Front Mission 3

Playstation

1999

Square

Tactical RPG’s have never been a huge mainstay in the west. They’re perceived as being big, cumbersome and impossibly difficult to get into, thanks to their far more complex battle system than those seen in the majority of Japanese RPG’s. To be honest, I would tend to side with the genre’s detractors. I like my games to either have a plot or no plot at all, and I don’t like the plot to be bogged down with tedious turned based battles instead of exploration and shorter encounters. Front Mission 3 is a strategy RPG by numbers in this respect. It hasn’t really passed beyond the formula in its earlier Super Famicom prequels and a multitude of games like it, like Fire Emblem or Buhamut Lagoon. You watch a bit of story, upgrade your robots, have a bit of a scrap, and repeat over and over until you see the ending credits. There’s a nice little option where you can choose which person to side with early on in the plot, which completely changes your alignment and who you fight with, but even though the scenarios are fairly different, it’s still the same old same old. I doubt you would play it through twice.

So Front Mission 3 is a mech game, plain and simple. If you like big robots, you’ll salivate over the customisation options present here. And as turn based strategy games go, it is pretty engrossing. You’ll spend hours piecing together your perfect Wanzer (the unfortunate contraction of ‘walking panzer’), before lovingly deploying it in battle. You learn from your mistakes, and you begin to learn how to use terrain in your favour, using crates for cover and shooting from the top of slopes for added accuracy. It’s a bit like a table top strategy game in this respect, but slightly less nerdy. Only slightly mind.

The thing that will put many people off is the graphics, which re a mixed bag at best. The engine used for displaying your Wanzers special moves is detailed but grainy, but the overhead sections are sub SNES standard. Obviously it’s all about the gameplay, but let’s be frank: a bit of eye candy would have smoothed things over nicely. Bland and grimy visions of the future are all well and good, but it isn’t too hot to look at. It’s only the super lush FMV that occasionally pops in to remind us how Square can still drop our jaws that stops it from scoring lower.

Front Mission 3 does have a strong pint however: its story. Now, the central characters are frankly awful, clichéd cardboard cut outs. Then you have the sexy blonde Russian spy, the cool dude etc. It’s all very videogame characters 101. However, there is a huge cast of supporting characters, including enemies, which you get to know very well throughout the game. Some of the characters are humorous, some are tragic, and some are just plain evil, but you find and pick out your favourites. Perhaps it was intentional that the central protagonist is so bland; his own lack of personality allows you to project your own on his, allowing you to sit back and enjoy the ride. However, the very best thing about Front Mission 3 is its intricate mythology, that can be accessed through an in game ‘internet’ system. Here there are about a hundred websites for you to browse, many of them pretty big, and packed with masses of information about Earth in the 2112. Unlike a lot of sci-fi, Front Mission is surprisingly pessimistic about life over a century in the future: aside from the bipedal robots, technology is fairly similar to that which we use today, but there have been major political developments, including the emergence of new nations. Such is the level of detail that has gone into the back story, it is easy to become completely engrossed in the world, especially when it’s themes of nuclear disarmament are so contemporary.

So if you like strategy RPG’s, I can’t recommend it highly enough, but if you’re still a bit unsure, I suggest you come for the big, convoluted story, and stay for the big, fighting robots. It’s the Japanese way.

Graphics: 5

Gameplay: 6

Music: 4

Experience: 7


Total: 22/40