 More and more Super Famicom games that never left Japan are getting English translation patches these days and thanks to hardworking folks like Optorock, Super Famicom Wars can now be played in English. That's right, it's the ancestor of the Advance Wars series that gained popularity on Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS. The series actually started all the way back on the Famicom before getting two more releases on Game Boy in Japan and later on the Sateleview peripheral before finally getting a full cartridge release in 1998. So Super Famicom Wars is actually the fourth game in the series. In case you're unfamiliar, the Wars series is military style turn based tactics and strategy with some role playing game elements like experience points occasionally thrown in there as well, but it's mostly tactical maneuvering and planning. If you've played Advance Wars, you'll be right at home with this game since the gameplay basics are mostly the same. You control an army with the goal of course being to destroy every enemy or capture their headquarters and there's four countries to choose from. There's Yellow Comet, Green Earth, Red Star and Blue Moon, not to be confused with the beer. You choose between seven commanding officers and go up against other commanders and they more or less act like difficulty settings. There's Mr. Yamamoto, Billy Gates, Vaan Rosso, Caroline, Juan the Delta, Rogensky and ...Hetler? Really? So yeah, you can play as or against friggin' Hitler. Three of these officers have special abilities so to speak. Caroline, it increases your luck stat, Billy Gates gets 10,000 extra gold every turn and Mr. Yamamoto's army all starts at level 2. Everyone else has playable characters is just an avatar more or less, but as opponents they all differ in how they fight you. There is no story mode or campaign mode in Super Famicom Wars for better or for worse. You fight battles just to, you know, fight battles. However, this game is two player and four player compatible which is a nice bonus but I'm honestly not sure if you actually need the four player adapter or if it's the case where you're just passing the same controller back and forth since it's turn based. I would guess it's the latter. Still, it's a really cool option to have since it allows you to set up teams or just have it be a free for all. Anyway, the gameplay functions on a grid based map. You just move your cursor over a building until you see the wrench icon. Press A and create a unit and to create a unit you need money. You typically start out with something like 7,000 gold and more gold is generated each turn depending on how many buildings you have under your control. So you're going to want more money so you can start creating bigger fancier stuff for your army. So the next step is to capture neutral and enemy buildings. Only infantry and mechs can do that but the problem is they're pretty weak so you gotta devise a plan and strategize how you're going to protect them while navigating the map and increasing your resources. And Super Famicom Wars does a decent enough job giving you enough options to make it interesting. Granted, what's here is obviously limited compared to later games which is going to be a deal breaker for some people but there's still a good amount of depth to dig into here. It reminds me of playing SimCity for Super Nintendo as opposed to playing, say, SimCity 4 for PC. You can eventually get tanks, battleships, missile launchers, all that good stuff as well as artillery trains that feature a wide range of movement and pack a huge punch while transporting up to two ground units at once. And there's also what's called a proto tank or a neo tank which can only be obtained by capturing a neutral laboratory. The battle structure here is similar to the other games in the series. It takes one day to create the unit. Then the next day you can move them around depending on the terrain in front of you. Then you provide maintenance for fuel and ammo, and you're rewarded for protecting your units because they have the ability to level up after a while. But bear in mind, when you attack in this game, you don't get first strike unlike later games in the series. The units always attack at the same time, so you can't be too aggressive. There's certain game options you can turn on and off here like Fog of War, for instance. That option hides units outside your vision range so you gotta send out recon units to go scout so you know where the enemy is. There's 15 brand new maps here, 15 classic maps from previous games, and 10 foreplayer maps. And you might recognize some of them since they were used in later games like Dear Harbor and Royal Channel, which both show up in Advance Wars Days of Ruin. But the maps bring me to the biggest flaw in Super Famicom Wars. Sure, the functionality and gameplay is fine, but the map design is limited and lacking in a lot of areas. That's where the game shows its age the most, since a lot of maps are really time consuming and take forever to do even the most simple navigation. Other than that, Super Famicom Wars is a perfectly good game for what it is. There's quite a bit more here than what I'm going over, but I just wanted to give a brief overview of what this game is all about. Oh, and big time kudos to Optorock for this translation. It is really well done and extremely player friendly. If there's anything in the game you don't understand, the game, and by proxy the translation, does a great job of explaining. But the game itself is a bit of an oddity because it's one of those cases where it's just a little weird to go backwards in a series that's, um, advanced, as much as it has in the 20 years since. Some people are going to be driven baddie by the sheer number of animations you have to sit through over and over and over. And yeah, the map design still needed a lot of work at this point, but still, this is a fun game that still holds up reasonably well today, especially against a second player. And I want to thank you for watching and I hope you have a great rest of your day.