Move out!

Advance Wars is the Game Boy Advance/Nintendo DS itteration of Nintendo's Wars series, a series of turn based strategy RPGs where you usually take control of a Commanding Officer (CO for short) and control an army of units to either take your opponent's HQ, or destroy all of their units (technically called win by rout). However, instead of just being a series of maps you complete like in previous games, Advance Wars actually has a story campaign, and expands upon the concept of COs with differing abilities that were introduced in Super Famicom Wars. It even went on to introduce the idea of each CO having a unique CO Power, with Super CO Powers being added in Advance Wars 2, and even Tag Powers being added in Dual Strike.

Really, in my opinion, this series is the shining jewel of the GBA library, and Dual Strike is one of my favourite DS games that I still play to this day! Even the remake of the first two games made by WayForward, Advance Wars 1+2 Re-Boot Camp, is a very solid remake with tons of nods to not only the Advance Wars games, but also to the whole Wars series as well! This series is a must have to every Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS enthusist's library, and I hate that this series often gets overlooked when it comes to great GBA games.

Honestly I'd have to say my favourite game in the series is Dual Strike, because it has a certain charm that kinda ties the rest of the series together, kinda like a love song to the GBA games, or a nice little bow. I also really like the aesthetic it all has, looking very sleek and smooth but packed full of DS game vibes that DS games have! I highly recommend you check it out if you have the means to do so, Dual Strike is well worth your time! Jake also has the most T-Boy swag I've ever seen in any CO in the series!

...And also there's Advance Wars: Days of Ruin, which doesn't follow the stories of the first three games, but rather chooses to go a rather darker, post-apocalyptic route, to cater more to western audiences. They also stripped most of the tag power and super CO powers, leaving to this strange gimmick where you have to have your CO travel in a unit just to get their D2D in a small radius. That alongside the much much darker tone that emphasises the need for survival just kinda turned me off of this game and makes it my least favourite in the series, although they did get SNK artist Hiroaki to do the art for it, and he does a damn good job on it.