I used to be really into Advance Wars. I still think about it more than average, honestly.

Regardless, back in 2017 I did a couple of mini-series: they got barely any views, but, well, Old Vigaroe was also well-designed to bury anything that wasn't part of a big project.

They were also kind of ugly and lame. I've touched them up in the process of porting them, making them a little less hideous and sometimes slightly more readable. But they're mostly pretty close to how I first wrote them.

I also, in 2018, did a 'devlearning' thing about the Advance Wars CO design, but I've not bothered to port that: while I find the devlearning process interesting myself, it's been a struggle to translate that into meaningful Vigaroe content on its own, and this particular case didn't have much meat on it.

Anyway, first up of the things I did port:


Days of Ruin: Will, Society, and Nihilism. I found Days of Ruin's narrative a little unsatisfying overall, but after it had sat with me for a while it struck me what an odd approach it had to being a post-apocalypse story, with attendant oddities in how it approached characterization of people within that post-apocalypse. This is the little essay that resulted.


Days of Ruin: Brenner, Duty, Morals. Then I realized my essay didn't cover all the COs, including the conspicuous gap of Fairly Central Character: Brenner, and I built a second part that made a somewhat-poor attempt to connect to that first essay and cover all the COs. I'd probably have been better off covering Mr. Mayor, honestly. This did at least put my finger on why Gage was just Kind Of There, though, as he could've played off Brenner quite well, but I'm not sure they interact at all in Days of Ruin.

Then a few weeks later -still in 2017- I had a really bad sick day and did a little game development hypothetical for fun of trying to translate the Dual Strike COs into functioning as Days of Ruin COs, mechanically. (I made no effort to justify this insanity narratively, and in fact never even thought about what that could possibly be like until writing this right now in late 2026) I proceeded to convert that fun-for-me project into a Vigaroe series, because this was very early in Vigaroe's time, before I started not only doing the big projects but having them get, y'know, lots of views, and I wasn't entirely sure what was and was not a good fit to Vigaroe; early on, I often treated it halfway to being a personal blog about games I was playing.

Still, I liked the whole thing enough I didn't want it to simply vanish into the ether, so here it is, rebuilt for 2026:


CO Conversion: Intro and Orange Star. In which I explain the concept, do an overview of some of the eccentricities of Advance Wars mechanics to ground things, and then cover Orange Star all by themselves because they have an absurd number of COs.


CO Conversion: Blue Moon, Green Earth, and Yellow Comet. In which I blitz through the rest of the Allied Nations COs, because they don't actually outnumber Orange Star that much.


CO Conversion: Black Hole. In which I cover Black Hole by itself, which makes sense mostly because I decided to do the Bolt Guard and the Sturm Crew together, never mind that Sturm and Von Bolt have never existed in the same game. Black Hole has a lot of COs when you do everybody like this, even though in each individual game they don't have very many people.


CO Conversion Bonus: Rebalancing DoR COs. Having had a fair amount of fun with the prior and been perpetually frustrating by how the actual DoR COs are poorly-balanced and their existence bounds Reasonable Design for hypothetical new COs in problematic ways, I went ahead and tried to work through the idea of rebalancing several of them as part of this project.

To be clear, this project is just this stuff you can read. I'd sort of like to make a romhack or something, but I've never had the skills or opportunities to make such happen. Sorry.