Advance Wars: Days of Ruin makes no attempt to hide its many departures from the series. Days of Ruin is much darker both visually and thematically. The gameplay and pacing are slightly different, and online play is available for the first time in the handheld sub-series. 1UP’s Kris Pigna sat down with Intelligent Systems to hear more about the upcoming title.

1UP: Days of Ruin is a stark departure for the Advance Wars series in a number of ways — a darker storyline, simplified and streamlined gameplay…. What lead to the decision to make so many changes, and why did you feel this was the right time to do so?

Hitoshi Yamagami and Masaki Tawara: Actually, we struggled with this issue a lot. Throughout our work on the series we spent each and every day adding what we thought were new elements to the latest games, but the response from consumers was consistently “the games are fun, but not much is different.” And our response was “What should we do?! We are making huge changes…” So, we decided to seek advice from the product development group at Nintendo of America and realized that we, as Japanese people, don’t know much about the reality of “war.”

Oooh. Realism. More at the link below.

1UP.com