/Playstation 2, Sega, _Strategy

Sega Ages 2500 Series Vol. 22: Advanced Daisenryaku

This entry in the Sega Ages 2500 series provides a convenient contrast to the previous SDI & Quartet bundle, allowing us experience the toe-curling difference between a re-release of two old games that definitely deserved to be brought back into the limelight and Advanced Daisenryaku, a game that probably should have been left back in 1991.

But first, a little history to go with this historical game. The game’s original developer, SystemSoft, are quite well known in their strategic niche, creating not only the Daisenryaku series (appearing on well over a dozen different formats by my counting, with three English releases along the way) but also the Master of Monsters series and a good selection of other games too. If you like seeing hex grids and dealing with lots of numbers for a very long time, then SystemSoft’s name is a good one to look out for when you’re trying to find something to play.

This remake of the Mega Drive entry in the series—now with upgraded graphics and 3D battle scenes laid out like tiny military dioramas—is another great strategy game from the reliable developer. Whether you want to work your way through the lengthy standard campaign or take on any of the 44 scenarios individually as part of the blandly named Standard Mode, the depth in here is just extraordinary. There are land, sea, and air units, encompassing everything from battleships bristling with guns to men on horseback. You’ll need to consider the weather before staging an assault on an enemy town, and make sure you have the boots on the ground nearby to capture it afterwards. Ammunition comes in multiple types per unit, and as each squad can only carry a limited quantity you’ll have to pick your battles carefully, trying to find the balance between pushing forwards with keeping a clear line to somewhere friendly you can replenish their supplies. There’s a “zone of control” system in place as well, units able to hold the line even if you don’t have a wall of them physically occupying every last spot on the grid.

And the sheer size of the maps these skirmishes take place on is just outstanding. More than a few of them are so large you can literally trace the outline of multiple countries on the minimap. One of them covers all of England and Wales as well as a good chunk of French coastline, for example.

This is absolutely the sort of strategy game you can spend all day with without even realising it—heck, you could spend all week with this, falling asleep in front of your PlayStation 2 at 5am after a full evening’s worth of tactical gaming and still be more than willing to do it all again the day after.

So why leave it in the past if it’s this good? Well, as you’ve probably already noticed, it’s set in World War II—and it’s chiefly played from the side that Indiana Jones enthusiastically punched in the face. The game is aware enough of how this looks to show a brief noncommittal acknowledgement when it loads, which is instantly blown to smithereens by the game’s intro, consisting of a fullscreen digitised photo of Hitler which is then overlaid with a graphic of marching Nazi flags before turning blood red and finally moving on to the title screen.

All of those pro-allied forces games that turn this war and any other into events where nice family guys are just trying to be heroes somewhere abroad and use terms like “liberate” to weakly disguise their actions are bad enough, but trying to turn Hitler—actual Hitler, not “redrawn 1940’s army guy who maybe looks a little familiar”—into an eye-catching intro… that’s just not necessary.

In the name of balance I will point out that in Standard Mode you can control any (or every, or no) side of your choosing, and you can even change exactly who’s playing as which force whenever you have control. Do you want to spend hours bombing, shooting, and generally blasting fascism right out of France? You can. But that’s always the alternative. By default you’re always the Nazis, and that’s the side that gets all the fancy period-style artwork designed to make them look cool and war look like fun. The Nazis. I don’t feel it’s especially strange to say I don’t want to spend hours of my life helping Hitler win anything, not even if it’s only pretend Hitler, nobody else ever has to know about it, and the game’s otherwise really good.

I can certainly see the appeal in poring over old military equipment: heavy machinery is inherently interesting, and then when you go and add regional liveries and reams of stats on top it’s only going to be even more so. Likewise war has been abstracted into various sorts of games for as long as people have been fighting, but there is a strong pro-war historical backdrop here—and I am aware that’s not unique to Advanced Daisenryaku—that turns the game into something far more uncomfortable. It doesn’t want to let you pit specific weaponry against realistic enemy tanks, see how one particular plane’s statistics do against another type, or be Blue and out-strategise Red—this game wants you to be the Nazis and invade Poland on the 1st Sept 1939, to fight on the beaches of Normandy and everywhere else, and it’ll do all this without ever getting into all the icky business of why they were doing that.

The team behind the Sega Ages 2500 series had more than proved by this point they had the talent and the support to capably cover everything in Sega’s history from ancient arcade games to Saturn classics, and with that in mind I just don’t believe that out of everything they had access to this honestly deserved a slot over, say, any game at all that didn’t feature a whole bunch of Nazi imagery. We could’ve had Dynamite Dux instead. Or Astal. Or a 32X Collection (I’d still like one of those today). Or SegaSonic The Hedgehog. Anything.  

We mustn’t forget the past or try to airbrush old standards or outdated behaviour into a more acceptable modern shape and pretend it was actually fine all along, but I also don’t think there’s any need to make the effort to dig something as thoughtlessly “Hey, maybe the Nazis were kinda fun” as this out of the attic and then uncritically present it to the world for a second time either.

Further reading:

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Published by

Kimimi