Advance Wars: Days of Ruin is a very fascinating entry in the Advance Wars series on account of how it fits in next to the rest of its series- or perhaps more accurately, how it does not. The "Wars" series is the first of Intelligent System's forays into the turn-based strategy gameplay now commonly associated with Fire Emblem, with Famicom Wars predating Fire Emblem 1 by just shy of two years, and Advance Wars being released in the West more than two years before Blazing Blade. As franchises, the two are just as distinct as they are alike- Fire Emblem is set in the "swords and sorcery" era of warfare, Nintendo Wars is set in the modern day "guns and tanks" era. Each unit in a Fire Emblem map is a character unto themselves, while units in Nintendo Wars are interchangeable and disposable. Fire Emblem rewards playing safe and ensuring your team is ready for any challenge you throw at them, while Nintendo Wars rewards going on the offensive and seizing ground before your opponent can get entrenched.
Days of Ruin... in many ways, adopts more of Fire Emblem's philosophies than Nintendo Wars'. While all of Advance Wars' obvious mechanics remain intact, Days of Ruin rejiggers the balance to give this game more of a Fire Emblem flavour. It also takes away the Advance Wars trilogy's distinct, carefree "war is fun!" attitude for a darker aesthetic, a decision that has had a distinct impact on the game's reception. The developers' decision to go for this tone was done out of a desire to not keep Advance Wars stale, and for what it's worth, Days of Ruin has a very unique tone out of IS's properties. With that said, this was the last Nintendo Wars game until the remake of the first two Advance Wars games- it seems aesthetic was not enough to keep people enticed. And they almost forgot to release this in Japan- it wasn't for four years until they finally released a version of this on Club Nintendo for the JP audience.
As for why I'm coming around to this game? Well, this game has plenty of fun with its setting, and some solid characters and moments worth highlighting. And more importantly, I wanted to come back to a game that was taking things seriously. This is a game that is telling a story on purpose, and while the stakes can inspire a bit of 'doom and gloom', they also know just the right levity to keep things at a suitable emotional level. This thing is still Advance Wars at heart, and Advance Wars always loved its comedy.
(As an aside, the series name "Nintendo Wars" is because most games are named after the console they appeared on. They apparently weren't super fond of continuing that naming scheme on DS, so it maintained the 'Advance Wars' moniker. The first DS Advance Wars game, Dual Strike, probably benefited by keeping its naming association with the other games that share its characters, but with this game having brand new characters and no longer having the cute "DS" wordplay, the old title is a complete artifact.)
Like, look at this description of the Campaign. This almost feels trite, although I feel like this wasn't quite as common a sell back in 2008 as it is today. Unlike most of the worst kind of post-apocalyptic stories, DoR does have an idea of what the antagonistic force will be, and the thematic purposes of the characters.
As an aside before we get started, Advance Wars has always allowed the player the option of changing the colours of each character, and Days of Ruin keeps this up. On a clean cart, which is what I'm playing, you only start with the options of changing the colours of the four main heroes, out of the twelve possible "COs" (or characters). I won't be doing this, because it won't affect the artwork, but it's a nice little bit of customisation I'm disproportionately fond of.
Well, we can't say we're burying the title drop.
Admittedly, "Days of Ruin" is the title of this game only in North America. The European regions call the game "Dark Conflict", while the eventual Japanese port called it "Lost Light". As for why I am uncharacteristically playing on NA instead of my home region, the answer is that the North American localisation alone has many of the qualities that make me look so fondly at this game. The European localisation had a vastly different, more serious tone, and I don't think that's what this game really wanted. In many cases, Europe does prefer to stick closer to the text while North America takes liberties, and this is one of those cases where I think the Americans were onto something.
There's a few cases of artwork strewn around the game, and it was clearly designed with the DS's screen divider in mind. I think DS games are smart enough to know how big that divider is, but it's always awkward to showcase when that divider isn't around.
