2001's Advance Wars is a perfect little game: Compact yet tactically rich, a purposefully limited but versatile library of units like top-heavy tanks and chonky bombers smashing together in rock-paper-scissors shoot-outs. The only wildcard, each commanding officer's slow-charging heroic power, can swing the tide of a battle but is still relatively tame—like gaining a couple extra tiles of range on artillery strikes for one pivotal turn. Give a small team of brilliant game designers the remit to make chess with toy soldiers, and I think this is what they would come up with. And yet it is not my favorite Advance Wars.
My favorite, Advance Wars: Dual Strike for the Nintendo DS, is more the Chess 2 of strategy games. More units, more powers, combining those wildcard bursts in ways that drag matches out into dizzying swingy battles like games of Risk where someone's turning in their bonus cards every freaking turn. Forget perfect: I loved the bombast of Dual Strike being messily over-the-top, and on a visit to indie studio Area 35's Tokyo office ahead of TGS this week I immediately clocked that its new entry in the Tiny Metal series takes after my one true love.
