Jagens are characters, often given to you in the early game, sometimes available even from the very first battle. They have high stats for the early game, and are often already promoted, of the advanced classes that your other troops will have to use a special item to obtain. Jagens often have little to fear from the enemy hordes, at least in the early game.

Jagens are very useful characters, but are kind of a trap. They’re already promoted so they get few experience points from battling lesser foes, and when they do gain a level, they tend to have very low growth rates in their stats. If you over-rely on Jagens, your other characters will be underleveled, and eventually a Jagen’s slow stat gains will cause it to be unable to keep up with the increasing power of the enemies in the advanced levels. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be used at all, but they’re best purpose is to take the edge off of the difficulty curve and supporting your other troops. Since the original Jagen was a mentor figure to Marth and his allies, it’s an excellent case of the game’s story mirroring its design: Jagen’s days of glory are past, his true purpose to help shield and guide the next generation into becoming the best fighters they can be.But! Each game is different, and not all early game powerhouses neatly fit into the Jagen archtype. Some such characters don’t actually stay competitive for long at all, while others (like the awesome Titania in Path of Radiance ) have a strong chance of being useful for the entire game.

You should know a few things about how Fire Emblem’s character growth works. Every character has a number of stats: HP, Strength, Speed, Defense, things like that. The Fire Emblem series is defined, in terms of combat design, by its slow character growth. Every time a character gains an experience level, it only has a chance of gaining a single point in each stat. This chance is preset for each character, and gives everyone a tendency towards certain destination stats, an average spread throughout its 40 potential experience levels. What its actual stats will become will be different each game, depending on what that character rolls upon growth. While many characters have a chance of really great stats, whether they’ll achieve them differs on every playthrough. Growth rates affect that likelihood.

Fire Emblem games tend to put characters right on the edge of survival. When you go up against a boss, you may only have a handful of characters who are capable of denting its high armor, or surviving its counterattack. (Remember, in classic Fire Emblem, is a character dies, it’s gone permanently. If you want to keep using the character, you’ll have to go back to the save before the battle!) This makes it possible to get into situations where all of your characters, even if they’re of decent level, aren’t strong enough to safely defeat a boss.

Characters who join at a high level, or pre-promoted, are a solution to this. The story will sometimes hand you a new recruit to help you keep going, in the event that your party’s been betrayed by the RNG. Whether you should keep using them is something that only experience (and multiple playthoughs, or, let’s be honest, FAQs and walkthroughs) will tell you.

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In particular, the article mentions how the two of the principals behind Super Mario RPG went on to work on Mario and Luigi, and how Nintendo hasn’t made developing the series any easier with increasingly strict guidelines on how the characters can be used, like how modified versions of iconic, yet generic, types like Toads and Goombas can’t be created, possibly for fear of diluting their brands.

The article also notes that both subseries have undergone revivals lately, with Origami King and Thousand Year Door in the Paper Mario series, and the new Brothership in the Mario & Luigi line, despite the shutting down of AlphaDream, who made them. But it’s not getting easier to make new games in either series, with Nintendo’s growing strictness over outside use of their characters and the serieses painting themselves further into a corner with each installment consuming more of the feasible possibility space.

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The video (21 minutes) has a lot of interesting changes though. Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door has sustained a huge amount of fan interest over the years, due to its story being actually really good for a Mario game, it’s terrific sense of humor, and its deep gameplay. It’s generally agreed to be the highlight of the whole Paper Mario series, building on the ideas of the first game.

