Front Mission 3

"It's unrealistic, the interface is annoying, but if you love future-Earth storylines and big mecha, this game is for you."

Graphics: 9/10. Detailed and smooth: the only glaring error is that it's on the Playstation.
Sound/Music: 5/10. Music is monotomous and boring. Sound effects are good, but nothing special.
Storyline: 9/10. Post-present storyline on Earth 100 years into the future is told with precision and flair.
Gameplay: 8/10. Simple battles and cumbersome interface can give difficulties, but the battles are addictive and setting up units is entertaining.
Overall: 9/10


Front Mission is a name that's never been heard of in North America until now. When I first read about Front Mission for the Super Famicom way back when (it was about the same time that I first read about Tactics Ogre), I was excited about the game, and dreamed about it a lot. The idea of a strategy-mecha based game excited me to no end.

But back then, American distributors weren't so keen on getting those kinds of games released (Tactics Ogre never made it here back then, either).

Being a fan of strategy games like Jagged Alliance 2, Tactics Ogre, Final Fantasy Tactics and the board game Battletech, and big-mech games like Mechwarrior II and Mechwarrior III, the release of Front Mission 3 made it a must-have.

In summary? The game's good. However, there are many annoying things about the game that linger in my mind as I play, and leaves a slightly acidic taste in my mouth.

We'll start with the good.

The game's setting is something that can't be found in most RPG's nowadays. The conspiracy-theory, post-present (as opposed to future, post-present is a type of ''realistic future'' that can actually be envisioned for today's world) atmosphere is excellent and really conveys the story. You visit places like Japan, North America, Singapore, and Taipei, and can read about the history of the world before the date of 2112. In the game's built-in Web Forum, information about the world's transition 100 years into the future is recorded in detail, from different viewpoints. When you fight in various locales, the maps show urban landscapes, complete with light poles, glass buildings, and billboards. I don't think Square's really ever done anything quite like this. They've done a lot of science-fiction with medieval throwback (like Xenogears, SaGa Frontier and Final Fantasy VIII), and other games like Fallout have done post-apocalyptic scenarios, but there's never been anything that's placed in a realistic future. This is not only refreshing, but it's interesting because, as you play into the story, you're often thinking, ''this could be us''. Of course, the feature of the entire game is the wanzer: Front Mission 3's name for the oft-renamed mecha.

But the story is only a catalyst to keep you doing one other thing: fighting.

Front Mission 3's combat system is really nothing new. It's all recycled from other genres, whether it be Final Fantasy Tactics or Battletech. The map is divided into a grid, and you get to walk, then fight (in that order). The combat is nothing special, and it's actually quite simplistic. You're allowed only four pilots on a team, which makes the battles simple and rather easy to visualize and handle. The actual strategy isn't very demanding. As far as I know, the battles are drastically simplified from Front Mission 2, which allowed for you to pilot about ten mechs, allowing for more options, more challenge, and more strategy.

When you battle, you walk a certain number of steps that's determined by your machine's abilities, then you fight. When you fight, you battle with different weapons: melee weapons, shotguns, machine guns, rifles, flamers, missiles, and grenades. Each weapon has its strengths and weaknesses opposed to the others. As you do damage, you damage the other wanzer in various anatomic parts: the torso, the right arm, the left arm, and the legs. Where exactly the damage is done is determined randomly, though different weapons will distribute damage differently. For instance, a punch does damage only to one location of a wanzer, while a shotgun will hit many body parts at the same time. Each action, whether it be walking or fighting, uses up AP, (which probably stands for action points, since it's not stated in the manual), so if you walk too much, you can't fire your weapons. A nice feature of the AP system is the ability to allocate AP to your wanzer's body parts. If you have a certain upgrade to your wanzer's torso, you can add AP to increase its defence. Another use of AP is for counterattacks. Front Mission 3 gives an opportunity for you to counterattack every time you're hit (provided you're within range). However, you have to have enough AP before the attack can be executed, giving you something to think about as you plan your battle.

Although the battles are simple, they're actually quite fun. You charge in with your big machine and launch a series of shotgun shells, punches, and other menacing attacks. When you fight, the screen zooms in on the fighting pair, showing the attacker and the defender duking it out. The animations in the game are slow, but they're smooth and actually appropriate for the large, lumbering robots. A wanzer will lift its arm and punch the other's arm, and the arm will explode and fall into the ground, leaving the wires exposed and sparkling. The wanzer retaliates with the menacing shots of a machine gun, and even if a bullet misses, it'll strike the building behind and explode.

The graphics are done well in this game, and you can tell that Square wanted to put more in the game's graphic department. The level of detail in the game right now is very good, considering it's for the long-obsolete Playstation. Wanzers are texture-mapped with bitmaps. When you destroy a body part, it blows up in any number of ways: it can simply explode or it can fly off of the wanzer. When you fire and miss, you will see bullets strike the ground or the building behind the target. When you walk around with an arm blown off, the wires will sparkle and hiss. Bullets will bounce off of metal poles, missiles will fly over and around buildings to track their targets, and wanzers will recoil differently depending on where they are struck. The animations in the game are slow but smooth, and the visual effects, while nothing amazing, fit the bill. The only reason that Square probably didn't add more was due to the limitations of the Playstation console. The load time is already rather abominable, and if anything else was added it would have only made things worse. I'm rather eager to see the amount of details the staff will put into a Front Mission 4 if it comes out on a next-generation system.

