Zut alors! It's a France-exclusive GBA launch game
Oh, and also something called "F-Zero."
Video Works will be focusing primarily on NES for the next few months, but there's always room for a little Game Boy Advance indulgence—especially when it comes to exploring first-party Nintendo games that are almost completely unknown in the U.S. Nintendo published four games at the GBA's launch in Japan, but two of those games never came to America. Europe, however, did see them... though in the case of this week's featured game, that's only true of a very specific region of Europe: France.
There weren't a whole lot of Game Boy family releases that were localized exclusively from Japanese into French, but it did happen from time to time. Of all those works, perhaps none makes quite so much sense as Napoleon for Game Boy Advance. Napoléon Bonaparte is a towering figure in French history, a prime mover in the country's transformation from monarchy to republic. Without Napoléon, there might never have been a French democracy for the U.S. to model itself after. So when Genki and Nintendo created a game about his conquests, it only made sense for it to be localized into French.
Why it wasn't also localized into other European languages has never been explained. It's just one of those odd quirks of video game history.
Also this week we have the better-known Nintendo creation, F-Zero: Maximum Velocity. That one actually did make its way to the U.S... something that can't be said of many F-Zero releases, including the final GBA entry.
Incidentally, the Napoleon footage in this episode was recorded from a fan translation of the French release (L'Aigle du Guerre) into English. If you're interested in trying this proto-MOBA/proto-Pikmin game in your native language (assuming that's English), you can find the translation patch at romhacking.net.
