Front Mission 3

"Go surf the internet"

You are Kazuki Takemura, son of a Japanese military-base commander, and testing pilot for new ''wanzers''(= wandering panzer, mech). While delivering two new wanzers to a military base you and your mate Ryogo are witnessing a strange explosion on the base. This is how it all starts...

Graphics: 8

Battle design: 8
The stages are all well designed, but sometimes a bit rough. Especially when you look at smaller things like trees or cars you see the pixels. But the wanzers are all very well done, especially during a fight. During battle, the ''camera'' zooms to the wanzers and shows every detail of the battle. So you´ll see shotgun shells falling down, the impact of each hit, parts breaking or exploding, and all the movements of the mechs are very smooth and realistic.
FMVs/Cut-scenes: 7
Immediately before or after the mission you´ll see some cut-scenes in in-game graphic. That´s not that bad when you only see the wanzers moving, but as soon as somebody is leaving his mech you see a crappy animated pixel-guy stalking around. There the programmers could have found a better solution. From time to time you also see a FMV, and they are square-like perfect.

Sound: 7

Music: 5
The music is not that bad, but especially the tunes during the dialogues are very repetitive. So you always have the same theme when you are in a submarine, when the imaginary numbers are talking, or when you are in the bar. This fact simply is annoying.
SFX: 8
The Sound effects are well done. You have the characteristic sound of every weapon, cool explosion sounds, and even the sound of broken electric parts when a wanzer with a torn off arm is moving.

Controls: 10

When I glanced over the manual before playing the game I feared that because of the huge amount of options the controls would be a problem for the gameplay. but it works. You are never overtaxed. The reason for this are the very well done in-battle menus that allow you to select the way of attacking/defending, the weapons-decision, and all the other important things.

Gameplay: 8

The game always uses the same scheme: storypart/battle. So firstly you´re being told what´s the situation and what´s to be done. This is done by the ''dialog-screens''. Here you only see a background depending to the place you are the picture of a dormitory, the command room of a submarine, or the bureau of someone. Underlayed by a certain theme, you see dialog boxes popping up with a picture from the face of the person talking. Depending of what he/she is saying the faces have five or six different expressions. When everything is said, you usually see the section of a map that shows you what´s your next destination. Having reached it, you usually see a short cut-scene in ''in game-graphic'' and then the battle immediately starts. After selecting four team members the battle starts. You give your four wanzers their starting-positions on the battlefield and then it´s your turn. Now you can command all of your mechs. You can, depending on the amount of your ''APs'' either walk or attack, or both. After finishing your round it´s the enemies´ turn. Every attack causes a counterattack, as long as the attacker is in the range of the target. So if you attack a wanzer equipped with melee-weapons from the distance he can´t do anything. or when you use a rocket-launcher you can hide somewhere in the back and shoot your opponents from a very huge distance without getting any counterattack. All of the machs have HPs for every ''bodypart''. If they are gone the part is gone. If your body is gone, YOU are gone. So always mind your body-HPs. But also without any weapon you are nearly useless. With repair-kits, carried in backpacks you can restore or repair damaged parts. A bit annoying is the fact, that the enemies always concentate on your leader (usually Kazuki) for their attacks. So he is the one that should have the most HPs, and repair-kits. Unless he is destroyed the other three mechs are nearly safe.
After each mission you have the possibility to setup your mechs, with new parts from immediately bought wanzer-parts, or from captured enemy-wanzers. The cool thing is, that you can exchange nearly everything of your wanzers. So if you keep many parts in your stock you can create really weird-looking wanzers with different battle skills. That´s another point: The battle skills. Each body part ''keeps'' a secret special ability that the wanzer will use randomly during battle. Once used, you can keep those ''battle skills'' in your computer, and they will be activated randomly.

Story: 9

The story is set in ''our world'' 100 years in the future. This is quite cool, because the game involves real existing countries and even cities, and also the storyline is not that unrealistic. Japan invented a new form of an A-bomb, the USA tries to get it, and China also has it´s function in the story. That´s a quite rough overview of the story. But during the game you will reveal all of the backgrounds, and despite using some cliche-topics, it´s a really deep storyline. Another clou is the existance of two completely different storylines, each providing 50+ hours of gameplay.

Presentation: 9

Props to Squaresoft simply for creating the FM3-Internet. This is an amazing idea. Between the missions you can surf in the internet. They created a whole Internet for FM3. So you can surf to government-sites, you can hire hackers, you can get secret information, download pictures, tools....Very impressing. The further you proceed in the game the more Internet-addresses you get, and thereby the more background information. You can even receive and send emails.

Final Score: 9

Even someone who doesn´t like round based strategy games will have his fun playing this huge game with nice gimmicks like the internet and the endless options to ''tune'' the wanzers.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 08/15/02, Updated 08/15/02