 When Advance Wars 1 & 2 Reboot Camp released on April 21st, 2023, it did so to a muted fanfare. The game, which Nintendo had delayed due to, quote, recent world events, had initially been slated for a release the previous year. It was only after it became clear that said, recent world events weren't going to be resolved anytime soon that Nintendo finally shipped the game. This was fitting, as a similar delay to the original Advance Wars upon which Reboot Camp is based, occurred 20 years prior. This delay, which also came in the aftermath of a world event, was particularly significant, as it changed the way Nintendo approached localising games in the West. This is the story of how Advance Wars paved the way for more Nintendo games to receive an official English-language translation, even as the franchise waned in popularity in its native Japan. This is why Advance Wars matters. When I joined Nintendo, I was told that these kinds of games would never be successful abroad, because they were turn-based games, and turn-based games weren't appreciated outside Japan. Kentaro Nishimura has had a long and storied career working for Nintendo. One of the earliest games he worked on was Fire Emblem Thracia 776, a title for the Super Nintendo which has never been released internationally. The prevailing wisdom was that Western audiences simply didn't care for thoughtful console games. Westerners only wanted to have their reflexes tested, got easily bored, and didn't like to have to learn things or read too much text. Said Nishimura, we decided it was because these kinds of games were too complicated. People are used to action games and shooting games, and in those, all you have to do is press the A button and the B button, and you'll soon understand how to play. This assumption was only half the problem with localizing games outside of Japan. The bigger issue was not necessarily audience tastes, but rather the relative cost of translating a text-heavy title into other languages. Platforming games require and incur relatively little translation costs, because there's less text to translate. In the case of several Famicom games such as Super Mario Bros., the games were written in English to start with, because writing Japanese text took up more game space. With role-playing games, though, with so much text to be carefully translated, publishing any game outside of Japan was an enormous risk. It was easy to perceive English-speaking audiences as unreceptive when the games had a much higher sale threshold to reach before they became profitable. Thus, a lot of hugely popular classic Japanese games remained inaccessible to non-Japanese audiences. Many of these titles remain without an official translation to this day. Famicom Wars was something different for Toro Naruhiro. His company, Intelligent Systems, had been founded to provide programming tools to aid Nintendo in the development of their games. Said Naruhiro, Our start point for making development tools was when Nintendo launched the NES system. It was totally different from today in that PCs were not yet used widely. Whether you did software or dev kits, back then there was neither. So we had no option but to make it all ourselves. For example, even graphic software for drawing pictures was something we devised by ourselves. After an extensive period of assisting Nintendo with various projects, though, Intelligent Systems collaborated with Nintendo developers to create their first game, a battlefield simulator, with Naruhiro serving as programmer. Famicom Wars, like many titles for the Famicom and Nintendo Entertainment System, is bereft of strong, unique branding. The strategy game pits two opposing, color-coded teams against each other, but there are few standout heroes or characters for players to invest in. Nevertheless, Famicom Wars laid the foundation for Intelligent Systems' future efforts as game developers, both on additional titles in the retroactively named Nintendo Wars franchise and by taking the basic gameplay and applying it to a different genre. Two years after the release of Famicom Wars, Intelligent Systems and Nintendo collaborated on another strategy game, Fire Emblem, Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light. Strategy games are typically kind of hard-core and dry. You only care about winning or losing the battle, and there's no space for the player to empathize with the characters or story. This is the appraisal given by Shouzu Kaga who led the development of the first Fire Emblem game. While Famicom Wars had proven popular, it was perceived to suffer from the same limitations as all war strategy games. The troops were generic and lacked personality. The idea with Fire Emblem was to take the core gameplay from Famicom Wars and mix it with the conventions of the role-playing game genre, well-defined characters that the player could bond with, and a nuanced story. Kaga called it role-playing simulation, the first in a brand new genre of games. He said, I think I made an RPG that borrows the frame of a strategy game. The battlefield is like a strategy game, but each character is a protagonist in their own right and you can actually get attached to them, making it closer to an RPG I think. The game proved successful in Japan, but this was a game with a lot of text. There was no way that Nintendo, who had collaborated with intelligent systems on the