Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising - Development

Development

After the success of Advance Wars, Intelligent Systems, the company that created the original game, began designing a sequel to Advance Wars. It was originally announced on January 15, 2003 under the title Advance Wars 2 to be released in North America in June of that year. Super Mario Club was to conduct testing, and Nintendo would publish the game. As Advance Wars was not released in Japan, Black Hole Rising was also unreleased in Japan, despite the fact the games were developed there. Later, before the launch of Advance Wars: Dual Strike, the games were released in Japan on a single cartridge, Game Boy Wars Advance 1+2, which contained both of the games. The Japanese release had minor graphical differences, mostly in the portraits of the commanding officers.

When screenshots of the game were released in April of that year, it was seen that the original graphic style of Advance Wars would stay unchanged, and one could guess that changes would mostly be cosmetic. When a demo of the game was released at E3 that year, it was clear that the gameplay would stay nearly identical to its predecessor Advance Wars, though new content would be added. IGN journalist Craig Harris commented after E3 2003 that " doesn't have an overwhelming sense of newness".