Man, this one took me almost a year to beat. It was super boring, so I only played it when I brought my DS on long road trips. It was kind of like a sedative, lol.
Something about seeing games like Front Mission released strikes me as tragic. The probability is that Square-Enix was gauging interest in the Front Mission series to see if they should continue releasing them in the states. The answer was clearly ‘no’, as Front Mission 5 has been out for a while. The problem is, if you’re going to use an earlier game to gauge interest in a series’ continuation, you have to make sure the game you’re using doesn’t suck.
Front Mission is set in the near future on Huffman Island, a fictional landmass that is being claimed by two superpowers: the Oceania Community Union, which consists of Japan, Australia, and other pacific island nations; and the Unified Continental States, which consists of the Americas. War breaks out between the two, and you will play either from the perspective of Royd Clive (Seriously? Royd? From which exotic island is Royd is a common name?), a mercenary who works for the O.C.U, or Kevin Greenfield, your untypical soldier who hails from the U.C.S. Each of them uncover some sort of grave secret truth about the war, why it was really started, and bla bla bla, these kinds of trite stories make me wanna puke. Oh, and the big deal about Front Mission is that people fight in these huge bipedal robots called Wanderung Panzers, or Wanzers for short.
Anyways. Front Mission is one of the worst kinds of tactical RPGs - The kind where strategy can be thrown out the window.
Strategy is turn-based; that is, all your character take their actions, and then the enemies follow up until all allies or enemies are defeated. There are only three ways of attacking someone in Front Mission: With Melee weapons, Short range (Machine Guns, Shotguns), and Long range weapons (Rocket / Missile Launchers). Short range attacks, by the way, is a misnomer, since you can only hit an enemy with a short range weapon if you’re adjacent to them.
Most wanzers have four different parts: Their body, which keeps a wanzer operating, the arms, which carry the weapons, and the legs, which control how far a wanzer can move. Destroying a part will disable its function - if the body is destroyed, the wanzer is removed from combat. Normal attacks target a random part, and Melee and Short range attacks are subject to immediate counterattacks from their enemies.
Attacking an enemy will grant your wanzer pilot experience points, both towards gaining a level, but to an experience meter in whatever form of attack they used. When a pilot levels up, they always gain a specific amount of points in all three attack types. Some characters level up evenly, while other characters gain more points in others.
That being explained, let’s get to the point. Here’s why Front Mission’s combat sucks:
- In Royd’s/The O.C.U scenario, you can send so many Wanzers into battle that you can just brute force your way through the whole game. You get something like seventeen characters, and you can usually send about nine or eleven into battle at a time. In Kevin’s/The U.C.S scenario, you only get seven characters, and that’s still too much - you usually have more than half of the enemy’s number! Name any strategy RPG where you had more than half of the enemy units’ number that was a really challenging strategy RPG. If you can, well…no offense, but you probably need to get better at strategy RPGs.
The problem here is that when you have so many units, you have a ton of leeway to make terrible decisions. This is especially bad in a turn-based strategy game; if the team who moves second has any hope of winning, they have to have a significant advantage from the outset. And, if you’re going to make the AI pilot wanzers like five-year olds, they need a much better advantage than they’re given.
This alone isn’t a dealbreaker, for sure. However, lowering the number of units you can take into battle to five or so would have immensely improved the game. There’s still another big problem, though:
- Every single method of attack is stupidly overpowered. Each of the three attack types have their own skills, which a pilot can learn by using a certain attack type with frequency. The short and long range attacks both have a skill that allows a pilot to aim at a specific part of a Wanzer. From that point on, you can just aim at a target’s body and usually kill them in one shot. Long range attacks are safer, but have a limited amount of ammo; and short range attacks are a bit more dangerous, but deal more damage. Melee, while being the weakest of the three, can still allow their pilot to attack first every time and stun their target, disabling them from being able to act (thus, unable to counter attack) for as long as a few turns.
You might be thinking, “So, couldn’t the enemy do the same things to you?” The answer is technically “yes”; however, they never will. Enemy units RARELY have attack skills, and if they do, it’s usually a ‘Level 1 Skill’, which means they have the lowest possible chance of triggering. The skills that allow a wanzer to target specific body parts triggers every time, but enemy wanzers never get those skills So, while YOU constantly have a huge advantage, due to the enemy AI not taking full advantage of the game’s rules, you can steamroll your way through every single battle while you watch TV or play a better game at the same time.
