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. Fake fans.

Really cool game. The ascetic overall look of the world paired with Amano’s character artwork. The so-minimal-it’s-mystifying “no one seems to understand why this war is happening” storyline. The granular upgrading of your team’s mech suits. Meeting the local eccentrics in the bar of each town you pass through. The meticulous, war-of-attrition flavor of tactical gameplay. That last one especially—slowly grinding down the limbs and bodies of enemy mechs—coming out the other end of missions with your own suits barely holding themselves together. It was all delicious

But about a third of the way into the campaign, the difficulty spiked intensely for me, and unfortunately I couldn’t see any way through it beyond starting a new save and hoping for a better result with my now deeper knowledge of the game’s systems. And so I’m moving on, albeit with a lot of hope for the series’ future installments

G-Craft's Front Mission took SRPGs to a quasi-futuristic dimension - with mecha (Wanzers) taking the role of typical units, alongside a grim war-driven political story. Effective visuals and a fantastic soundtrack (kudos to Yoko Shimomura & Noriko Matsueda) greatly complements the large-scale missions, that were exercises in pure turn-based tension. While fairly easy compared to other SRPGs, it certainly isn't devoid of strategic merit. Its unique multiple HP system meshes well with weapon details that allow for several different approaches to enemies, such as hindering weapon use or movement. Additionally, the customization avenues found in its massive roster, gear setups and skill-learning system offer more leeway for different builds, albeit a little held back by the obtuse trial and error approach and overlong battle animations.

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.

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.

I tried my best to like this game, but in the end I just couldn't bring myself to finish it. The concept itself is intriguing, the mech designs are cool and the weapon upgrades make you feel like a powerhouse and gives you the incentive to invest money and plan your team strategically. The story, while really simple, got me surprisingly invested early on and most of the characters are charming enough for me to care about their stories.

The gameplay is your standard turn-based strategy, where you place your units on the battlemap and try to eradicate the enemy. The game is quite challenging and makes you think different tactics so you won't get totally curbstomped.

For me, it all falls apart outside missions. Everything else but the main gameplay revolves around tedious menus, cutscenes, upgrading your mechs, comparing stats and buying equipment. For every 15 minutes of robot action you spend like 40 minutes in menus. I like the core gameplay itself, but this loop isn't just fun for me and I had to drop the game. I might return to this on DS and see if the QoL changes made this game any better.