Front Mission seemed kind of daunting at first to me, as I’ve never really played anything like it with the customizable mechs. What really intrigued me about playing Front Mission was the talent of Amano and Shimomura behind it. There’s digitized portraits of Amano’s character designs in-game, and his timeless art is the kind of stuff I’ll never get sick of looking at. It started to make more sense as I played it, and honestly, it wasn't as confusing as I had thought.
Front Mission is a strategy RPG where you customize mecha for your units to use in battle. When changing the equipment for your mechs though, they didn’t take the easy route with spritework. There are different battle sprites, field sprites, and giant sprites in the setup menu that all change depending on the pieces of equipment you pick. There’s a ton of equipment too, with there being body armor, legs, guns, and even backpacks too, so to see this much work put into something like this is astounding. It really helps sell the game's whole gimmick of building mechs and really makes some builds feel unique. Might I add that you can even paint the mechs different colors for free? This actually helped a ton because I usually have a hard time differentiating troops in these games, so I knew who was who with the allocated colors.
Much of the time will be spent sitting in the menu and customizing your mechs. Admittedly, buying parts is slow, but it’s fun thinking about which builds to go for. There’s a weight limit for mechs, so you kind of need to balance out your builds and not have too much stuff on them as you mix and match a variety of parts from shops, which all raise certain stats. Another aspect of the builds is your character stats. There’s some sort of hidden leveling system for weapon proficiency, so you’ll usually want to stick to one type of weapon for each character. You have the “Fight” stat, which is for gauntlets; the “Short” stat for 1 tile range weaponry; and “Long” for missiles and other long range guns. Certain equipment will work better for short-range or long-range people, so that’s why there’s a lot to think about in the parts shop.
The combat revolves around this body part system, where each mech has separate health bars for their leg parts, both individual hands and the body. Destroying the legs will lower their tile movement; destroying either hand will make whatever weapon the mech is equipped with unusable; and destroying their body will immobilize them completely. You also can’t control what parts you shoot unless someone has a skill that lets them, so it kind of makes a lot of battles very RNG-reliant. I also really like the combat animations. It’s pretty satisfying seeing your mech fire off a multi-hit machine gun as the game lags with the debris flying everywhere…
Front Mission has some awkward balancing as well. The start of the game provides you with some pretty unremarkable equipment, and leveling up units is tricky since they don’t do very much damage. This made the game very hard at the beginning, and I was getting my ass kicked at a certain skill check. At around a third through the game, the characters start to get stronger, unlock their skills, and eventually become some of the most broken units in RPG history (probably). This means you don’t even have to be strategizing anymore. There is benefit at the start of the game from having a balanced team, but in the latter half, the short-range units are so busted that it doesn’t even matter if you have any other differently classed units. Hell, I’m sure you could solo most maps with just one of them!
Overall, I enjoyed my time with Front Mission. The story is very ahead of its time and probably my favorite aspect of the game, which is rare for me since I’m more of a gameplay-oriented person. It’s a pretty easy game and not that hard to get into, despite how complicated it may seem. If all still goes south, there’s an arena you can grind at in case you get stuck too.
Front Mission is a strategy RPG where you customize mecha for your units to use in battle. When changing the equipment for your mechs though, they didn’t take the easy route with spritework. There are different battle sprites, field sprites, and giant sprites in the setup menu that all change depending on the pieces of equipment you pick. There’s a ton of equipment too, with there being body armor, legs, guns, and even backpacks too, so to see this much work put into something like this is astounding. It really helps sell the game's whole gimmick of building mechs and really makes some builds feel unique. Might I add that you can even paint the mechs different colors for free? This actually helped a ton because I usually have a hard time differentiating troops in these games, so I knew who was who with the allocated colors.