The battles are fun, but what I also found entertaining was setting up a wanzer for battle. Although it's fun to buy, upgrade, and set wanzers up, the experience is hampered by a rather cluttered and clumsy interface that could have been easily adjusted. The game boasts a 140-hour playing time. Most of this time will likely be wasted in the setup screen, trying to juggle between menus in an attempt to check out whether or not you should buy a new part or use the one already in stock.

The most glaring error is the omission of an ''overall status'' screen. In battle, you get this screen by selecting ''status'' when you move the cursor over any unit, and this brings up a quaint, clean screen consisting of the unit's body parts, weapons, and pilot statistics. A click of the X button brings up additional information about individual parts and weapons: their melee value, their boosts to statistics, and other similar numbers. However, outside of battle, this extremely useful menu is absolutely nowhere to be seen. If you want to check out a wanzer's summary statistics, you either have to enter the simulation mode to go into a mock battle, or tediously flip through all seven parts of the menu in the setup mode to look through each body part and weapon. When you're equipping one wanzer, you can't flip through the body parts by hitting some conveniently located button, but instead, you must hit ''cancel'' a few times, then reselect the menu and go to the next body part. Even worse, there are no individual statistics on individual wanzer parts like there are in battle mode's status screen. Instead, the weight of your wanzer and the melee rating is lumped into a sum, making it difficult to judge exactly which part ''is the best'' for you.

The only redeeming aspect of the setup screen is the whole concept of customizing wanzers.. You get to equip different weapons on wanzers, essentially customizing your machine to suit your needs. You can add upgrades to the body parts or swap them for the purposes of specialization. The only problem with this concept is that the customization isn't very advanced. Compared to a system like Battletech, which gives you a gigantic selection of weapons, armour, and engines, Front Mission 3 is rather limiting. If you wanted to build a swift mech in Battletech designed for quick missile strikes, you can do it. If you wanted to build a heavy mech to deal huge damage, you can do it. But in Front Mission, you only really get a mech down to its core components. You can equip a maximum of four weapons: two shoulder weapons and two hand-weapons. The weapons in each class are essentially mirror-images of each other, with a few modifications in power as you climb up the ranks. You can't fire two weapons at the same time in Front Mission 3, making fun combinations such as dual-missile launcher mechs or melee-only mechs useless. Special attacks are randomly executed in the game, giving combinations involving different weapons limited use. The game is probably geared toward players who haven't been exposed to all levels of mecha-gaming, and is, as a result, somewhat dumbed down.

Another aspect of Front Mission 3 that bothers me is the level of realism. Although the idea of mecha isn't realistic in the first place, there are a few basic facts about them that should be adhered to, such as the fact that they can probably kill humans with little or no effort, and that it's likely easier to sneak around on foot inside a city than it is inside a wanzer.

However, the ''human'' rule is viciously ignored in this game. A little infantry unit in Front Mission 3 is probably one of the most annoying units you'll ever face, and a squad of five men with rifles could probably take out a wanzer in this game. You can't hit them (your accuracy against human units goes down by half), you don't do serious damage to them (all weapons do 2 damage to a human with 20 HP, unless it's a rocket or missile, which does 8-12 damage), and they can do insane amounts of damage (relatively speaking) with their little dinky rifles. I'm probably making a little too big a deal out of this, but infantry battles are somewhat common, and when I torch a human with my wanzer-sized flamethrower four times, the little bugger shouldn't be able to dance his way out and retaliate with an attack that takes one off one quarter of the HP on my left arm.

The other factors of realism deal mainly with the story sequences, where the characters talk about ''sneaking into a city'' and decide to use their 30-foot wanzers to do it, but since this is Square (notorious for its unrealistic scenarios and battle systems), it's somewhat forgivable.

The storyline itself is a good story that'll keep you playing the game. Apparently, there are two separate branches, which makes for some good replay value if you're the type who loves to read. The story is about wars, international conspiracies, and is very political in nature, and being a fan of conspiracies and military-type stories, this certainly fits my bill a lot more than Final Fantasy VIII's ''lovey-dovey save-the-world''. Although the story itself is nothing extremely unique or special, it's rather unique compared to Square's regular storylines, and they tell it with their usual Square flair. The movie sequences in this game are subtitled, and I applaud Square Electronic Arts LLC for leaving this game subtitled, because it really adds to the global feeling of the game. The FMV doesn't quite surpass what Square's already done, but it's different in the fact that the images are a lot more photographic, which reflects on the fact that this game takes place on Earth 100 years into the future.

Overall, Front Mission 3 is a good buy. The game's unrealistic and cumbersome at times, but has many unique elements never seen before in most traditional role-playing games. Fans who loved Final Fantasy Tactics and its political storyline will definitely find appeal in this game, and even non-fans should give this a spin. If you like mecha, then this is a definite consideration for you. Although many players will be put off by the lack of features, lack of realism, and its overall simplicity, it puts it on a level where everyone can play it and enjoy it. Certainly, the story makes the whole game worth playing through, because it's a really good story.

If Square learns from their mistakes and releases a Front Mission 4 on the Playstation 2, it'll be a top-seller.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 04/02/00, Updated 04/02/00