Nintendo Talks About Advance Wars’ New Direction

Advance Wars: Days of Ruin is an extremely drastic change in tone for the series, which, until now, was actually fairly bright and cheery. (At least as far as war games go.) Game|Life recently spoke with Tim O’Leary, a translations expert for Nintendo, about the game and he went into great length about why the decision was made to change the game’s established characters and story.

I’ve been asked a lot, why the redesign, what’s up with the new characters, the game seems kind of dark in tone. The development team, when we posed this question to them, came back and said: Over the course of this franchise, this long-running franchise, they were getting feedback over the last couple of games that was saying, yeah, we love this game, really fun to play… but it’s not a lot different.

But the developers were saying: But we changed so much! But all of the development changes were tweaks in gameplay. There was no cosmetic change that people could get right away. So they said, okay, let’s take a look at the franchise. Advance Wars is a war game. What is war? Maybe the Japanese idea of a war game [made for] a good turn-based strategy game, but the story, the characters, weren’t very realistic in terms of real war. Greens, purples, yellows, happy-go-lucky scenario. This time they said that war is darker and grittier, and war is really fast, you need the ability to react — to survive on the battlefield, you have to be quick.

So based on that kernel of thought, they really ran with that and created a world that would have helped them create war that fit into that new vision. What happens is, a meteor shower has hit this world. And this is not Megaland from the last three games, it’s completely new. A meteor shower hits the world, kills 90% of the human population. Tsunamis, earthquakes, raging forest fires, clouds of ash and dust, no sunlight, vegetation is dying. Here’s our world. Let’s populate this world. Only 10% of humanity is left. What would you be doing in this situation? These are the questions they posed to themselves.

I know Daniel and I will both be picking Days of Ruin up next week when it’s released on January 22 – what about you?

Read the full interview at Game|Life.