One of those in-jokes people have with this game is that the final boss of the GBA Advance Wars games, Sturm, had an ultimate attack where he dropped a meteor on your army, and given the game mechanics of his final battles, he's probably dropping several on you. The fact that the avenue of apocalypse that DoR chose was a meteor strike specifically plays very amusingly with that fact. This is unlikely to be the canonical reason for this, since most characters who remember before the apocalypse don't remember the nations of the GBA games, but we could always be on completely different continents.
But yeah, don't worry about not knowing any of those characters.
The Japanese title, "Lost Light", plays in very well with this element of the story. Part of the reason the Chicxulub impact caused as much devastation as it did was likely due to the constant expulsion of dust particulates into the atmosphere, depriving the Earth of sunlight. DoR is going to acknowledge that, although the absence of sunlight isn't going to physically hinder us in any way. It's more of a symbolic thing.
They phrase it differently later, but this is the game's thesis.
Say hello to our protagonist, Will. He's young and was only in training when the meteors struck, but one gets the impression that in a non-meteor world, he would probably have been a rank-and-file grunt when he graduated.
He sure wasn't prepared for something on this scale.
That stare is mildly terrifying, although the screen gap thing has kinda taken the steam out of things.
Always nice to depict our protagonist in the middle of being traumatised, rather than after the fact. Really setting a tone here.
All of a sudden, map view! We are also taking a very Fire Emblem approach to representing units on the map- that Bike unit represents Will, an approach makes irregular appearances in this game. It never happens in classic AW, but is part and parcel of representing characters' situations in FE.
AW shares its fondness for having is opposing generals sling mud at each other mid-battle with Fire Emblem, but the larger scale of an AW map and the absence of COs from the front lines means they have to go out of their way to justify it as both sides having a radio they talk to one another over. They only mention this justification, like, once or twice per game, but if you're ever wondering how two characters are talking to one another, the answer is radios.
As far back as Famicom Wars, the two major armies battling in the Nintendo Wars were Red Star (later renamed Orange Star when the localisations started happening) and Blue Moon. DoR has given the nation our protagonist hails from the far more country-name-sounding title of "Rubinelle". Given that the name "Nelle" appears to refer to a shining light (and that the commander-in-chief of Advance Wars' Orange Star was named 'Nell'), it's not like we've made much of a change from our roots, but still.
We are introduced to Advance Wars' take on the Brigand Boss of Fire Emblem fame- or "The Beast", as he prefers to be called. The Beast's role is more or less identical to that of a Brigand Boss's- to loudly boast about his wicked nature and equally wicked skills, while being absolutely non-threatening and a good opportunity to ease the player into learning the game mechanics.
He appears to have an army of his own (or at least two other people to serve as his backup units), but as a character, The Beast is defined by selfishness and a disregard for his fellow man. We will see later how the game justifies the traditional scope of Advance Wars combat in a post-apocalyptic setting, but for now, take the existence of people willing to follow The Beast with a grain of salt.
See above about The Beast's treatment of others. I do appreciate that The Beast focuses on this post-apocalyptic "hoard supplies" mentality when it comes to his brand of villainy. Although we will have to give him some time to see how he reacts to a defenceless female when we find one.
Will's protests fall on deaf ears, and we begin our turn with a curious logo. The fact we get assigned this logo when our turn starts is a very mild spoiler, but given the lack of backstory we have for Will so far, a blind player may be forgiven for assuming that this insignia is relevant to Will.
Advance Wars music has traditionally taken the form of "each CO has their own theme, and their theme plays when it is their turn". In a bit where the interface actually does try not to spoil things, this map plays the "no CO" theme for both Will and The Beast, despite both characters having their own themes. We'll be going back to that tradition after this map.
Will is correct- a single bike is no match for three units, especially when one of those units is a vehicle. That may just be a recon, but recons vs bikes never end well for the bikes.
This is equally true when neither of them have machine guns.
