A look back at: Front Mission: Gun Hazard

 

This somehow took a lot longer to get through than the previous Front Mission, and honestly that's cause I did so many other things to close out this summer. I still do ROM hacks and walkthroughs for them, play the occasional mod every now and then, but also work and college courses got in the way more often than not. This game should have been finished earlier, but because of so many other commitments, I did things a mission at a time with Front Mission: Gun Hazard.

Side-scrolling action RPGs are quite the rarity, but they can be somewhat fun if done quite right. This one game is based off of Cybernator, but with action RPG elements. So you gain experience and money for each kill, and enemies often respawn with a bar at the NE end of the HUD. What this entails is that for each mission, you'll have some non-static enemy encounters coming from either direction and you can blow them all up before continuing, so I usually find a nice sweet spot to park my butt in and just grind on the enemies until they stop showing up. Then, finish the rest of the static encounters or get to the end. There are very, very few missions with constraints to worry about, like auto-scrolling, but there's not even any timed missions or so. Good playing does mean avoiding too much in damage, though I do say, with destroying enemy Wanzers or other mechanical devices, the lingering explosion damage is the source of most of my damage problems. As far as weapons go, the shotgun weapons are the best primary weapons in general, though I did use vulcans every now and then. The secondary weapons I usually avoided using due to finite ammo and having to always restock, but the knuckle has no ammo limit albeit having to deal with the annoying splash damage.

Front Mission: Gun Hazard also does a rare thing for action RPGs at the time and have a computer-controlled ally character that you can choose between missions. And all are different in many ways, they all can gain experience and levels just like Albert can. Though leveling Brenda and Kagemitsu doesn't really accomplish much, since one's a carrier pilot for calling airstrikes and the other's just a map robot. The ally Wanzers though are a challenge to keep safe from harm as you go through a level battling enemies. Emil and Clark I had the best overall time with, since they usually stay behind me, but Luven, Axel, Sakata, and Anita (I didn't use Rook once, I'll admit) have the annoying habit of getting in front of me, taking damage when they are the ones who are weaker than my main Wanzer (as a reminder, Albert gets most of the experience since you HAVE to play as him). It's not too much an issue with Sakata as he's got that invulnerability shield, but the others shouldn't get in front of me. Luven's the worst at this, since he also lobs the bombs that hurt him and you as well if not thrown right. And trying to keep the AI from walking into destroyed enemy explosions was also a challenge.

The game's plot is quite intriguing. That tower in the beginning is so strange, representing what could have been, but of course it's going to be the finale since someone eventually uses it as a beam weapon to destroy towns too distracted with each other in world wars. And while Albert gets caught up in the first few wars that are revolutions, coup d'etats, and whatever else, clearly some guy is running all the political strings, or should I say a "Society". That is in fact what it's called. This side story runs completely differently from the regular Front Mission games, but is still a decent example of why war seriously sucks.