Squeenix Front Mission series worth playing?

[deuxhero]

So I just found out about this mecha TBS series which has a handful of games in English. Anyone know about it? Should I bother?

 

[Rahdulan]

Only debatable game in the series is FM4. There's a fan translation for FM5 which is either the best or second best after FM3.

Just... ignore Evolved. Please.

 

[Andyman Messiah]

Front Mission is so-so. I've only played the first, the third and the spin-off Gun Hazard.

* Front Mission (serviceable fan translation on the SNES, more serviceable official translation on the NDS) is my favorite. It's just a good strategy RPG with very basic, almost unmentionable JRPG mechanics and a plot that eventually goes off the rails COMPLETELY and UNEXPECTEDLY. You'll know when it happens.
* Front Mission: Gun Hazard is a side-scrolling platformer. Pretty shit but then I've never been a fan of the genre anyway beyond Metal Slug and Contra 3.
* Front Mission 3 is a great game in the same way I think Dragon Age 2 is a great game. The protagonist is the most easily agitated Angry McAngst motherfucker ever and IT IS A HILARIOUS THING. This fucker will lose his temper over ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING. You'll want to play a drinking game. Trust me on this. Take a shot every time the protagonist throws a shit fit. Trust me, you'll enjoy the game way more. That aside, it's still a good strategy RPG. Make sure you don't lose yourself in the massive fake internet browsing Squaresoft designed for it. "MAI IMMERSHUN!!"

 

[Suicidal]

Front Mission 1 is really good.
Front Mission 3 is quite good but way too easy and has a lot of stupid random elements in the combat (skills are learned randomly and activated randomly and other such bullshit). I think it's worse than 1 and 5, but still a good game and worth a playthrough if you like turn-based combat and chunky robots shooting at other chunky robots. It's also EXTREMELY long and has 2 campaigns, the one which you get depends on a seemingly insignificant choice you make very early in the game. I don't remember much about the main character being an angry cunt like Andyman said but IIRC it had the derpiest plot of all the games in the series.
Front Mission 5 is, in my opinion, the best game in the series mechanically - it has the most customization options for your mechs, more different weapon types, actually challenging missions (if you're going for the optional objectives, that is). Gameplay-wise it seems closer to 1 than to 3. Runs perfectly fine on a PS2 emulator even on shitty PCs if you use speedhacks.

Haven't played 2 and 4. Haven't heard anything about them either.

Actually I'd really love to see a new Front Mission game with X-COM style base building and weapon R&D between missions. Would be pretty awesome I think, too bad it will probably never happen.

 

[Karellen]

* Front Mission 3 is a great game in the same way I think Dragon Age 2 is a great game. The protagonist is the most easily agitated Angry McAngst motherfucker ever and IT IS A HILARIOUS THING. This fucker will lose his temper over ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING. You'll want to play a drinking game. Trust me on this. Take a shot every time the protagonist throws a shit fit. Trust me, you'll enjoy the game way more. That aside, it's still a good strategy RPG. Make sure you don't lose yourself in the massive fake internet browsing Squaresoft designed for it. "MAI IMMERSHUN!!"

This is all true, and I really can't emphasize enough what an enormous wanker the main character of Front Mission 3 is. How can I say this? There are two common types of protagonist in Japanese stuff - the classic village boy, who is not very smart (that is, he's dumb as a pile of bricks) but also a decent guy and good with people. Then there's the newer type, the smarmy jerk who gets away with being demeaning to everyone because he's smarter than most people he meets. But the hero of Front Mission 3 is one-of-a-kind, because not only is he frequently so astoundingly, mindboggingly, suicidally stupid that you find yourself wondering how he's still alive in his teens, but beyond this he's also a gigantic raging asshole all the time, with an emphasis on raging. It's like Square wanted to make sure that whenever a new Final Fantasy game comes out and the angry reactionaries inevitably start to call its main character the worst JRPG protagonist ever, someone would come along and say, "no, there's that guy in Front Mission 3", leaving everyone nodding in painful agreement.

That aside, I agree with what's said in this thread. The first game is very good - the worst thing about it, as I recall, was the repetitive upgrading of all your robots, but even that was pretty inoffensive and rudimentary, and kept the focus of the game on the actual combat encounters, which are good, and involve a lot of units. There were some inbalances in the system, but since the combat itself works for the most part, the game itself is still fun to play. The narrative, as I recall it, is also pretty gritty and keeps a mood that's appropriate for a war scenario - it also lacks most of the silliness most JRPGs have, in case you find that sort of thing offensive.

