#famicom wars

The Wars series is a sister series to the Fire Emblem series that spans many of Nintendo's consoles. The Advance Wars games, the installments released on the Game Boy Advance and the Nintendo DS, are perhaps the most well-known and also appear to have the most connective tissue (I am not too familiar with the installments released on the original Game Boy and Game Boy Color that only released in Japan).

Three of the Advance Wars (Advance Wars, Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising and Advance Wars: Dual Strike) games share a light but overarching narrative that becomes more the focus as each game in the series progresses, with Advance Wars: Days of Ruin being unconnected. They are set on various continents in Wars World and feature four nations: Orange Star, Blue Moon, Gold Comet and Green Earth. They are manipulated and opposed by the faction known as Black Hole that seeks to take over the world. Their armies all have various COs that act as the main protagonists and antagonists of the series. These various titles also have more connections to each other and older games, like Famicom Wars and Super Famicom Wars that I'd like to explore.

Family Relationships

In the Advance Wars trilogy, Nell acts as the commander-in-chief of Orange Star and has a CO ability that increase the luck damage of her troops, called Lucky Star. Her younger sister Rachel appears one of the main characters in Dual Strike as well and has a similar ability that increases the luck ability of her troops, called Lucky Lass. In Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp, the remake of the first two Advance Wars games, shopkeeper Hachi mentions their mother:

"Step inside-there’s lots to buy! Nell’s units are so lucky all the time. It’s probably because she was born with her very own good-luck charm. Don’t believe me? Take a look for yourself-it’s that cute little beauty mark on her face! Must run in the family, ‘cause I happen to remember her mom having an identical one… Not sure about her sister though."

This may be a call-back to Super Famicom Wars, which does not feature a story. It does feature the same nations as those in the Advance Wars trilogy (aside from Black Hole) fighting on small islands, with their own set of COs. One of them is Caroline, who works freelance, has a beauty mark like Nell and is considered a "lucky girl". Her specialty is dealing more damage than normal, mirroring Nell and Rachel's CO abilities as well. It is thus possible she is their mother.

Another potential, but more tenuous, connection has to do with Sasha and Colin. These are siblings from Blue Moon who are mentioned to have rich parents and Colin's CO ability allows him to gain more money per turn than usual. This is similar to the ability of the freelance CO Billy Gates, who is mentioned to be the son of a billionaire. If Super Famicom Wars is indeed set in the past of the Advance Wars trilogy, as indicated by Re-Boot Camp, Billy and his father may be part of the same family.

Mentors and students

There are more connections between the Advance Wars trilogy and previous Wars games than just potential familial ones. The CO Sensei from Black Hole Rising is part of Gold Comet and mentioned to have taught Kanbei, another CO and the emperor of Gold Comet. In the Japanese version of Black Hole Rising, Kanbei mentions Sensei by his real name: Yamamoto.

Sensei thus shares his name with the third freelance CO from Super Famicom Wars, Mr. Yamamoto. He also shares his CO abilities with Kanbei, which entails that their units receive stat boosts, indicating Sensei may have passed these on to Kanbei in his younger days.

Of note is that Sensei also taught Hachi, who used to be commander-in-chief of Orange Star before Nell, alongside Kanbei. Hachi mentions this in Re-Boot Camp:

"Well now, look what the cat dragged in! Are you familiar with Sensei? He’s my friend and an absolute legend. He sure taught me a thing or two… Ah, now I’m getting all misty! Anyway, Kanbei and I owe most of our success to that man."

In Super Famicom Wars, the CO of Orange Star is instead a character named Yuan Delta. The framing of the original Famicom Wars is that Yuan Delta made the game as a training program for the player as pointed out by AskAdvanceWars on AO3. He used to be the commander-in-chief of Orange Star but is now looking for a successor. So in a possible timeline, Super Famicom Wars may be first and set during Yuan Delta's glory days. He then makes Famicom Wars to train his successor, who may be Hachi. Decades later, the Advance Wars trilogy then takes place, where Hachi has retired and Nell is now the commander-in-chief of Orange Star.

The Alien invasion

Sturm, the leader of Black Hole in Advance Wars and Black Hole Rising, is an enigmatic person who wears a robotic, orange suit with a gasmask-like device over his head. He claims to be warfare incarnate and other than that and in the original Black Hole Rising, he is described in his profile as a mysterious invader from another world.

When looking at Black Hole infantry, they similarly wear suits to Sturm, but the details of their faces are obscured. We can get a better look in Dual Strike, where we see they are alien-looking beings that wear a similar contraption around their mouth to Sturm. This may imply Sturm looks similar to his infantry under his mask and that the other world he is from is another planet, not another dimension. This all would mean the central conflict in the first two Advance Wars games is about aliens and their human allies trying to take over Wars World.

Locations in Omega Land

Omega Land is the continent that is the setting of Dual Strike and has quite a few names locations. Below I made a compilation of which locations are named.

Today's Beauty-Marked Beauty is: Nell from Advance Wars

Famicom Wars

Intelligent Systems got its start with programmer Toru Narihiro being tasked with porting games from Nintendo’s Famicom Disk System to the format compatible with the more widely used Nintendo Entertainment System’s for overseas production. Known primarily in the early years for developing software-creation-tools, both hardware and software, Intelligent Systems worked closely with Nintendo R&D1 and developed many games that were functionally hardware tech demos like Wild Gunman, Duck Hunt, and Gyromite. Before long, the effort became an offshoot company that was a branch of Nintendo.  The drive to make something in a different direction was held, and so Narihiro along with Satoru Okada, Kenji Nishizawa and Gunpei Yokoi sought to develop a simulation game, and the change in direction for the joint-stock company began with Famicom Wars. The goal was to create a strategy game similar to SystemSoft’s Daisenryaku series, which originated on Japanese PCs, but adapted for the younger, wider audience of the Famicom.