Onto the Playstation, and onto the nonsense of one-on-one battle animations making battles take way longer than necessary that we basically have to disable them, and then make guesses to see if I've lost arms and legs on the wanzers. Front Mission 2 is an upgrade on the original game, but not really when you consider it. You can rotate your camera, you can do the same things you did in Front Mission 1, but now leveling is different and there's lots, and I mean, lots, of skills that you can't really get all of them on one character and their wanzer. But those skills are the bread and butter to kicking your opponents in the guts.
Best thing Front Mission 2 does is the swapping scenarios, honestly. The idea that Bangladesh is now Alordesh and through some revolutionary activity is remarkable in a dystopian future, but everyone's got some sort of role that's important to some degree. It's also quite weird, because even though two characters are mainline protagonists, Ash and Lisa, they talk less than Thomas, who doesn't get his own scenario but is central to the plot as a good leader. Ash is even less talkative than Lisa for that matter. And then there's Saribash, who's never playable, and somehow much more of a central character due to him, his daughter Lila, and Ven, the most central enemy of the game. But not the main one. It's so interesting. Ven and Saribash are the two most central characters and Thomas is like the third most notable. And Ven surprisingly never goes to the good side (his lieutenant captain Maylan joins the good guys though), he just gets fought over and over until a secret society basically kills him. The evil mad scientist also feels betrayed, though he also reveals that the OCU, the central allied power for the series, seems to have kill satellites to destroy all. Hey, that was somehow in Front Mission: Gun Hazard as well!
Anyways, all the battle animations, all the other things, it would be a nice game in general, showing how someone wants to flee but also how they still feel like the place is home. There's the issue of this being a fan translation that wasn't even finished, so there's only partial stuff translated, most of which involved the battle dialogue only, but not cutscene dialogue. This meant, of course, consulting a script online, not easy to find. In any case, I did finish this. I have no intention of trying Front Mission Alternative since there doesn't seem to be a translation of that PSX game, but we'll probably try another Front Mission game later on.