Will rallies himself to think about how to get out of this situation in one piece, and invites the player to spend a few minutes clicking on everything on this map and getting an idea as to what sorts of things are likely to be relevant in this game.
Right, so let's see what we've been given to work with...
The Bike is a brand new unit to DoR, and here we can see a few things to be on the eye out for. Bikes are considered tyred units, meaning they can cross smooth terrain quickly, but get quickly caught up on anything slightly difficult. They can move 5 squares at a time optimally, and can shoot up to one square away. They only have one weapon, a machine gun, and can shoot at Infantry, Vehicles, or Helicopters- but don't appear to be very good at shooting anything but the former.
All units have 10 HP, and their Atk and Def values are determined on a per-matchup basis. An advanced player might want to know the exact numbers of each matchup, but an intermediate player can get away with looking at the arrows and judging accordingly.
This is what The Beast is rocking. The machine gun has similar damage prospects, but the armour on his vehicle is going to outweigh the lack of armour on us. The difference between Tire A and Tire B, as it happens, is that Tire B units can cross Plains and Ruins with no penalty, while Tire A units suffer a 1 square penalty for each. When The Beast has a three Move advantage on us, I don't think that's going to save us.
The basic of the basic, Infantry are little more than warm bodies that must be safeguarded to perform their most important duty. Since there won't be any need for Capturing on this map, that won't be relevant, so this guy just exists to make our odds of success that much grimmer.
We can zoom out the Map with R. This also changes the sprite design of our units, but most of the terrain we can see doesn't look all that interesting. What we can see is that pretty much every terrain type is represented on this map- aside from those important ones that are being saved for later.
- Roads offer zero movement penalties to any movement type, but also offer zero defensive benefits. They're there to get your units into place, but you're vulnerable to being caught mid-route.
- Plains are little better. They impede only Tire A units and have a single defensive star's worth of cover, but you generally want to have something better for yourself.
- Ruins are a new terrain type to DoR, and represent the fallen remains of the old world- there's a big chunk of it north of us in the middle there. Ruins are identical to Plains, but give cover in Fog of War. We'll talk about that when we find some.
- Wasteland is the other new terrain type of DoR. There's a lot of it in front of The Beast's recon, and it has an uncommonly high penalty for how common it is- 3 movement tiles for Tired units, and 2 for Treaded ones. They're worth two terrain stars if you're on one, though.
- Woods got a buff compared to AW classic- they now have three terrain stars. Their movement cost is identical to Wasteland, and they also serve as cover.
- In the corners, we can see our first Mountains. These are worth four defensive stars, but can only be traversed by Infantry and Mechs- and Infantry need two of their three movement squares to get on one. This is not a map where they'll be doing much.
Clicking on the Recon to see its movement range, and all this Wasteland is cutting its movement down tremendously. Even the three squares afforded to it allow it to reach us if we remain stationary, though.
Will points out a square to retreat to. It's probably our best one, and it's not going to help us come Day 2.
In Fire Emblem, the default setting is that your turn will automatically end when all of your units have exhausted their actions. Advance Wars has no such setting, and you must manually declare the end of your turn each time. This is a convenience later, trust me.
We can access this menu by pressing the A Button on any square not occupied by a unit. Tutorials refers to the info cards we've been getting on basic mechanics, while Options refers to the basic options like music volume and whether or not the map is divided into a grid. Mission Info contains all the stuff we'd want to look at other than Ending our turn or putting the game down.
The Terms page tells us our victory and defeat conditions. Usually, this'll be pretty obvious, but it's always good to get clarity.
This is the "Status" menu. The columns represent, in order, "Units produced", "Units destroyed", "number of properties", "income", and "available funds", only two of which matter on this map.
The "Chart" menu goes into more detail on our units, information that I rarely care about even on maps with enough units you can't see them all by looking at the map.
As for the "Tactics" option... well, I'd love to show it off, but there's a moment later where it makes more sense. Trust me, we're going to want to hold off.