This is a good opportunity to muse upon what the gameplay merits of TYD are. I identify these:

• The combat system, which keeps most of your moves useful in different ways by giving them special properties that make intuitive sense. Jumps can’t hit spiked enemies or enemies on the ceiling, while hammer attacks only hit the first enemy in line and can’t hit enemies in the air. There are exceptions to these rules, but they’re more costly. Follower attacks also have their own limitations along these lines.
• The action commands, and Guard and Superguard functions. Paper Mario wasn’t the first JRPG to add a timed minigame to combat (that may have been Super Mario RPG), but the design here is very good. Most moves have an action command minigame where good performance increases the move’s power. Guard reduces the damage taken from attacks by pressing a button in a brief time window, while Superguard negates damage if a different button is pressed in a briefer time window. The button you press changes both the difficulty and the reward. Both aren’t easy to perform consistently, as many enemy attacks have tricky timing, but the Superguard bonus is great enough that it’s really tempting to use it. All three of these functions largely replace the general randomness and variance in JRPG combat, making it a lot more skill-based. (Finding ways for players to demonstrate skill in RPG-style games is a long-standing design challenge. I should write something about that here in the future!)
• And then there’s the joy of exploration, and the many secrets in the game world that reward it. Paper Mario had a bunch of them, but TYD really goes overboard. I can’t name a game with as much cool stuff thrown into its game world for players to just happen upon. The old line used in many Nintendo game manuals is to “try everything,” but how much of everything should the player really try? TYD is one of the few games that feels like it lives up to the true breadth of that word. There is a character in the game whose purpose is to give the player hints at finding obscure secrets. The Trouble Center offers further rewards and fleshes out the game world by giving Mario and friends the opportunity to perform helpful tasks for people. There’s so many things to do!

Super Paper Mario also had a lot of tricks, but it had a worse story (IMO), and it completely abandoned the classic Paper Mario battle system. Later Paper Mario games went in a completely different direction with unique battle systems for each. It was Thousand Year Door that got the most right in a single game.

So, um. The video! Yes, watch it, it’s interesting.

Obscure Changes in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door (Youtube, 21 minutes)

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The first Advance Wars game had a legendary awkward launch date: September 10, 2001. I don’t know if world events following it had any influence on its popularity, but Advance Wars had the advantage of being a long-running series, going back to the Famicom, that had never been given a chance in Western territories. (One reason? Super Famicom Wars had a notorious character named Hister, with a moustache that made its inspiration unmistakable.)

The first two Advance Wars titles, taking their name, like previous versions, from its release platform the Gameboy Advance, were unexpectedly popular. The gaming groups I was in in college played an incredible amount of Advance Wars 2. We maxed out the game’s timer at 999 hours! I have no doubt that, if our group hadn’t broken up from people graduating and leaving, we’d still be playing it today.

Both of these games are preserved in proper fashion by Wayforward’s Switch remake of Advance Wars and its immediate sequel. Of the two games after it, Dual Strike leans a bit too hard on CO powers (already a creeping problem in AW2), and Days of Ruin implemented a lot of gameplay adjustments and fixed but, alas, lost the weird sense of fun from the semi-cartoony characters and setting of the first two games.

The Gameboy Advance Advance Wars games did not have internet-enabled multiplayer. The DS versions had better options, but they’re unavailable now, at least without some technical effort, due to the shutdown of the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection.

Advance Wars By Web both allows a game much like AW2 to be played over the internet, and it does so with features that make it feel like a play-by-mail game, with the site handling the state involved with turn-based multiplayer. It does this at the of having any form of single-player: all of its battles are against other human players. So it’s not an excellent way to learn to play Advance Wars games interactively, as with the official games, which easy you into the game a bit at a time. But as for learning how to play this online version, there’s a number of useful videos available on their Tutorials Page. I especially like their video on overcoming first turn advantage, which they do by spotting the second player one Infantry unit. It’s not a perfect solution, but one that works out fairly well in play. And the video on designing balanced multiplayer maps, which offers a lot of practical advice that can be carried over into designing maps for the original games. And there’s a huge library of over 3,800 games to view, if you want to see how the community plays.

I don’t know if Reboot Camp is helping to sustain the avid fandom that the first Advance Wars games did, but I’ve enjoyed it a lot. If you enjoy it too, you can go from Reboot Camp right into playing against people online on AWBW. I can’t offer much more about it than that, for Advance Wars is a deceptively deep game and I have to make a post here, on the average, every day, but it’s been offering online play between humans for nearly twenty years now! That has to count for something.

Advance Wars By Web (awbw.amarriner.com)

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