The problem I had with the third game, as I recall, is that it spends a lot of time with fancy animations and loading times in the combat. As a result, even though the third game has much smaller encounters overall, since the game limits you to fielding only use four units at a time, the fights tend to take really long. I remember liking the game (aside of the main character, who is tolerable only because of how hilarious his whining sometimes is), but in time, the slowness of the combat can really wear you down. It's not bad if you like the genre, but I'd start with the first game, which I remember being much smoother.

 

[deuxhero]

Wouldn't the power of emulation fix the slowness?

Though I can really only manage triple speed for most PS2 titles when playing with enhancements, and I've played SNES stuff a pain in the ass at 10 times the speed, so if it is REALLY bad, it might not help that much.

 

[Indranys]

My brief explanations about the series :

Front Mission 1 = simple SNES TRPG with cool graphics and very cool main character, the story is so-so but still serviceable. IMO the mechanics are kinda broken but it's still fun.
The story is about the conflict in fictional Huffman Island between two superpower nations.

Front Mission 2 = has the most epic combat in the series, big battlemaps & a lot of wanzers! The story is pretty mature and interesting with good political tone. Coup d'etat in Bangladesh FFS!
The main guy is cool, and he's a Bangladeshi/Alordeshi too! Only made in Japanese, you can get English translation patch in frontmission.info, but it's only translated around 80-90% because they got some difficulty to insert some translated texts or something. I've never finished the game and played it long time ago so don't take my words too much.
The artworks in FM2 are very similar to pre FF X games' concept arts, that because they were created by the same guy. Overall, it's the best FM game IMO.

Front Mission 3 = Gameplay wise somewhat streamlined, simpler, less epic game than the 2nd, with different mechanics but also with a few new features. You can eject from wanzers and steal the enemy wanzer etc. A lot of FM2 veterans hate the combat in this game.
The story is the longest in FM series, across Japan, China, South East Asia countries and more. It has two completely different scenario too! And you could browse the massive ingame internet, read and send mails, browse interesting sites, buy softwares from l33t hax0rs. FM2 already had this feature, but FM3 improved it very much.
The characters are just so-so to decent, nothing special. Main guy isn't as cool as the previous protagonists (not even close IMO).

Front Mission 4 = The weakest game in the series in all aspects. The combat is the hybrid between FM2&FM3 plus a few new features like link attack and skill management etc.
The casts are bad. The story is lame. The game takes place in Europe and South America, which is refreshing, but still not good enough in the end.
Non combat features aren't as good as FM3, No more internet and shit.

Front Mission 5 = The best combat in the series, not as epic as FM2, but it's more tactical. Spiritual successor to FM2 combat system while implementing the best features from all FM games.
So we have FM2's pilot specialization/combat roles and stuff to FM4's link attack ans skill management in FM5.
Storywise, it talks about various events from FM1 to FM4 (mostly FM1&2 events though) from the eyes of a USN (equivalent of NATO in our world) soldier to clarify some cliffhanging shits once and for all. That's the theory though, I find there aren't enough explanations and no real resolution for past events in the series. So the story is just to weak IMO.
It's also one of the shortest FM games IMO, beside FM1. But there's a new game plus features like new parts and shit. Cool if you want to replay it again and again.
The characters? Horrible. Damn animefaggotry is just too strong in this game, strong enough to annoy me at least. Indeed FM3 casts are bland and rather bad, but there's no anime shit in that one. But in FM5 you can find a tsundere supergirl as your CO, she had her Major rank before her 28th birthday but has an emotion like a teenager.
And yes, she loves the main protagonist too!
Sorry I just can't handle that shit man. Some old characters from the past front mission games are recurring in FM5, but mostly just cameos, and you can recruit the male protagonist in FM4 if you know the trick.
Just play the game and skip the cutscenes, that's the right way to enjoy the game IMO.

Sorry for the butthurt, I hope it helps.

 

[Damned Registrations]

The best part of playing FM3 is watching a guy in an orange jumpsuit take a shotgun blast to the face that could kill an entire herd of elephants, turn around, fire a pistol, and forcibly eject the enemy pilot. Then steal his wanzer.

Either that or when footsoldiers use their precognition to do the same thing, only without ever being fired at.

 

[lightbane]

FM5's characters were quite bad, indeed. Even then, the main character had his charm, not only he bangs his boss but he's quite smug about it In fact, outside of the cutscenes the hero can be quite assholeish (moreso if you take certain choices). The combat is of course the best.


