While the Fire Emblem series has been experiencing a renaissance, the same couldn’t be said for its longtime compatriot, Advance Wars. The other strategy franchise from Intelligent Systems has been dormant since 2008. Well… not anymore! And we’re psyched. But until Re-Boot Camp releases, digging back into those older titles is the way to go. Where should you start? Read on.
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With its 30th anniversary, a lot of people have been talking about the long-running strategy franchise, and many are being introduced to what it has to offer. So where do you start if you want to get into the series? What’s the next step if you enjoy Three Houses or mobile hit Fire Emblem Heroes, and where do you go after that? We’re here to help you answer those questions.
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The 3DS has proven to be a welcoming home for tactical role-playing games. Still, though, there’s room for a franchise like Mercenaries Saga to carve out a nostalgic niche, providing the sort of grind that leaves doors wide open to exploiting the games’ systems. Mercenaries Saga 3, thankfully, doubles down on that feel.
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The hallmark of a great strategy game is how easy it is to let yourself give in to its myriad systems and revel in their complexities. Grand Kingdom, developed by Spike Chunsoft and brought to the West by NIS America, certainly is that. It doesn’t have your traditional JRPG trappings, instead focusing on intricate mechanical interactions and a veritable smorgasbord of possibility. Grand Kingdom doesn’t seek to be a game you like. It seeks to be a game you live.
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The Wars didn’t always have commanders. Famicom Wars and Game Boy Wars sent Red Star and Blue Moon against one another, and that was that. You were some faceless commander, with no noteworthy backstory or specific skills. It’s only with Super Famicom Wars that distinct commanding officers made their debut, and it changed the series for the better forever.
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Advance Wars started the series in the West, but it was Super Famicom Wars — the series’s second home-console entry — that implemented so many of the ideas that would make those games shine. Check out our video for more!
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It’s weird to think of Advance Wars as some sort of series for importers. After all, we’ve seen the last four entries in the West, in some cases several years before they’re released in their original Japanese form. The last title, Days of Ruin, was released in the U.S. and Europe in 2008, after a breakneck localization process that saw completely different English names and conversations in the two regions. Japanese players could buy it… in October 2013. As a digital-only Club Nintendo reward. This is just the latest in the Famicom Wars franchise’s rocky, questionable release history, one sometimes affected by real-life conflict.
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Nintendo and Intelligent Systems’ Wars series has always been one of the best turn-based strategic experiences you can enjoy on a Nintendo console or handheld. Here’s something that will blow your mind and appreciate the entries in the series that were localized even more. Famicom Wars, the very first installment, contains many of the same mechanics we enjoyed years later in Advance Wars. It’s a classic case of not messing with success.
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Let’s get this out of the way: Valkyria Chronicles Remastered is virtually identical to the game’s 2014 Steam release. It raises the resolution and includes all the game’s add-on content, but otherwise preserves everything about the PS3 original. The differences? Here they are: you can buy it on a physical disc, there are PlayStation button prompts again and, perhaps most notably, trophy hunters can now earn their Platinum that they were deprived last generation. That’s really it. This release included the demo for Valkyria: Azure Revolution in Japan, but there’s been no word on that in the West.
Now that we’ve taken care of that, we can move on to talking about how well Valkyria Chronicles holds up in 2016, which is unreasonably so.
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