game, would approve translating the game into foreign languages. After all, Western audiences don't like strategy games or role-playing games, right? It's worth noting just how technically impressive intelligent systems work on 8-bit devices was. Thanks to their work on development tools for the Famicom, the staff at intelligent systems were able to squeeze more out of the hardware than would otherwise be possible. This was of particular importance to their strategy games. Said company founder and programmer Toru Narahiro, the program in a typical simulation game uses a lot of memory. Our game exceeded the capacity of the main memory available in the NES unit. So we figured out a way of increasing capacity by accessing a portion of the memory dedicated for saving the game. Using this memory, together with the main memory, we were able to get the game running. One particularly good example of this technical genius is Game Boy Wars, the sequel to Famicom Wars, which released a year after the first Fire Emblem game. Game Boy Wars is visually simpler than its predecessor, but the ability to play a Nintendo Wars game on a portable device proved popular. While intelligent systems pivoted to creating Fire Emblem games on the Famicom, the Nintendo Wars series began a new life on the Game Boy and Game Boy Color, with three sequels, Game Boy Wars Turbo, Game Boy Wars 2, and Game Boy Wars 3, releasing over the next few years. These games, though, weren't developed by intelligent systems. Another experienced developer, Hudson Soft, made these games. There was a single Nintendo Wars game for the Super Famicom developed by intelligent systems. The sensibly named Super Famicom Wars didn't receive a full physical release and was instead available as an early form of downloadable content. Meanwhile, Hudson Soft's efforts to continue the franchise on Game Boy, while not released in the West, would end up having a profound impact on the future of Nintendo, not because of the games themselves, but because of the way they shaped Nintendo's release schedule. The preparation of launch titles for the Game Boy Advance was a busy period for Nintendo. Too busy, in fact. In order to develop as many games as the company wanted to have ready for launch, they needed outside help. Said Advance Wars director Kentaro Nishimura, to be honest, Nintendo was already too busy. We had too many jobs to do, so we had to ask intelligent systems to share the responsibility of making Advance Wars. In returning to work on the Nintendo Wars franchise, intelligent systems wanted to address one of the biggest concerns with their strategy games, the fact that these titles were often impenetrable to first-time players. Said director Mikato Shimojo, at the early stages, it's just intelligent systems developers who get together and come up with unique game ideas. But when we present to Nintendo, their observations are nearly always, that's too sophisticated, that's not balanced for a general audience. And that's when we start working on the adjustments. The goal was to make the new Advance Wars appeal to the Game Boy Advance's target audience, young children. To this end, the developers placed a much larger emphasis on creating appealing characters, and making the artwork cute, eye-catching and memorable. They also made sure that the game wouldn't confuse or frustrate these younger players. Said Nishimura, with Advance Wars, even though there wasn't a plan to release it outside Japan, we made it really easy to play. We put a really good tutorial in, so people didn't need to read the manual. This decision to make the new game as accessible as possible paid off in ways the developers hadn't anticipated. While Advance Wars was intended as a GBA launch title, it was never intended for localization. After all, Westerners don't like strategy games, right? Except the Nintendo of America staff loved Advance Wars, said Nishimura. When the US marketing people played it, they came to see us and said, but this is great, why can't we sell it over here? So, because of the overwhelming enthusiasm from Nintendo of America, Advance Wars was a rare turn-based Nintendo strategy game that was given a Western localization. As it turned out, the English language translation was the first version of the game that would release for the Game Boy Advance. It would be several more years before Japanese players got the chance to buy the game. There are two likely reasons for the decision not to release Advance Wars in Japan. The most likely is because of Hudson Soft. Game Boy Wars 3 debuted on 30 August 2001 as one of the last Game Boy Color games before the release of the Game Boy Advance. To release Advance Wars as a launch title for the GBA would be to instantly kill off sales of Game Boy Wars 3, and it wouldn't exactly win Nintendo any goodwill from series fans who'd only just bought the previous game in the series. The US market had no such scheduling conflict. The game released first in this region, but it took several more months for it to release in Europe. This kind of delay was not uncommon at the time, but it's widely speculated that, as would happen 20 years later, certain world events had an impact on Nintendo's release schedule. After all, Advance Wars released in the USA on the 10th of September 2001. It's worth remembering one more time that Nintendo saw localizing a game like Advance Wars as a