Much of the time will be spent sitting in the menu and customizing your mechs. Admittedly, buying parts is slow, but it’s fun thinking about which builds to go for. There’s a weight limit for mechs, so you kind of need to balance out your builds and not have too much stuff on them as you mix and match a variety of parts from shops, which all raise certain stats. Another aspect of the builds is your character stats. There’s some sort of hidden leveling system for weapon proficiency, so you’ll usually want to stick to one type of weapon for each character. You have the “Fight” stat, which is for gauntlets; the “Short” stat for 1 tile range weaponry; and “Long” for missiles and other long range guns. Certain equipment will work better for short-range or long-range people, so that’s why there’s a lot to think about in the parts shop.
The combat revolves around this body part system, where each mech has separate health bars for their leg parts, both individual hands and the body. Destroying the legs will lower their tile movement; destroying either hand will make whatever weapon the mech is equipped with unusable; and destroying their body will immobilize them completely. You also can’t control what parts you shoot unless someone has a skill that lets them, so it kind of makes a lot of battles very RNG-reliant. I also really like the combat animations. It’s pretty satisfying seeing your mech fire off a multi-hit machine gun as the game lags with the debris flying everywhere…
Front Mission has some awkward balancing as well. The start of the game provides you with some pretty unremarkable equipment, and leveling up units is tricky since they don’t do very much damage. This made the game very hard at the beginning, and I was getting my ass kicked at a certain skill check. At around a third through the game, the characters start to get stronger, unlock their skills, and eventually become some of the most broken units in RPG history (probably). This means you don’t even have to be strategizing anymore. There is benefit at the start of the game from having a balanced team, but in the latter half, the short-range units are so busted that it doesn’t even matter if you have any other differently classed units. Hell, I’m sure you could solo most maps with just one of them!
Overall, I enjoyed my time with Front Mission. The story is very ahead of its time and probably my favorite aspect of the game, which is rare for me since I’m more of a gameplay-oriented person. It’s a pretty easy game and not that hard to get into, despite how complicated it may seem. If all still goes south, there’s an arena you can grind at in case you get stuck too.
The gameplay is just too slow for me to enjoy this. Seems really cool though
A fine albeit simplistic tactics game. Unfortunately the itemization is boring, and the gameplay loop strongly encourages upgrading after almost every mission to make the following missions easier. This makes shop menuing a chore and missions not challenging. The writing leaves a lot to be desired, but still forms a solid foundation for later titles. I can only recommend for diehard fans that want the full Front Mission history.
Love the use of Amano’s art style and I wish final fantasy treated it with as much respect as this game and on a completely unrelated note did they just not teach Wanzer pilots how to aim in the military? More than half of my attacks missed throughout the course of the game… it’s really not even that serious but everytime it happened every ounce of dopamine disintegrated because the game relies on hitting random body parts with no way to guide shots unless your pilot learns a skill that allows them to do so, but that comes in play half way through the game and even then you get more XP if you destroy every body part, so I ended up not using it half the time. Front mission also has stats that increase depending on what weapon you’re attacking with. You know what other game did this? Final Fantasy 2. But you all let Projared brainwash you into thinking the level up system sucked. Shame on you.
Amo esse jogo
Game Review - originally written by (wraith)
People in the scene go wild over many of the things in Japan. J-Pop. Giant Mechas. Strategy RPGs. Well, Front Mission takes two of those three things (guess which ones), and swirls them together. The combination of giant robots with huge-ass guns fighting in a turn-based strategy environment should satisfy the inner fan-boy in all of us. The graphics are beautiful, and the gameplay is excellent SRPG fare. So maybe you'll like it more than Spinner 8 did. Probably.
People in the scene go wild over many of the things in Japan. J-Pop. Giant Mechas. Strategy RPGs. Well, Front Mission takes two of those three things (guess which ones), and swirls them together. The combination of giant robots with huge-ass guns fighting in a turn-based strategy environment should satisfy the inner fan-boy in all of us. The graphics are beautiful, and the gameplay is excellent SRPG fare. So maybe you'll like it more than Spinner 8 did. Probably.