say it was disappointing
@@tj12711oof 😅
@@tj12711 Wargroove is pretty good but suffers in how little the not-COs abilities impact the game. Having a small area heal is shameful. At least Days of Ruin let you put the CO on any unit to boost it, plus units around it, AND you also had the power. It allowed for proper assymmetry and actual spikes of power for pushing.
dont forget if your CO dies in DoR u can redeploy them on another unit, meanwhile if your Wargroove CO dies its a game over @@migueeeelet
@@tj12711 I was not a fan of Wargroove
The reason i like the reboot camp is i get to experience the first two games in the series. My jumping on point was back when Days of Ruin came out, and i was lucky enough to get a copy of Dual Strike. So while its a lesser experience I am at least able to play the games.
I'm pretty sure you can emulate GBA games on a refrigerator at this point.
Just download an emulator on PC or even your phone and the experience will be 100% better than playing the remake
was too expensive
I'm actually pretty sad to hear everyone hated this. I have been really enjoying it.
Did you play any of the originals?
Any time a publisher advertises a game and then delays it, they actively shoot themselves in the foot. Any hype I had for the remake was gone after waiting months.
I really wish there could be some way to offer incentives for developers to improve flopped games through patches. Sadly, there’s really no money to make in that :/
No mans sky.
Only so much they can do, to improve this game .
Considering nintendo cared so little about the remake that they were willing to massively delay it for a pr stunt, this project was probably doomed from the getgo.
@@dinar8749
I'm afraid to think the only reason why they released it is because they noted the IRL conflict was not gonna just end and was not worth just a game for that, or for a more cynical viewpoint, because after the conflict just stopped being a "trendy topic" then there was little reason to hold said game back.
@@clownplayer7265 Yeah it's probably the latter sadly
Stop taking iconic pixel art games with incredible spritework and making them look like cheap mobile games with 3d. This ruined Mega man X, and the Zero series alone proves it. It ruined Golden Sun and games like Octopath Traveler, Cross Code, and Sea of Stars proves it. It ruined Metal Slug and the fact that theres nothing on the market to actually compare the quality and creativity of its animation to is a testament to the tragedy of capitalism not giving a shit about the passionate artistry that sticks with people over the re-sellable garbage they can pump out like an injection molded playskool toy that winds up in a landfill before your kid even hits puberty.
edgy
Megaman X was going downhill since X5
At least we got some good music
I was super hyped to get this game till they announced it was delayed because of a real war. Call of duty is released almost every year and nobody has a problem with it despite the fact that came out during various wars..
In Nintendo's defense, if you said 2000 ppl play it daily 20 years later, basically means 0 ppl play it and you can't make money from it for the cost of making the game.
I wonder if MattMcMuscles will make a _”Wha Happun”_ video on Reboot Camp and talk about how cursed the series is being delayed due to real world wars and the 9/11 Terroists Attacks, getting games cancelled like 64 Wars and the mismanagement like Days of Ruin not even being released in Japan until like 2013 where it was a Club Nintendo Reward if I’m remembering correctly? But yeah Advance Wars deserved better after just only getting Virtual Console re-releases on Wii U Eshop during the 2010s.
WWIII will break out if Nintendo tries to release another Advance Wars game.
@@nlaldwouldn't be fucking suprised tbh
I am one of the new faces that this game brought in. I actually love the remake and the experience it gave me. I think I understand why this was not what people wanted but I am still happy we got it and that it brought me to the community!
There's a silent majority of people like you who just enjoyed the game for what it was - an accessible, casual remake of the games. It won't be a disappointment for you (and it wasn't for me as I got what I expected from the trailers to be honest), but for those who were looking for the potential of Advance Wars as basically a modern chess to be realised with a massive multiplayer capability on a modern platform, then... well, it was a colossal disappointment.
So it's a good game for some; a terrible game for others. Very subjective.
Yeah me too. I never played advanced wars before but always thought it looked like a series I’d like. Didn’t know about reboot camp until shortly before it released, wasn’t aware of the delays. So there was nothing to be disappointed about for me. Found the campaigns to be fun and made several of my own custom maps. Feel like I got my moneys worth out of it. I do wish the multiplayer was better, a match maker would be great. I like the in game graphics, but again I never played any of the other advanced wars games so I got nothing to compare it to. I think making it look more like a game of pretend soldiers was also due to the war.
I encourage you to try emulating Dual strike (loose sequel to aw2) and my favorite Days of Ruin/Dark Conflict if you want more AW
Still got tons of fun with it, been playing it, S ranked the war room when i was bored.
no online multiplayer matchmaking was really a drag though...
With the AI it sounds like the programmers wanted to mimic high level play, but where alot of AIs in games fail in that regard is they never switch to "Ok time to attack"
I wish the entire game kept the 2D asthetic that's shown in its cutscenes. It would have looked so much better. There's this weird notion that if an old game is 2D, then the remaster has to be 3D. There's nothing wrong with 2D graphics in 2024.
I can't express enough how much the graphics put me off.
I played all the previous Advance Wars games. I played all the Fire Emblem games up to the 3DS. I'm a huge fan of turn-based strategy games in general (as well as real time ones).
But man, those graphics are just absolutely awful. I commented this under the original trailer, and under every video I saw about the game: They better include a classic graphics mode.
When it became clear that they didn't, there was no reason for me to get the game.
As I write this, I am playing AW1 on a separate PC. I have absolutely no issue with playing through the original games again. But the remakes are just a worse-looking version. So why should I pay money for that?
"The COs all look amazing." Counterpoint: Max.
WayForward: What’s that? Your favorite character isn’t a woman? Sorry, can’t help you there! I’m too busy spanking the monkey to the girls lol!
Out of all the faults Reboot Camp has, not having any automated matchmaking is probably the worst part to me. I don't really have friends I play Nintendo games with so the online might as well not exist since I can't just be matched with a stranger to play against.
The price was pretty egregious imo. Not to devalue the franchise, but they were basically asking customers to fork out the original retail price of both games. Requiring people to buy both games at basically their original MSRP on the GBA boggles my mind (Link’s Awakening was price a little too high, though it arguably need more TLC than Advance Wars did.).
$60 was too high for AW 1+2. Should have been $40, or at least list them as separate titles.
I mean, look at Pikmin 1+2… even if it took less effort to port those games, just imagine it from a consumer value perspective. If they want to revive an old niche franchise like advance wars, they shouldn’t be pricing out customers new to the franchise. It’s just such a questionable move.
Oh after all the delays i forgot this exists
i can understand where your coming from, you've been playing this a lot longer than me and i was very young when i first played it on the gba, i also agree that the multiplayer could have been done better, but for me I've seen a lot of companies throw out games that have micro transaction, grind-athons, ultra high-specs that aren't needed etc, that just having a game like this with a story and replay-ability just makes me feel happy. so what if its just nostalgia, at the end of the day i sat down and played through this game from beginning to end and still find myself coming back to play it now and then. this game may get mixed reviews from fans but picking apart the good and bad might be what helps build a better advance wars in the future.