Advance Wars

The objective in each mission is to defeat the enemy army. There are two ways to defeat an opponent: destroy every one of the opponent's units on the map, known as routing the enemy, or capture the opponent's headquarters. However, some maps have specific objectives, such as capturing a certain number of cities to claim victory or survive a set number of days. The available modes of play include "Field Training" which offers tutorial missions, a campaign mode which carries the game's storyline, the "War Room" which is a collection of maps on which the player strives for high scores, as well as multiplayer modes and a map design mode.

The "Campaign" and "War Room" modes both help to rank the player up (from Rank #100 to Rank #1) and to earn coins to unlock COs and maps in the "Battle Maps" shop. The modes also gives the player an additional rank for effort after winning a battle on that map, which assesses the player's speed, power, and technique in that battle; speed being the number of days spent trying to win the battle, power being how many enemy units were defeated, and technique is the number of the player's units that survived (in percentage).

The story of the Advance Wars begins in the "Field Training" tutorial mode, with the nation of Orange Star in a war against the neighboring nation of Blue Moon, with Olaf as the Blue Moon Army commanding officer (CO). Olaf suddenly ordered an invasion of the Orange Star nation and is in battle with the Orange Star Army. The campaign continues the story that started in the tutorial. Nell, the de facto leader of the Orange Star COs, gives the player the duty of a tactical advisor for the Orange Star Army.

The player follows the war effort through all four countries, with its own COs, over the course of the game. Starting with having only one choice of a CO to advise, Andy, the player will have a choice of two more Orange Star COs, Max and Sami, to advise as the story progresses, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. Depending on which CO is chosen by the player to advise, there are times when a mission is split into a choice of two or three, where the maps and dialog could be different. After completing that mission, the story paths could split up, depending on which CO was chosen in that previous mission, with the story differing from the other path, eventually leading back to the main path.

Advance Wars was first announced at Nintendo Space World 2000 under the name Game Boy Wars Advance. In January 2001, Nintendo France gave new screenshots from this and other Game Boy Advance games to French gaming sites with little other information. It was developed by Intelligent Systems, and eventually published by Nintendo. Four player mode was confirmed before E3 2001 and with it a US release date of September 10.

Game Boy Wars Advance was originally scheduled for an October 12, 2001 release in Japan, but it was canceled in order to avoid competition with Game Boy Wars 3 (released for the Game Boy Color that same year). It was eventually released in a two-in-one compilation in 2004 with its sequel, Game Boy Wars Advance 2.

Upon release, the game received a score of 92/100 according to the review aggregation website Metacritic, indicating "universal acclaim". According to Julian Gollop, developer of X-COM and Rebelstar: Tactical Command, Advance Wars, besides being influential, opened up the market for similar games on handheld video game systems. It was rated the 26th best game made on a Nintendo System in Nintendo Power's Top 200 Games list.

Nintendo Power awarded the game a perfect 5 star rating, stating that "Advance Wars treads on new ground, taking the strategy genre to a place where gamers of all tastes will be gung-ho for it". The Electric Playground called the game "a deep, quite cartoony and consummately Japanese turn-based wargame with depth, character and replayability to burn". IGN called the game "incredibly intense and amazingly addictive... especially when you learn every little nuance of the game design".