Name(s): Front Mission
Platform(s): SNES / Nintendo DS
Developer(s): G-Craft (SNES, WSC) / Studio Clips, Tom Create (WSC) / Square Enix (PSX) / Tose (DS)
Publisher(s): Square (SNES, WSC) / Square Enix (PSX, DS) / Forever Entertainment (Multi-Platform Remake)
Director(s): Toshiro Tsuchida
Genre(s): Phase-Based Strategy RPG
Release Date(s): February 24, 1995 (JP) [SNES] / July 12, 2002 (JP) [WSC] / October 23, 2003 (JP) [PSX] / March 22, 2007 (JP), October 23, 2007 (NA) [DS]
Related: Front Mission (Franchise)

I fucking love Japanese mecha and their idea of sci-fi in general. It’s not like Western sci-fi where everything is cold and sterile. They have a lot of fun with it. It seems like an inviting future, rather than one that’s just as mundane as the present time, only with more computers.

Having had a ton of fun with the Super Robot Wars games for the GBA, I was naturally excited when I heard about a new strategy RPG coming out for the DS focused on mechs, and it was the critically-acclaimed Front Mission series, which I had never tried before. I scooped the game up launch day, was incredibly hyped, and it took about five minutes for me to regret my purchase.

Where do I start with Front Mission? It’s a port of a SNES game, so RPGs had a bit of a way to go at least when it came to making intuitive interfaces, fast gameplay, and balanced mechanics. But there were still a lot of great SNES RPGs regardless, and SquareSoft is a big company with plenty of resources, so that’s hardly an excuse. Strategy RPGs were relatively uncommon then too, but I feel most problems with this game are due to a general lack of common sense when it comes to making a game and poor execution of several of the game’s elements, such as the story, soundtrack, graphics, etc. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

You play as a soldier name Royd or Lloyd or something (it’s not worth looking up). His crew are ambushed by an extremely powerful Wanzer (mech) while on a mission and his fiancée is killed, so now he’s a perfect proto-emo, wooden SquareSoft protagonist. This surprise attack prompts a war and Royd joins some militia called the OCU or something (I’m not going to check the real name because it’s also not worth it), egged on by their commander or whatever with the pretense of being able to avenge his fiancée.

So, Royd sets out to help the OCU defeat the USN. There’s a few other soldiers that join your team, most of whom hardly ever speak, are nearly devoid of characterization, never interact with the supporting cast, and have no little to no backstory. They are nothing more than tools for you to have more units to command during maps. It is impossible to give one fuck about the generic plot premise or blank-slate characters, so playing Front Mission for the storyline is completely ruled out, and our only possible reason for regarding this game is its gameplay. But is even that any good?

This is a turn-based strategy RPG. There’s a grid that you move your Wanzers along and you use terrain for defense cover (though the defense gained is mostly negligible and the majority of the tiles you’ll be on in a map are flat surfaces and offer no protection anyway, so the way you position your units is rarely important. Strategy!) as you fight other Wanzers with your guns and missiles and shit until they all blow up, and you gain a hollow sense of accomplishment for progressing a story you won’t care about and having little involvement in your victory with how little strategy you are required to use to win.

The way combat is done is completely awful and a terrible idea. A Wanzer is divided into five sections. There’s the arms, legs, and body. To destroy a Wanzer, you have to destroy its body. That’s all that is required. Destroying an arm disables the use of the weapon that’s in that arm and destroying the legs reduces the Wanzer’s movement to 1.

When you attack a Wanzer, the part you hit is completely random. Completely. Battles are entirely up to luck and nothing else. You could fire first at a Wanzer repeatedly and if your luck is shitty enough hit everything but its body while that single Wanzer gets all the luck and kills your units one after the other by managing to hit the body on all of yours.