I’ll admit, though, that even this isn’t quite enough to make the game ‘bad’ - I’ve played broken games that still managed to be FUN. The true coup de grace to Front Mission lies in buying equipment, which strips the fun clean out of the game.
For each character in the game, you have to buy wanzer parts for their body, left/right arms, legs, a CPU component, a backpack, a weapon for their left/right arms, and optionally a weapon for their left/right shoulders. As if that wasn’t enough, there’s always about ten million different parts available in a shop - partly because the shops NEVER filter out obsolete equipment from earlier in the game, but also because every time the game offers new parts, there’s always about seven or eight new parts/weapons for each available thing. The funny thing is, there’s always one or two obviously superior parts. Some of the parts are complete horseshit, too, like they’ll offer two rocket launchers, but one costs 100 more gold (or whatever the currency was called) while being uncontestably worse than the cheaper one!
After you’ve bought all ten parts for your character’s wanzer, you have about 5-10 more characters to buy all those parts with. Have fun scrolling down those lists fifty times each time you complete a battle and go back to the shop. Oh, and by the way, if you don’t have enough money - and it’ll happen eventually - you can go to towns and fight arena battles, which require about as much strategy as the rest of the game. You will always win every fight as long as you have one character with good equipment, which makes it nothing more than a banal extension to the process of buying parts. Expect it to take anywhere from fifteen to forty minutes to deck out all your wanzers with the newest equipment.
The end result is a strategy RPG that not only makes it hard to die, even when you’re TRYING to do so, but has you spending almost twice the amount of time preparing your units for combat than you spend actually engaged in combat. Maybe the strategy aspect of the RPG was supposed to be the buying of wanzer parts, and the fight sequences were meant to be the filler? I think I’m having an epiphany, here.
Beyond that, the story is only as good as it needs to be to honestly be called a story with a straight face. The O.C.U scenario is a joke - the characters virtually never interact with each other, and what scarce dialogue exists is totally lame. Each character has only one thing on their mind for the whole damn game, and they never talk about anything besides that, for all five of their respective lines. Some characters say absolutely nothing after you recruit them, which is even more bewildering. For that reason, it’s very hard to give a crap about any of the (seventeen) characters. The U.C.S scenario does much better in the characterization department - even though the characters are static, the fact that you have the option to talk with your squad in between missions makes them all seem a lot more like humans than flimsy plot devices. The irony is that, in the O.C.U scenario, most characters appear to have some sort of storied history that winds up never materializing because of their lack of screen time and egregious dialogue. In the U.C.S scenario, the opposite occurs: Most of the characters get plenty of screen time, and are much more engaging, but there’s nothing to be found out about any of them! Besides that, the both of the scenarios have almost the exact same story progression, plot twists and all. Ultimately, the story is cliched - without even presenting the cliches in a fresh way - and has no point.
What else…There are about four versions of this game. The only ones in english are the DS version (which is the one I reviewed), and the SNES version that has a fan translation. I can’t comment on the quality of the fan translation, but the DS version is easily superior in terms of content; the SNES version doesn’t even contain the U.C.S scenario - the only remotely enjoyable part of the game - and the quality of the music on the SNES version (written by Yoko Shimomura and Noriko Matsueda) is hysterically bad. Just get the DS version. The character art was drawn by famed artist Yoshitaka Amano, but the characer of his drawings are really lost in the graphics. The O.C.U scenario takes about 25 hours to complete, and the U.C.S scenario takes about 15 hours to complete.
I wanted to like this game really badly. I really enjoyed Front Mission 3, and although what little of Front Mission 4 I played was mediocre, I was really interested in seeing where the game was going. Unfortunately, the Front Mission series is going to be now and forever judged on where it started. Here’s some advice, Square-Enix: Leave your old crappy RPGs to the fan-translators, and focus on bringing us the new hotness instead, because releasing this thirteen year-old game with nary a single revision to the gameplay is just embarassing…for you guys.
I’ll keep looking, though!