Let's go ahead and click on this button.
This icon represents characters with no loyalties, and The Beast is more or less the only character to actually use it. There's, like, one or two characters who borrow it later, but you can consider this The Beast's personal emblem.
The Beast moves forward. Well, good news, we've separated the recon from the infantry!
In significantly better news, we have been reinforced by friendlies. This scene is a very Fire Emblem shot, in that the arrival of two characters is represented by two additional units- and it gets even moreso later on. Conventionally, only one CO is supposed to be controlling units on a map.
By "one of ours", she means "from Rubinelle". We'll see later that there is valid reason to check flags, but for now, it's just as much a product of "Will has a gun, is he hostile?"
Although Lin's the one who sees the situation, Brenner is the one who calls the shots. These two get amazing once you get to see how they talk to one another in less-serious moments.
With that said, despite the fact they get nametags, they will be going unnamed to Will for now. For now, all Will needs to know is "we will stop the Beast from shooting at you."
So yeah, Will's unit, the Bike, actually walks to the edge of the map and disappears. This battle really was cut out of a Fire Emblem game and pasted in Advance Wars.
The Beast takes the time to ask what, exactly, Brenner is getting out of this situation.
Brenner tells him exactly the answer you expected: He's a good man, and doing this sort of thing comes to him as naturally as breathing.
Later on, I think The Beast being mentioned to have an actual rank in the military is supposed to be a mild surprise, but Brenner seems to have noticed it immediately. At this point, though, I don't think there is anything about The Beast that really identifies him as a soldier. Like, yeah, he might have the iconography or hardware, but he's had plenty of time to steal those.
The Beast proclaims his lack of loyalties to any law. He is here to take whatever isn't nailed down, and damn the consequences.
The legal definition of "outlaw" is "someone who has been stripped of all legal protections as a punishment for breaking laws". The sentence of outlawry has been abandoned by modern legal practice, but in a post-societal wasteland, it may become the most effective deterrent once more.
Brenner's ability to care about other people stops with those who refuse to do the same.
I believe that's our line.
With a Tank on our side, that will be quite simple. Ah, yes, that unit Brenner has...
The Tank is the basic building block of an Advance Wars army. In addition to its Machine guns for infantry, it also has a Tank Gun to deal solid damage to vehicles- and quite significant amounts to most vehicles that you'll find in high numbers. The Tank Gun can also shoot at Ships and Submarines, but good luck doing that.
We can also see that the Tank can only shoot six Tank Gun shots before running out of ammo. We won't need that many, but it's worth remembering there are finite ammo counts for things that aren't machine guns.
A bit of an interesting change DoR did is that you can choose an enemy to fire on without moving your unit first. This change was designed to nerf some Fog of War cheese tactics, but it's rather neat without that in mind. It's worth noting that this change would actually be brought back for Reboot Camp.
As far as this battle is concerned, we see we are doing 77% damage. The way to think about this number in shorthand is that we will do 7 damage, plus a 70% chance of doing an additional point. The way we are actually doing damage is that every unit actually has 100 HP, and we are doing 77 points of damage plus an additional 0-9, chosen randomly. Only the visible HP matters for situations in which HP is relevant, but the nitty-gritty details can explain some otherwise strange HP fluctuations that come from attacking a damaged unit.
As it turns out, animations are done with one side on each of the top and bottom screens, and it will probably be far more trouble than it is worth to properly depict them. The animations themselves don't have much of the series' traditional charm anyway.
Sadly, it seems our tank failed to roll that additional point of damage.
Fortunately, the recon was dealing more than enough to pick up the KO.
The most you'll see out of the animations is each character making a comment based on scoring a victory or taking a defeat. Also visible: Despite the cutscene implying that Lin is driving the recon, both units are mechanically considered Brenner's and will use his face in the animations.