Also, I think you're forgetting the fact that not only the main character was bad in FF3, literally EVERY one of your playable characters was either downright stupid, utterly suicidal, so emo it would offend Squall or completely insane. Also, a few of them are blatant traitors that don't hide the fact they would betray you as soon as it suits him/her
The plot is so bad that at some point the bad guy wonders why the main character is still alive despite his constant failures (seriously, one of the first thing he does is to try to take over an entire base by himself).


Anyways, play all of them if you can. I recommend a ps2 emulator for the 4th one, if only to speed up the really worst part of the game: mandatory combat animations


No idea about FM2, the translation patch is still not out yet, I'll wait until it is done before playing. There's also a prequel of FF1 for the DS but it has not received a translation (and probably never will). A pity.

 

[Necroscope]

FM3 is my favourite; the game has its faults but I enjoyed the gameplay and the atmosphere very much. Oh, and the music is beyond awesome:

 

[Andyman Messiah]

Yeah, the music in FM3 is really goddamn good.

 

[stabby]

No idea about FM2, the translation patch is still not out yet, I'll wait until it is done before playing.

You might be waiting for a while now, as from what I recall they stopped work on the patch due to some difficulty with one part of the text inserted (think it was for in-game cutscenes or something else), realizing that though it could be done they just didn't have the spare time to do so anytime soon. At the very least they did release their progress so far, and I do believe they included a text file translating the cutscenes in question.

And for the OP's info, it's pretty much been all said. Personally I do find that FM4 was the weakest, as it had some truly derp moments (apparently a high-tech walking tank doesn't have a tracking signal or recorder of some sort, so you can plainly tell your superior "What crashing plane? We were totally somewhere else!" with a straight face), but beyond minor nitpicks it's still a pretty good game. Just wish it had used had used the hardware a little better, as the points between combat were a bloody drag (though it could be said of the series as a whole, as well as sRPGs in general).

Still, think it's high time I replay FM3. This thread has reminded me as to just how hilarious a twat the protag is in that game...

 

[deuxhero]

So grab the DS remake of 1 to start?

 

[Absalom]

My brief explanations about the series :
*wall o text*

Grab the DS remake for sure. You could prolly emulate it as well.

Also I actually liked Gun Hazard it was good quick clean fun

 

[Karmapowered]

I don't mind jRPGs, and I am not ashamed to call myself a genuine fan of some of them : FF6, Chrono Trigger, Valkyrie Profile, Jeanne d'Arc, Legend of Mana, Seiken Densetsu, Sengoku/Kichiku Rance, <insert a rather large list of other games here>, etc. However I didn't like any of FM games that I've played (FM1, FM4, FM5), and I wouldn't consider them as worth playing. Below are the reasons explaining why it is my opinion.

I will only focus on FM5 during my short (and rather unstructured I am afraid) review, since it's being universally touted as the best of the series.

1/ the main protagonist, which is basically you, the player.

He is the epitome of the typical beta male posing as the leader of an elite squadron (of badass mechs/"wanzers"), and he is a disaster. If you've ever wondered what too much emo in a single human being produces, look no further. No offence meant to sissies, but if I wanted to play as a sissy, I would play a game about sissies, not badass mechs. He also has terrible side-kicks (seconds in command), that I sometimes just want to punch in the face, but that's probably just a personal preference.

2/ the story is unconvincing and sometimes just a pathetic excuse for lame cutscenes.

First example : you are close to achieve one of your first missions against one of your enemies, a huge (supposedly indestructible mech) that came to devastate everything on its path. You manage to beat the mech, quite easily I might add, but suddenly another puny mech appears out of nowhere, dashes up to you faster than any mech in the game could ever do, snipes one of your squad buddies, and disappears again, leaving you unable to react (since it's a cutscene).

Second example : you are close to achieve another mission, which has you protecting landing vessels on a beach, so that your troops can return to the safety of the carrier waiting at several miles from the shore. All goes well, you heroically destroy your opponents, but one of them manages to stand up in an ultimate effort to backstab you while you prepare to board the vessels. You are saved because the amiral emo ninja girl that is secretely in love with emo badass squad leader snipes the enemy mech from the deck of the carrier, which, and it's worth repeating, is miles and miles away... with some kind of a WW2 machine gun.

Last example : at this point, you think that there are people with awesome sniping/markmans skills in this game, and the emo ninja girl that "saved" you in the beach mission has to be one of them. The story explains she has hardcore, black belt, special ops training. However, another cutscene comes to contradict that feeling, since it shows her unable to shoot someone standing just a couple of feet away from her, taunting her, before flying away unmolested in a helicopter. The result is that she starts crying, and the main protagonist proceeds to comfort her and hold her longingly in his, uh, not-so-manly embrace.

