I left off on
Advance Wars. I should do a Run the Series entry on it to post most of this and sprinkle it with useless detail but here's a quick cliff notes on it. First game I played in this series was the GC Battalion Wars spin-off. Almost beat it but had to return it to the video rental store after getting to the last campaign mission. Later bought it and wanted to finish it but lost the data when my memory was corrupted. Early in the DS lifespan, a friend had Advance Wars: Duel Strike and I played some multiplayer with him. Liked what I saw to want more plus on the forums there were a few people who were big fans of the series like S-U-P-E-R. At some point, I acquired AW 1, AW 2, and AW DS. I think my plan was to play it through from the beginning but it was actually Advance Wars: Days of Ruin that I delved into a game. I got it early on from its release at the time and even tried the online multiplayer. I got close to the end and think I was around 2 missions from completing the game but set it down for awhile because of the difficulty and then never got back to it. I've forgotten a lot about the game since then. I played Advance Wars GBA off and on for awhile but would drop it after it a failed mission and then come back to it years later. Last year, around March, I finally stuck with it and played it through to the end. That makes it the first Advance Wars game I actually beat after coming close to doing so in Battalion Wars and Days of Ruin but not finishing the job there.
There's still a lot to do in Advance Wars 1. Maps to unlock, bonus campaigns, higher mission rankings but none of it really interests. As a completionist, I'm slightly irked at having a game with so much still unfinished but then I think of actually playing it and I'm happy enough to stay away from it. I think there's a reason why Fire Emblem has had more entries and taken off and Advance Wars has stalled. I'm not sure what that is since I haven't played a Fire Emblem game but I have some ideas namely better stories, game characters in battle, possibly a better combat/battle system, and better music.
My main issues with Advance Wars 1 is that it is mostly just a collection of different battles/maps that you play. There is a story but it is so threadbare and flimsy. It's like the brainstorming session for a story was just used. With little narrative reason to move forward, it mainly falls on the player to hope they like just doing a bunch of different battles with increasing difficulty. And the battling aspect is alright but it's nothing that great. At first, its quite easy then it hits a brief period of being tricky but doable in a first try and then it becomes long battles and wars of attrition. That middle portion is great but, man, I hate that endgame stuff. The last mission in this game took awhile. I think it took 5 tries or so for me to get it done. A lot of learning and figuring out how to combat the AI. There was one time to where my GBA Micro died on me and thus I lost all my progress. (I've got to get that loosy-goosy power issue fixed one of these days.) But I hate spending a couple hours on something only to realize I've got to restart it again. Or the missions where one does win after a long time as both sides whittle down their forces and it becomes a game of slowly draining the one side of money and hope that you can start to get a few more units built before the AI to give you some kind of number advantage again.
I guess it doesn't help that I often think of playing the Civilization series when playing these games as that is not a good comparison for Advance Wars. I'd rather be playing Civ than AW's basic little maps and limited units. There's a lot more going on in those games to keep it interesting.
Advance Wars 2 - Supposedly better than the first but I've yet to play it. Just finishing the first one has been enough of an accomplishment.
Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones - Never played it. I thought this might be the first Fire Emblem game I played as I was making an effort to get through my Ambassador games and then I hit a couple GBA games that stopped my momentum and never got around to it. I know the game wowed Mr. Grubdog at Pietriots
when he played it directly after finishing Fire Emblem GBA. The possible 30 hour timeframe to play it also led to me putting it off then. Now I'm playing 100s of hours in Xenoblade games and BotW so maybe it's not that bad anymore after all.
F-Zero Maximum Velocity - Let's establish something off the bat. Do I consider myself an F-Zero fan? Yes. Have I played all the F-Zero games? No. Do I like all the F-Zero games? No. Why am I fan? Because of F-Zero GX. It's basically because of one game in the series and I think that is the case for the majority of people asking for a new F-Zero game. GX got me into the series. After loving it and playing a lot of it, I got a copy of the first game for SNES because it was so cheap. There's a reason for that. I'm sure F-Zero for SNES was kind of good for its time at the launch of the SNES but playing it now is probably like going from Mario Tennis Aces to Mario Tennis Wii U. (Zing!) It's missing so much of what made GX a standout game. Sure the difficulty is there but to me it is not that much different from trying to play an old NES racing game like Rad Racer. It's just racing a car on geometric tracks. I still spent some time with it and have even taken it for a spin on the SNES Switch App but I still lose interest in it pretty quickly. F-Zero X on N64 is closer to GX as it went into 3D gameplay and has more of the character and ideas found in GX. It's main problem is just being surpassed and a bit obsolete compared to GX. It's the same way I can still play Mario Kart 64 and prefer it over Mario Kart SNES but I'd rather be playing Double Dash or almost any Mario Kart past the 64's version. (Not you Super Circuit! Go back to the end of the line!) Unfortunately, F-Zero never got another 3D entry after GX and was sandwiched by two GBA games meaning there are more 2D F-Zero games than 3D and the 2D games are just nowhere near as good as the 3D games. Maximum Velocity is the first. I've only experience it from the Ambassador program. I've maybe played it for 11 minutes. It's pretty much the same game as F-Zero SNES and the world doesn't need another game of F-Zero SNES. It's a single player game with 4 racers to choose from going over geometric tracks that are rendered a little bit more sharper than the original. This is not what I'm hoping for when I'm hoping for more F-Zero. The only reason to buy this game would be to hopefully convince Nintendo there is a market to release an F-Zero sequel. Unfortunately, I still recommend that no one buys it because, first, you will play this game for an hour or less at most and, second, if a lot of people buy this game then Nintendo may interpret it as people wanting another 2D F-Zero game like the SNES original. I'm not a fan of Super Circuit but even that is better than Maximum Velocity. In fact, I'm sure there 100s of racing games bettern than Maximum Velocity. It's got no purpose and nothing to offer aside from more of that SNES experience.