Half the weapons you can equip to your Wanzers only hit once per attack too, so if you miss the body you basically just wasted your turn. You have a 1 in 5 chance of dealing any damage that actually matters. In fact, I think it gets worse later in the game when Wanzers can equip shoulder guards, adding even more parts to hit. When a part’s HP is reduced to 0, you can no longer hit it, but odds are you’ll still hit everything else before the actual body, dragging about battles far longer than they should be and making them frustrating beyond belief whenever luck decides to turn against you. Don’t you love it when you can’t form a strategy in a fucking strategy game?

In-between stages you can talk to people in the town who never have anything worth saying, train at the arena for money and cash to make this game even easier than it already is, or upgrade your Wanzers. The best thing about mech games is being able to customize your mechs. You feel really accomplished when you come up with a clever mech design that manages to defeat your enemies. If Front Mission has a good customization system, then it can make even those mundane battles worth trudging through for that satisfying feeling of seeing a team you put effort and thinking into making win battles.

But like many JRPGs I’ve played, Front Mission only has the illusion of customization. This is when a game gives you a lot of options on how to power up your characters at one time. They give you a lot of equipment to choose from (or in this case, parts) but they aren’t balanced out at all and there’s always equipment that is in every significant way superior to the other choices, so every player is going to go with the objectively superior equipment unless they are stupid, making 90% of the options offered to you worthless. That isn’t customization. It’s the standard RPG system of buying better equipment each town and dumping the old shit, only the developers wasted more time coding equipment no one is ever going to use because there is no reason to.

Every character in the game has a combat specialty. There are three weapon types: melee, mid-range (rifles), and long-range (missile launchers etc). Each character on your team is better with a certain weapon type, but the game doesn’t tell you which, because that would actually make sense but nothing else in this game does so I guess they figured they’d keep that theme up. When a character uses a weapon type, they gradually gain skill points for that weapon type (more if they are naturally suited to that weapon type).

Once the skill points are high enough, they can learn skills that activate in battle and give special effects. For example, one skill can give you an extra attack, and another lets you choose which part of the Wanzer to target (which completely breaks the game as there’s no point to not target just the body and your attacks normally hit several different parts of the Wanzer at once, and damage is cumulative so when you target just one part it all adds up and pretty much destroys it in one shot).

For all the reasons stated above, you’re only going to have three different types of Wanzers the entire game. One designed for melee, mid-range, and long-range. And because there are obvious and objective best ways to outfit your Wanzers for each of these, you’re going to duplicate them for the rest of your team according to their weapon preference. If you’re low on money, which you rarely really are, you can fight pathetically easy battles in the arena to earn extra money and a small amount of EXP.

The thing about Front Mission is that the enemies never scale in power to you. Even not taking skills into account, your natural equipment is so much better than the enemy’s that they just put up less and less of a fight as you go on, making strategy even less necessary. You’re basically just pressing buttons to advance a generic and near non-existent storyline.

And here we are at the crux of the matter. Front Mission does nothing well and is a completely pointless game to play given your many alternatives for better strategy RPGs, even ones specifically featuring mechs (like, any of them). Also, the soundtrack is completely unmemorable, there’s a severe lack of variety in music and you will get sick of hearing the same songs repeatedly.

The art design is far too gritty and realistic with lifeless environments and endless shades of grey and brown, and combined with the monotonous music and gameplay makes Front Mission, for me, one of the most depressing games ever. It’s just so… devoid of anything. It has good bones, at least. Mechs are awesome, customization is great. It just…. doesn’t do them justice. At all.

I’ve tried so many times to get into this game. I started it over from the beginning probably like 10 times thinking I would enjoy it the next time but I never do, because it’s simply a bad game with nothing to offer. I want my fucking $20 back.

I’ve only played one other Front Mission game, Front Mission 3. I’m glad I did, because it at the very least improved the interface of the game and turned out to be pretty decent. But the first one? Stay far away, unless you already have hardcore nostalgia for it, in which case I’ll never convince you otherwise.

NOTE: I’ve since finished the default scenario of the DS port. I wrote the above review long before that. My opinion of the game is still largely negative, but I’ve yet to rewrite this old review into something more cogent.