The Most Ridiculous Cast of Generals

Some while ago, I reviewed a series of Flash games, Battalion: Nemesis, Battalion: Ghosts, and Battalion: Vengeance. (Incidentally, if you want to visit all of the games' pages directly, the quickest way would be through the creator's Kongregate page. Also, I must regretfully mention that the multiplayer and level editor have been taken down. I didn't care much about multiplayer, having no particular interest in playing with strangers and no interest in the site membership I seem to recall was necessary, but I'll miss that level editor.)

I brought up that the games were loosely based on the Advance Wars games*, AKA the Nintendo Wars games, which I was not really familiar with at the time.

I wouldn't say I'm an expert on them or anything now, but I do have a general awareness of them beyond "they inspired the Battalion Flash games," and the most relevant thing I've learned, I think, is that while Battalion is a bit silly, Advance Wars is really silly. Like, there's plenty of silly characters in the tiny cast of Battalion, but most of the silliness seems to be in the form of bantering natures. In Advance Wars, every character is an absurd, over-the-top anime character, such as the vaguely teenaged/preteen commander who apparently waves around a pair of wrenches on a regular basis. (In addition to incidentally featuring a number of the ridiculous characters, the videos below are the laments of a particular player who felt that a couple of missions from one of the Advance Wars games were... a teeny bit unfair.)




Also, apparently Advance Wars commanders have magic powers, because one of them can summon meteor strikes and another can create blizzards (and there are others who have similarly bizarre abilities).

Frankly, while I like the Battalion games the way they are, I'd be all for a version with ridiculous commander powers like that added in.

*Interestingly, while gameplay was never identical (there were fewer types of units at a minimum), Battalion's gameplay moved away from Advance Wars' style as the games went on. Most specifically, the introduction of the War Machine mobile factories, and as far as I can tell Advance Wars never had a direct counterpart to the stealth tanks or jammer trucks, which are rather signature units in Battalion. (Examining the wiki, there was a similar stealth plane, but the gameplay differences between a tank and plane are quite significant; there's some similarities between the Advance Wars aircraft carriers-which can build aircraft-and a War Machine, but on the other hand a War Machine can build battleships.)

-Signing off.