tremendous gamble. This particular gamble paid off massively. Advance Wars quickly became one of the Game Boy Advance's must-have titles, winning both critical and commercial acclaim. Said Nishimura, it seems that Advance Wars' success shifted Nintendo's attitude over western tastes. Following the success of Advance Wars, Nintendo was willing to try exporting other strategy games, most notably Fire Emblem titles. This was a far larger commitment. Fire Emblem games, with their dense role-playing game plots, contain much more text to be translated. Advance Wars had done so well, though, that Nintendo was willing to give its spiritual successor a try. Plus, Fire Emblem characters had shown up in Super Smash Bros Melee, and the buzz among western fans was that they'd like to play games from the franchise that had given them Roy and Marth. Said Fire Emblem project manager Masahiro Higuchi, there was already a base of war simulation games in the west, so we were confident that people would respond well to it. There were actually attempts to have a western release before, but the large amount of text and complexity of the setting ended up delaying this. Fire Emblem games are among the most complicated and difficult of Nintendo games to translate, thanks in large part to the amount of unique vocabulary in each title, but the franchise has more than proven worth it. To this day, Nintendo still doesn't localize every game in English, but thanks to the success of Advance Wars, they're willing to give every game due consideration. According to Nintendo Treehouse localizer Tim O'Leary, we have an evaluation system in place here, and through that process we get the game in, do an evaluation of it to determine what we think the sales potential is, and it comes down to essentially, if we don't think the sales potential is great, we don't do it. This, though, is not the end of the Advance Wars story. Advance Wars 1 and 2 Reboot Camp, after all, was developed not by Nintendo, but by an American company way forward. This too has a lot to do with the decision to delay the release of the original Advance Wars in Japan. It was 2004 before Japanese audiences finally got the chance to play the original Advance Wars. By this point, Advance Wars 2 Black Hole Rising had already released in the West. The franchise had become one of Nintendo's shining jewels in English-speaking regions, but a three-year absence had diminished its relevance in its home country. The version of the games that Japan finally received came in a double pack. Advance Wars 1 and 2 features all the content from both games combined into a single title, and is the reason why the reboot, 20 years later, also combines both games in one. After this title, Intelligent Systems went on to develop a DS Nintendo Wars game, Advance Wars Dual Strike, known as Famicom Wars DS in Japan. Kujoo Entertainment released a pair of spin-off games for the GameCube and Wii, which were given a new title, Battalion Wars, when localized in the West. Finally, the last Advance Wars game by Intelligent Systems released on a DS in 2008, but again, the Japanese release was skipped entirely. It wouldn't be until the launch of the 3DS that the game was made available to Japanese audiences as a downloadable title. For a game franchise that Nintendo had never intended to release in the West, it ended up becoming one of the company's only English-first franchises. Wave Forward Games is best known among Nintendo fans as the creators of Shantae, the half-genie hero. While this franchise and plenty of their original titles, Vitamin Connection, Spidersaws, Marble Knights, have their fans, it's not really where Wave Forward's money comes from. Instead, Wave Forward funds work on original projects by taking on licensed games. The studio has made titles featuring SpongeBob SquarePants, Barbie and the Smurfs. Said company founder, Voldy Way, Our original games are throttled by funding, so we can usually only afford to develop one or two per year. Most of the games we work on offer brands that we are in love with, so the passion is built in from the start. Even if the brand itself isn't inherently inspiring, we try to model the gameplay after games that have inspired us. For example, we worked on multiple Barbie games where we modeled the game design after classics such as Zelda II, The Lost Vikings, The Legend of Zelda, A Link to the Past, etc. As a game studio that specializes in licensed titles, and as a western developer that is often inspired by Nintendo titles of yesteryear, Wave Forward was the perfect choice to take on the role previously filled by Hudson Soft, recreating a previous hit from the Nintendo Wars franchise for a modern audience. Much of Hudson Soft's work on Game Boy Wars Turbo and Game Boy Wars 2 involved updating the original Game Boy Wars for the newer Game Boy Color hardware, and so now, Wave Forward has remade the Advance Wars duology for the Nintendo Switch. As with plenty of other Advance Wars games, Reboot Camp ran afoul of usual delays and awkward world events, but this game proves just how influential the series has become in the West, even especially because Nintendo didn't think Americans would care for it. The moral of the story? Just because everybody knows something is a waste of time, it doesn't make it true. Sometimes you've got to break with tradition to discover new worthwhile pursuits.