3/ the gameplay is underwhelming.

Your squadron of mechs is supposed to be an elite one, the best one of the international forces that you are part of. Yet, your mechs will keep missing, and missing, and missing their hits in battle, even against probably under-trained and unprepared civilians "terrorists", even if your current gear is perfectly up to date or even superior to your enemies. I don't mind a couple of misses here and there, especially against stronger opponents, but it infuriates me to no end when it's so recurrent in games and happens even against grunts.

You can upgrade your mechs. To do so, you need money. You'd think that as part of international military forces, you'd have the opportunity to get the best equipment for your mechs, by successfully achieving missions or ranks. Not so in FM5. Regular army troops actually have inferior base equipment to random rogue elements, and so do you. Not only will you have to buy the gear of your mechs with your own money, but to earn that cash you'll have to participate in some idiotic arena games, betting against your fellow soldiers. If you think about it for a moment, this basically means that you are parasiting allied forces to upgrade your own forces. Therefore... let's not think too much. As the story elements above already proved us, FM5 doesn't encourage you to think. Indeed, I should mention that the aforementioned arena games are non-interactive cutscenes, with entirely random outcomes. That is right, during those arena fights, you will watch your mech moving around, shooting, using skills, most of the time in utterly moronic ways, with no way for you to intervene. You will just watch getting rammed in the ass by newbies. Till the last parts of the game, if the RNG decides to let you win those arena matches, you will earn peanuts too. So the question is, how do you upgrade your mechs, if you can't do it in a logical way (through missions), or through random casino games ?

You'll do it through simulator missions. That's right, the army can't offer you a decent pay for regular missions on the battlefield, but they can if you succeed at virtual simulator missions. That makes perfect sense. Doing those simulator missions is a pita. Some of them are of the "survive as a lone wolf in a dungeon of x levels" type. You enter the simulator with basic equipment each time, with all your skills artificially set to level 1, and progress through it till say level 10 of the dungeon, then level 20, etc. You collect real (?) gear on virtual enemies that you beat in the dungeon. At the end of the dungeon, you get to keep only 3, 4 or 5 items though (IIRC). Most of the time, you will not want to sell the stuff you got (since it's better than anything that you can buy or find outside these "virtual" missions), so you're bound to repeat those dungeon missions several times to also collect stuff that you can sell (doubles). Basically, each time you want to upgrade your mechs, you go through ever-increasing levels of a random dungeon with virtual enemies. How fun that is... not.

4/ your squad team mates.

For me, one of the most promising parts of FM5 (compared to FM4, for example) was the fact that you could now recruit new people to your squad. You do so by talking to NPCs before your mission briefings. They will offer to join you if your reputation is high enough. Each NPC has their speciality (gunner, artillery, close combat, etc.), their personality on the battle-field (in a range from caring/support to aggressive/berserker) and their expertise (level). Some of the NPCs even have special "S" (secret) skills, which are supposed to be rare and valuable. Unfortunately, this part of the game is as underwhelming as all the other parts of the game.

Your reputation basically sums up to your current (skill) level. Nothing else matters : neither your courage (successfully achieving higher level missions, for example), nor your tactical skills (keeping all your squad mates alive during missions) seem to matter.

If you don't recruit a NPC whenever the opportunity arises (at level = x), and you level up (x+1), all NPCs to be recruited will keep levelling up by themselves, automatically. This basically means that the optimal time to recruit someone is to wait for the longest time possible, till you really need them, so that you don't have to train them. Unfortunately, this time never arises, since your own team mates will have levelled up with you, and there is no real difference between them and the other NPCs, except maybe in their personality, which to be honest, doesn't matter all that much, and those special "S" skills.

So what's so special about those "S" skills you may wonder ? Nothing much in opinion. If some "S" skills have an obvious benefit, they also come with a drawback : better offence, but less defence, for example. There are special, special NPCs (otherwise said, special "S" NPCs), which might be worth the effort to look out for, but you'll probably need a guide (gamefaqs) to recruit them, or rely on pure luck, since some will disappear if you talk to them more than three times before recruiting them, some others will need to be recruited during the summer equinox at 3PM precisely, not before, not later, etc. (making this up, but you get the drift).

Conclusion

If some of the missions can be really fun and quite challenging to play (the one which has you conquering a base in enemy territory, and then defending it against overwhelming enemy forces, à la "Fort Alamo", comes to my mind), you'll inevitably run into the issues I've mentioned above.