Despite being a soldier at a military academy, Will has not yet been exposed to real violence, and is going to spend some time reacting to it appropriately. In this environment, you may have to go through that fast.
Since we defeated our first unit, we get this tutorial showing off another new mechanic to DoR: Unit levels. Every time a unit scores a KO, it gains one level, and additional levels represent a bonus to Attack- and at maximum rank, a bonus to defence, too. This is probably the biggest mechanic change DoR implements to encourage the player to be proactive about keeping units in good condition.
Unit levels are on a per-map basis- Days of Ruin keeps to Advance Wars tradition of each map being fully independent from any other.
The Beast's infantry move closer, but are either unable or unwilling to attack.
As we clean up The Beast's units, Lin will chip in to add the tutorials about Unit and Terrain information. Barely worth mentioning, but there's a part of me that does think she's talking to Will here and not just the player.
Speaking of fighting The Beast, I decided to shoot both units once and fail to KO either rather than focus fire on one. Mechanically speaking, there's little reason to do one or the other, but this happened to be the best way to move my units to shoot at all.
The Beast didn't even bother shooting back. Odds were good he'd lose his units in the counterattack anyway.
At this point, Lin also explicitly mentions the Tactics option in Mission Info. Remember how I didn't click on it earlier? Well, now seems a good time to click on it and show you just what you're getting yourself into here.
Welcome to the War Room, a place where the narrative rules bend somewhat for the twin purposes of tutorialisation and comedy.
Case in point, Will has noticed that, at the point in time I recorded this conversation (the end of Day 1), he has never met Lin. You might be wondering why they didn't simply write a version of this conversation that was Will talking to himself to remember his training.
No, pulling stuff like this is completely normal for the dialogue you'll get out of clicking the Tactics button.
Will usually plays the straight man role, being the only person to react to the shenanigans realistically.
And Lin, as the tactician lady, gets the lion's share of the shenanigans. And yet somehow, despite not being narratively cohesive, most of these scenes are completely in-character for her.
Case in point, this map has no real strategy, and Lin is perfectly happy to let that speak for itself.
While Will indignantly asks for something he didn't already know.
Did I happen to mention Lin's my favourite character in the game?
Lin does mention a fairly important pillar of the game mechanics here, although it's worth highlighting the specifics. A damaged unit will do only a fraction of the damage it would do at full HP, directly proportional to its current visible HP value, and it will do so regardless of whether it is attacking or counter-attacking. What Lin is describing here is that, when you counter-attack, you attack with the HP value you have after the attacker's damage is applied. The fact that Advance Wars has a mechanic that so explicitly rewards the side that strikes first is part of the reason why Advance Wars' concept of momentum is so much different to Fire Emblem's.
This line is probably the one bit of the conversation that actually feels like they intended for Brenner and Lin to have already arrived when you saw this.
Although this line in the context of leaving Will without visible reinforcements is amusing enough.
On Day 4, Brenner's tank and recon finish up the remaining HP of The Beast's units. We can see Brenner commenting on his victories here.
At least The Beast respects he's outgunned. Although I'm sure he won't take this one lying down.
The impermanent nature of an Advance Wars map, as well as the fact that any particular run of it will always start from the same position, encourages IS to add a metric by which to judge your progress. As such, Advance Wars applies a grading system to each map, based on Speed, Power, and Technique. (Strangely, I could find no evidence the grading system existed before on the Famicom or Game Boy games).
- Speed compares the number of Days you took to complete a map against a fixed number on a per-map basis, and awards you points based on how much faster or slower than that number you were.
- The formula is 200 - 100 x (Your Time/Par Time)
- Power considers how few attacks you needed to perform to destroy the amount of enemies you did. In the Advance Wars trilogy, it was based on "number of units destroyed in a single turn", but its been rejiggered here for the sake of not making giant maps awful.
