Advance Wars

Lore & Background

Advance Wars takes place on a fictional continent where four nations—Orange Star, Blue Moon, Yellow Comet, and Green Earth—exist in a fragile peace. The conflict begins when Orange Star and Blue Moon, initially allies, are drawn into war after an Orange Star commanding officer Andy is accused of attacking the armies of Yellow Comet and Green Earth without reason, resulting in a worldwide war. The game's campaign follows the player as a tactical advisor for the Orange Star Army, starting with Andy and later gaining the ability to advise Max and Sami, each with unique advantages and disadvantages.

The game features a battle system where two to four armies, each led by a commanding officer (CO), take turns building and commanding units on grid-based maps. Units have primary and secondary weapons, and combat damage depends on hit points, weapon type, unit type, and terrain.

Reader's Guide

Advance Wars is significant for its role in changing Nintendo's perception of Western interest in turn-based strategy games. Originally not intended for release outside Japan due to concerns about complex mechanics, the developers added an in-depth tutorial to make the game accessible. Designer Kentaro Nishimura noted that the game's success shifted Nintendo's attitude, and it is frequently credited as a driving force for bringing the Fire Emblem series to Western audiences. The game received critical acclaim and has been declared one of the greatest video games ever made. Its legacy includes re-releases on the Wii U Virtual Console in 2014 and a 2023 Nintendo Switch remake titled Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp, developed by WayForward. The game's release in Japan and Europe was delayed due to the September 11 attacks; it eventually released in Europe in January 2002, but not in Japan until the 2004 compilation Game Boy Wars Advance 1+2 alongside its sequel.

Did You Know?

• Advance Wars was not originally intended for release outside Japan due to Nintendo's belief that Western consumers would not be interested in turn-based games.
• The game was re-released for the Wii U Virtual Console on April 3, 2014, simultaneously in Europe and North America.
• A remake titled Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp was released for the Nintendo Switch on April 21, 2023, but not in Japan.

Defining the Tactical RPG

The tactical role-playing game—often shortened to TRPG or SRPG—occupies a unique space where the narrative-driven character growth of traditional RPGs meets the calculated, grid-based decision-making of strategy games. Rather than wandering through open towns or sprawling dungeons, these titles place the player squarely in the thick of tactical combat, where positioning, unit composition, and turn order determine outcomes. The genre's visual and structural DNA traces back to tabletop role-playing games and skirmish wargames like Chainmail, which were themselves primarily combat-focused. In pacing and rule structure, tactical RPGs feel closer to a board-game session than a cinematic adventure: discrete turns, clear objectives, and a finite roster of units clashing against a similarly sized opposing force. Death in these games is typically temporary, yet the strategic weight of each engagement remains heavy. This combat-first philosophy, stripped of the exploration loops that define many conventional RPGs, gives the genre its distinctive identity and sets it apart from both pure strategy titles and standard role-playing games.

Battle as the Core Loop

Where a conventional RPG might spend hours in a bustling market or a winding dungeon corridor, the tactical RPG compresses its entire experience around the act of fighting. The player commands a limited party of characters—warriors, mages, and other class-specific units—against a comparably sized enemy force on an isometric grid. There is no free-roaming exploration to fill the gaps; instead, progression is gated behind specific victory conditions, such as eliminating every hostile unit or simply outlasting the opponent for a set number of turns. Between engagements, the player returns to a management screen to equip gear, reassign classes, and allocate secondary experience points that push a character deeper into a chosen specialization. Primary experience, earned through combat, drives overall stat growth. This tight loop of battle, reward, and preparation creates a rhythm that rewards careful planning over reflexive action. A handful of titles, notably Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions, extend the formula by adding multiplayer modes, a feature that remains uncommon in a genre otherwise rooted in single-player strategy.

8-Bit Foundations in Japan

The tactical RPG's roots in Japan stretch back to the early 1980s. Koei's The Dragon and Princess (1982, PC-8001) introduced a combat system where a random encounter triggered a transition to a separate overhead battle screen, establishing the turn-based tactical format. That same year, Tunnels of Doom employed a similar structure, and Ultima III: Exodus followed in 1983. The true genre-defining moment, however, came with Bokosuka Wars (1983, Sharp X1; NES port 1985), developed by Koji Sumii. Its premise—a king recruiting and leveling up individual soldiers to push back against overwhelming armies—blended role-playing progression with strategic command and is widely credited as the foundation for what Japan calls the simulation RPG. Kure Software Koubou pushed further in 1988 with Silver Ghost, a real-time, point-and-click title that inspired the later Shining series, and First Queen, whose Gochyakyara system let one player-controlled character lead a full AI-driven squad through large-scale battles. SystemSoft's Master of Monsters (1989, MSX2) grafted fantasy magic and per-unit experience bars onto the wartime Daisenryaku formula, and its 1991 North American Genesis port made it one of the few early genre titles to cross the Pacific.

Fire Emblem and the Diverging Pacific

Intelligent Systems' Fire Emblem: Ankoku Ryū to Hikari no Tsurugi, released exclusively in Japan for the Famicom in 1990, is widely regarded as the title that crystallized the tactical wargame RPG into a repeatable template. Drawing on the character-driven appeal of Dragon Quest and the turn-based strategic mechanics the team had honed in their 1988 release Famicom Wars, the game established gameplay conventions—unit classes, grid-based positioning, experience-driven growth—that remain standard across the genre. Its success spawned numerous sequels and imitators, cementing a design language that subsequent tactical RPGs would inherit. Yet the genre's evolution has not been uniform. Western developers behind Tunnels of Doom and Ultima III had independently experimented with tactical combat as early as 1982 and 1983, and the broader lineage traces to tabletop systems like Dungeons & Dragons and Chainmail. Over time, development on each side of the Pacific followed its own trajectory, to the point where the label tactical RPG is sometimes applied exclusively to Japanese-made titles, even though the underlying design principles—finite parties, grid combat, class specialization, and battle-gated progression—appear on both sides of the ocean.

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