A look back at: Front Mission 2

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. 

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.

A look back at: Front Mission

 

Fantasyanime and RPGClassics are two of the sites that I credit for showcasing loads of classic RPGs that I just had to check out. Of the two, Fantasyanime is a lot smaller (and lost its download links like years ago) but it has shrines dedicated to lots of games that I just had to play. And honestly, I think out of their catalog, there's only like 8 or so left, including this game's spinoff sequel. As for RPGClassics, their walkthrough did guide me in how to get through this particular Square game that initially didn't make it out of Japan until a Nintendo DS remake occurred. And it even spawned a whole franchise of sorts. So yay, Front Mission. This was a long time coming.

Mecha combat meets Fire Emblem-like tactical turn-based strategy RPG gaming. Player phases and enemy phases, grid-based movement, different weapon styles for melee, short-range, and long-range, finite shoulder-mounted missiles for sniping, experience for actions you take, it's certainly all here. Though no permadeath, oddly enough, even though it would make sense with the modern war-like setting and mechs blowing up. A huge chunk of this game was spent on spending money on upgrading mechas, I mean wanzers of course. Gotta have a durable body, arms, and legs, arm the wanzers with weapons that work well with multiple bullets or better hit percentages, but at the same time keeping the weight at most 100, so even if you have the money you might not have the weight. I do like that you can customize not just the parts and weapons, but also the name and paint job too. Grinding for levels and skills boils down to using the units that need the grinding, and the colosseum option exists in towns for individual grinding a la the Fire Emblem arenas (without permadeath of course)

Storywise Front Mission proves to just be a linear game, which is fine by me. You just progress across the island, sometimes not being able to backtrack, and each town has upgrades that the others don't. Most missions, as in all but like one or two, have your main objective be to just destroy all enemy wanzers. There's thankfully only a small couple of escort missions, and even then, if the escortee doesn't survive the game still continues fine with just a small penalty. The idea of fighting a war, a war that was caused by your main character, but also the horrendous problem of mad science in using human brains for wanzer computers reared into the plot. A lot of old games delved into that mad science, it's certainly a trope that has shown face many times. As a reminder, I didn't play the DS remake, meaning I'm missing out of the USN storyline which was added there, but I really don't care that much at the moment. It was a fun game and I'm going to try the others soon enough.