- The formula is (Non-luck damage done x2 + Destroyed enemies x200)/Number of attacks -100
- Technique considers how few units you needed to build to secure your win. In the Advance Wars trilogy, this was based on "percentage of units lost", but the change in mechanics was designed to punish spamming units at the end of the map to swallow unit defeat penalties.
- The formula is (Enemy Units Left + Enemies Destroyed) x125 / (Player Units Made + Players Destroyed)
Also new to DoR, the amount of points you can receive for each individual ranking is capped at 150, rather than 100. The highest rank of S is bestowed for a total score of 300. The lowest grade is C, but I couldn't tell you the exact thresholds for each rank.
Unlike in the Advance Wars trilogy, the points used to calculate your grade are not currency that can be used to unlock goodies in a shop. DoR Grade is purely an assessment of your tactical skill. I'll try to get a high grade on each map, but saying "I'll try to get a high grade" is equivalent to "I'll try to play good"- I do that all the time, we'll just get an quantitative metric telling me how badly I did if I fail this time around.
This tradition sticks around- the victorious CO gets to throw a conclusive remark after the map is over. DoR never has a map where you get to choose your CO, though, so these get to stay nice and specific.
Some nice stats to finish us off. Although most of these are clearly not relevant here.
In story interludes, the top screen will typically be devoted to a description of our location. Given our environment, the informativeness of this information may be at a bit of a premium, but it's what they went with.
With The Beast successfully repelled, it's finally time to stick our characters together and finally ask who all three of them are. We may not know who Brenner and Lin are, but honestly, we're not much better informed with Will.
Will introduces himself as a cadet, and Brenner identifies him by jacket. Unlike The Beast, who is likely to have stolen whatever identifying labels he might have worn, Will's youthful face and instincts support the "cadet" interpretation, and I'm much more comfortable accepting this at face value. Besides, knowing he's a cadet is mostly valuable for anticipating his reactions, and well, he seems fairly predictable there.
Will was, or at least thinks he was, the only survivor at this particular academy.
Will having been buried for "weeks" is the explanation offered for why this post-apocalyptic society has already developed "rules", for want of a better word, despite us having seen Will's fresh reaction just a few days ago. These weeks also provide opportunity for other, less assiduous survivors at this academy to have dug themselves out and dispersed to either join The Beast, other surviving camps, or die of starvation, but Will won't recognise any of them.
This line is a bit more literal than it appears at first glance. Until The Beast found him, Will thought he was the last human alive. Given what a fluke his own survival seems like, it wasn't even a faulty assumption, although it's of great comfort that there's enough people around for a crowd.
Brenner applauds him for not dying. Admittedly, the game has skimmed over a few necessary-for-life bodily functions that Will is not suggested to have attended to, but they seem to have wanted at least a little bit of poetic interpretation here.
One gets the impression that Brenner is locally famous, but not necessarily known to all in Rubinelle. The kind of man that you love working for, but don't brag about to everyone you meet.
Lin is responsible for the busywork involved in maintaining something like a battalion. She trusts Brenner's judgement on what the right thing to do is, but is far better than him at executing it. The kind of second command every commander wishes they had.
Brenner has set himself the goal of seeking out people like Will and forming a support system. Admirable, and a worthy long-term goal, and our main objective for the next few missions will be figuring out exactly what short-term goals we need to set to make this vision realisable.
Brenner promptly brings Will under his wing. Will is glad to be under the command of someone more organised than him. He knows full well he won't last a day on his own.
He promptly proves my point by keeling over.
So yeah. Remember what I said about certain bodily functions Will hasn't been attending to? The fact that the amount of food Will is likely to have had access to has been at a premium has come up in the narrative. He's lucky a rumbling stomach is the only sign of his malnutrition.
(As an aside, have you noticed this is the first time either Will or Brenner has emoted? The artstyle they went for has proven surprisingly resistant to regular portrait changes. It's one of those flaws we're just going to have to live with.)
Perhaps figuring out how to get some real food should be one of those short-term goals.
Next time: Didn't I say something about four heroes?
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