Advance Wars is a turn-based strategy video game developed by Intelligent Systems and published by Nintendo for the Game Boy Advance. It was released in North America on September 10, 2001. The game's release in Japan and Europe was delayed, supposedly due to the September 11 attacks in the United States. Although the game was released in Europe in January 2002, neither it nor its sequel Black Hole Rising were released in Japan until the Game Boy Wars Advance 1+2 compilation in 2004. Advance Wars has been released for the Wii U Virtual Console simultaneously in Europe and North America on April 3, 2014. It is the seventh game in the Wars video game series. It is the first Wars game to be released outside Japan, as well as the first Wars game to not be released initially in Japan.

Advance Wars is the first game in the Advance Wars series of video games, followed by Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising (also for the Game Boy Advance), and then by Advance Wars: Dual Strike and Advance Wars: Days of Ruin for the Nintendo DS. These games form a sub-series of the Wars series set of games. At E3 2021, Nintendo announced that the original Advance Wars, alongside its sequel Black Hole Rising, would be remade and released together for the Nintendo Switch by WayForward in another compilation titled Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp.

The game was not originally intended for release outside Japan, like the previous entries in the series, which were released in Japan only due to Nintendo feeling that Western consumers would not be interested in turn-based games because of their complex mechanics. In order to alleviate this, the developers made the mechanics of Advance Wars easy to understand, adding in an in-depth tutorial that did not require players to read the manual. Designer Kentaro Nishimura commented that the game's success shifted Nintendo's attitude over Western tastes, and that same success is frequently credited as a driving force for Nintendo bringing another Intelligent Systems franchise, Fire Emblem, outside of Japan beginning with the seventh installment.

The story takes place on a fictional continent, where two nations, Orange Star and Blue Moon, have been fighting each other for years. The conflict enters a new stage when an Orange Star commanding officer named Andy is accused of attacking the armies of two other nations, Yellow Comet and Green Earth, without reason, resulting in a worldwide war. The game was released to critical acclaim and has been listed among the greatest video games of all time.

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