Upgrading your mechs is a chore more than an exercice of analyzing, acquiring and optimizing your assets that it should be. Cutscenes may have been quite a novelty for the time that the game was released at, and maybe explain why some fans of the game seem so adamant to drool over it, but they don't make a story good. It fails to make sense in the worst times, leaving you with a distasteful "why am I playing this again?" taste in your proverbial gamer's mouth, and a :picard: facepalm in front of your screen. Too many elements of the gameplay itself (during battles, but also outside) rely on random outcomes that the decisions of the player have no impact on, which I consider to be a serious handicap to the value of a game that sells itself as tactical.

I don't mind games to have weaker parts if they're at least somewhat balanced by other stronger parts. As far as I am concerned, the sum of the whole in FM5 remains strongly negative. There are better tactical games out there, on consoles, not to mention on PC, not to waste your time with this game (and probably the whole series).

TLDR;

Front Mission 5 = over-hyped, as is probably the whole FM series

 

[Cynic]

Front Mission 1 is one of the best games from the SNES era. You can get it on DS if you have one. Excellent game, really worth playing through once.

I played one of the 3D ones can't remember which one...it was okay but not as good as FM1.

I've heard 5 is very good but it never got localised.

 

[SCO]

1 yes (although missile launcher is all you need), 3 no.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Doesn't this basically boil down to whether or not you want to play a turn based tactical mech game? I mean, it's not like there's a ton of these floating around.

 

[SCO]

I'm just saying, FM3 made me rage delete the ISO.
Get Jeanne d'Arc instead and play that, it's playable with a good computer in jpcsx (if you replace the buggy 'replacement' fonts it comes with with 'extracted from a real psp' original font pack). Fuck mechs.

 

[WhiskeyWolf]

I recently finished FM4 and enjoyed it. After that I booted up FM5 for some more of the same and was immediately shocked by how much worse it presented itself, characters and the story were utter shit. There is cheese and there is bad cheese, FM5 is the latter.

 

[spekkio]

BROS, lemme tell you sth about:

Front Mission 2

+ Better than FM1 at own wanzer variety (using identical "best" wanzer setup isn't possible).
+ Better than FM3 at scale (6-10 units during missions so far - Mission 4). One mission can take up to 30-45 minutes.
+ Customization is as crazy as always - I already clocked over 8hrs, most of it spent on wanzer customization screen.
+ Special skill system is less complex than in FM3 (“use to increase”), while still being essential and fun to use.
+ Melee weapons are much more useful / essential than in FM3. You can't attack from a range when using MG/SG/etc. "Short" range weapons are 1x1 weapons (attack only adjacent tiles), same way as melee weapons.
+ Shit's addictive as crack - you just want to keep poppin' them moles.

- The game takes its damn time to load menus / maps / etc. Better have the turbo button ready.
- The UI is a bit of a mess, both in combat and during customization - sometimes you have to go 2-3 levels deep into submenus to get som important info (enemy range / armor type / weapons). FM3 is much better here. Plus, not everything is translated:

- This entire "1x1" showdown part of combat is a mess: too long, too much info, style over usefulness. FM3 improved here greatly (all info onscreen, short animation). You can disable this thingie in menus, but that means either less info or more menu browsing.
- Camera is set too close to the ground, which reduces visibility greatly:

- Missiles / ranged weapons are nerfed when compared to FM1 & especially FM3 (lower ammo, damage & accuracy). Too bad, since I loved them.
- Translation is incomplete, so you have to keep Eventscript and FAQ txts open while playing.

Anyway, strong so far, golden days of Square.

 

[JohnTheRevelator]

Only FM I ever finished was 3rd, I also got pretty far in first one via emulator on android. I always got bored at some point thanks to tedious and repetitive gameplay/utterly uninteresting enemies and games begin rather long. Though like Whisky I bounced of 5th rather quickly.

 

[Suicidal]

5 actually has the best gameplay, in my opinion. But the worst story and writing (but it's not like japs are good at these kind of things anyway).

 

[JohnTheRevelator]

Actually I read somewhere that in general FM's were made to also appeal to westerners, however since it wasn't big success (no marketing, didn't even bother to release second game in west for some stupid reason) they said fuck it and made 5th just for Japan. Could be why characters are so annoying.

 

[victim]

Wow, a little surprised so many people share my conviction that FM1 is the best one. The DS game has two campaigns, the first is a direct port of the SNES game I think while the other one is new. Both are awesome.