Wesley Fenlon | Not with a bang but a whimper.

I finished off Advance Wars: Days of Ruin on Monday, and my thoughts on the game have been simmering since then.  As a strategy game, it’s perfectly enjoyable, and it sits at a much more even keel than its predecessor thanks to the stripping away of radically powerful CO abilities.  Even so, Days of Ruin wasn’t nearly as fun as Dual Strike or Black Hole Rising.  The gameplay wasn’t the problem — it was the story, the presentation, the world.  Each stage was followed by a painfully bland, cliche piece of exposition that relied on a stale plotline that seems to pop up far too frequently in Japanese pop culture (and the US is likely no less guilty, but I can’t think of any glaring examples off the top of my head).

The plot is simple: against overwhelming odds, a young leader saves the world thanks to a limitless supply of hope and enthusiasm.  A mysterious girl is in there, somewhere, and is likely the key to his faith in humanity.  The villain is spineless and completely self-centered; as it turns out, he’s merely the pawn of someone so unbelievably evil he’d murder puppies for kicks and giggles.

I don’t understand how anyone could develop a game with such a predictable, uninspired story.  Are the writers simply incompetent, or is this somehow appealing to a certain group of people?  Maybe they don’t quite get what it is that separates their tripe from the simple plots of games that are actually great.  It is hard to define, but I think the distinction between appealing adventure and shallow, annoying drudgery comes from energy.

The first three Advance Wars titles were as narratively simple as they could possibly be — young Andy or his predecessors approached war with oodles of enthusiasm and more than a little naivete.  But it worked, because the characters were unassuming and appealing, nakedly fun-loving and cartoony.  It didn’t matter that each character was fairly flat and changed little throughout the course of the predictable adventure because the game maintained an energetic tone throughout — the characters had spirit, and they didn’t take themselves too seriously (unless that made them funny).

Another example that comes to mind is Gainax’s masterful anime, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann.  The story is, by and large, a predictable save-the-world quest taken to uncommon extremes.  But it’s awesome, simply because Gurren Lagann is the television equivalent of lightning in a bottle — it’s pure energy, manifested in a form that could stir an emotional reaction within the heart of even the most stolid individual.

But Days of Ruin is no Gurren Lagann.  Not only is it a regression for the series, but it’s indicative of a step backwards for the medium as a way to tell stories.  It’s almost as if the developers tired of putting so much heart into the games and decided to go in the exact opposite direction, trying to replace their lighthearted storytelling with some srs bsns.  Unfortunately, robbing your world of color and your characters of spirit doesn’t make your story mature.  It just makes it annoying.