Nintendo gives an Advance Wars 1+2 update after today's Direct

Nintendo has confirmed Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp is still on the way, despite its lack of presence at today's Nintendo Direct presentation.

"The release [of Advance Wars] has been delayed," a Nintendo representative tells Axios journalist Stephen Totilo. "We will announce the new date once it has been determined." That's pretty much exactly what Nintendo's been saying since the game's indefinite delay, but at least the publisher seems willing to acknowledge the title's existence.

Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp, as the title suggests, is a modernized collection of Advance Wars and Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising. Originally released for the Game Boy Advance, these games were the first titles in the series to be released outside of Japan, and with the series having gone dormant since Days of Ruin on the DS over a decade ago, fans greeted the announcement of Re-Boot Camp with a whole lot of excitement.

Developed by indie studio WayForward, Re-Boot Camp was originally set to launch on December 3, 2021, but was delayed to get "a little more time for fine tuning." The game was then scheduled to launch on April 8, 2022, but a month ahead of that release, Nintendo chose to delay it again "in light of recent world events."

While Nintendo never directly mentioned Russia's invasion of Ukraine as the reason for the game's delay, the implication was pretty clear. The company likely did not want to be seen as insensitive to current events by releasing a light-hearted, anime-styled war game with a real war suddenly dominating worldwide headlines.

While the ongoing war in Ukraine remains a topic of major concern, the recent announcement of modern GoldenEye releases, a game which contains a lot of imagery related to the Russian military, suggests that publishers like Nintendo are starting to see a window in which to release content that would've been seen as problematic earlier in the year.

One retailer has suggested that Re-Boot Camp is due to launch in February 2023, but that date remains unconfirmed.