Next week, Nintendo will answer fans' cries for a new Advance Wars game with Days of Ruin, a grittier installment in the hallowed portable strategy series from Intelligent Systems. Yesterday we took a look at Days of Ruin's darker tone and art style, and today we're back to examine how the game will play, including the changes made to the interface and controls, new types of units, major changes to the commanding officers and their abilities, and more.
"We chat with associate localization producer Tim O'Leary about the forthcoming Advance Wars sequel." (even though the title makes it sound like they interviewed the game.)
Actually, it's sort of strange how this franchise collapsed in Japan. It was historically quite decent. The first installment that did poorly was Game Boy Wars III, which was released in the dying days of the Game Boy Color (after the GBA was already released)... and since then there's just been no Japanese interest.
Fire Emblem stills does quite well in Japan, so it's not even like you can say "the Japanese don't like turn-based strategy"... and for the same reason, the difficulty can't be to blame. The whole AW series has good production values.
It's probably for the best that Nintendo started releasing everything stateside, because I don't think that the Wars franchise would have been able to sustain itself if it wasn't for the 50%+ of sales it now gets from the US.
Thanks guys for eating my profits with your analysis, I guess I rode the exuberance of this stock too long and got greedy :) I have to agree because of lack of interest in Japan and Europe, Advance wars is a niche title.
Perhaps the new look will endear more adult Japanese gamers....here's to hoping! Maybe it doesn't do well because its not Super Robot War...
The Japan numbers are Famitsu. Because there is no official Famitsu repository that provides LTDs, you are forced to use a third party site. I personally use Japan GameCharts, which sources its data originally from Famitsu.com and Game-Data no Heya. It is considered reliable. If you wanted to see week-by-week data, you could see it here (an excellent source, run by JoshuaJSlone. It shows that we only have data for the first two weeks of sales, and after that in off-chart sales there was enough to get an end-of-the-year update.
GBA data is harder to come by. Japan GameCharts (by choice) only lists games that have broken 200k, which neither of the AW installments for GBA did. It should be noted that AW is so unpopular in Japan that the two GBA installments were actually released in a double pack in 2004. I only have access to the Famitsu top 100 for 2004 (located here), which goes down to 130,000 sales and Advance Wars did not make it. If you have access to the Famitsu top 500, those normally go down to ~10,000 sales and it's virtually certain you'd be able to get a reliable number from there.
NPD figures cannot by site rules or NPD rules posted here. I understand that me saying "I've got the numbers, they're not hot, but I can't post them" isn't exactly re-assuring so I invite you to ignore my section on US sales. Unfortunately, the issues with NPD numbers make this sort of thing tricky.
In terms of online connections, my data comes from here. Every week on NeoGAF Bo130 posts all the Nintendo WFC data in a thread. You can view his methodology there, and rest assured his information is true.
While I would agree with some of your analysis (I'll break it down more when I get time), could you provide links to where you got your data, as I have a hard time trusting a post that asserts certain trends in sales or talks about sales figures but contains no links to sources where that data came from.
First, Famicom Wars does not sell in Japan. The previous Advance Wars sold only ~30k lifetime there. Neither of the GBA installments made it above ~100k IIRC. So basically, this number is relying on strong US sales and the nebulous "what if it does well in Europe" factor.
I think if you look at the kind of games on the DS that are doing well in Europe, Advance Wars does not fit whether or not it's shed the "kiddie look". European charts are very homogeneous and for the most part filled with traditionally popular franchises to a degree even higher than North American charts. In terms of DS games, Cooking Mama, Brain Training, and Brain Training 2 are the only games that have had Top 10 staying power. I have no doubt that AWDS2 could pull 100k in Europe, but I highly doubt the 300-500k necessary to justify this worldwide lifetime price could come from Europe.
In the American side, there are also several factors counting against it. It's a January release; one of the two or three worst months of the year. The AW games have not historically had legs, either. Obviously, I can't post NPD data to confirm this, but sufficed to say: a) AWDS sold the vast majority of its units within the first few months, and b) It didn't sell phenomenally. I also think that the "gritty look" might backfire a little. It'll lose the sales to kids who think it's a kids game (not that it ever was), but I'm not really sure it'll gain many new series converts. I do think some people who played the GBA installments and skipped AWDS will come back for this one, but I don't think it'll be enough to pick up the slack.
In addition, I'm not sure the online feature will be huge. As we know from the weekly NeoGAF Nintendo WiFi connection statistics, very few games have frequent use of Wifi. Animal Crossing, Mario Kart, Pokemon DP, Strikers, and Guitar Hero 3 are pretty much the only games that have reliably continued to have a large amount of WiFi usage. I see WiFi play amongst friends as being popular, but I doubt a sales-blossoming community will form around the feature.
I do think that 63-66 DKP is a more realistic estimate. Please consider all of this before investing in what I feel is a massively overinflated stock. Since the game will not hit 1 million, we will never see it mentioned in Nintendo's earnings release (which generally includes a list of million-shipping titles) and so it's highly highly unlikely that the correction I predict for this stock will occur soon. I think there will be a massive reactionary drop as Japanese numbers reveal the game bombing and casual investors react accordingly, although it's telling that there isn't even a confirmed Japanese date yet.
There will be a bounce if the game does alright in the NPD figures, but given that it's an end-of-month release, the idea that it will even chart is pretty unlikely and this makes the verifiability of the stock dependent on the mercy of NPD giving it out as part of its non-charting data release to sites.
Specs on two new vehicles, plus exclusive screens and videos. Talks about Bikes and Dusters and contains videos of both in action. "Although they seem at first like a small addition to the Advance Wars world, you'll find that bikes will let you create a whole new set of tactical strategies! Dusters are versatile air units with great movement range. They also have the ability to fire on both air and ground units—a new skill for Advance Wars air units."
In an effort to prevent the series from falling into a rut, IS has removed a lot of the distractions and unnecessary elements that have built up on the series over the course of its lifespan. The double-screen battles that annoyed so many players in Dual Strike are gone; many advanced units have been removed or replaced, and CO powers have been considerably toned down -- we're told they're no longer capable of single-handedly changing the outcome of a battle.
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