Who Gave Robots to the God Damned Terrorists?
Put in strictly technical terms, Front Mission 3 is a Japanese ass strategy RPG. It's a late Playstation era, grid-based mech combat game by Square Software that's stuffed to the brim with stock characters and lasts over forty hours. All the check marks are here. I've been playing it during five weeks of a PSOne play and review binge that you can check out by exploring my more recent user reviews. Despite it's quirks, this game is doubtlessly the best aged game of those that I have played so far, including Symphony of the Night.
Yay for me, I finally get to review a game with a substantial story, albeit one that was written by thirteen year old with ADD and a collection of Gundam DVDs. But enough about my formative years! We have a game to review.
The game starts out following Kazuki, a mech test pilot who wears his angsty demeanor on his sleeve and who you will never stop wanting to punch in the face. Along with his best friend Ryogo, another test pilot who spends the whole time being an unfunny sexist ass who you will never stop wanting to punch in the face, Kazuki leads a ragtag group of fighters who tear ass around Asia, destabilizing every country to almost no coherent end. Most of those fighters, by the way, will constantly make you want to punch them in the face.
The plot of this game is so dense that I even completely struggle to remember it, so don't feel bad if you go cross-eyed half way through this massive clusterfuck of a paragraph. It hurts my brain too and I'm probably getting most of it wrong. So Thelma and Louis are having fun beating up robots at the lab in Japan when they are called to make a delivery to a JDF base in Okinawa. The base's automated defenses go nuts, leading to the game's first real fight, after which the inside of the base explodes. Sonny and Cher then decide that the situation there was kind of fucked up, so the leave. Back home, Kazuki gets an email from his adopted sister whom Ryogo thinks he should bang (...ew), which tells him that she had just been hired at the base. Bill and Ted decide to do some investigating at an entirely unrelated bar where they happen to run into Emma, the one person in the world who also wants to get into that base. Emma tells them they should just bust into the place with their giant robots and they agree because, at this point, they clearly have some severe brain damage. Before Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers are chased out by a bunch of “bad guys” who are clearly just defending their base from attack, they find that the inside of the base has been completely hollowed out by a super-nuke. They leave, act like a bunch of self-righteous assholes and completely ignore the fact that they just committed a terrorist attack and killed a bunch of people. By the way, Kazuki's sister's name is Alisa and Emma is actually her biological sister from the US. OH! I'm sorry, the “USN”. Feeling betrayed, our merry band of psychopaths hitch a ride with Dennis, aka “Cool Face”, to the Philippines. Before you ask, no. Cool Face is not a nickname that I came up with. Some writer/localization worker actually let this game ship with the dumbest codename since “Deep Throat”. Anyway, the super-nuke is called “MIDAS” and the Brady Bunch figure out that it's in the Philippines through a thought process that in no way contains an ounce of logic, but it's cool, because there is an unrelated civil war going on in the Philippines. So they tip the balance of power in this small nation, throw it further into chaos, and then watch as an airship containing MIDAS launches the super weapon at a city in Da Han Zhong. For spelling and pronunciations sake, let's refer to Da Han Zhong as “not China” from here on out. So the guy who bombed not China was rolling with your crew for a while before he hatched some world domination plot involving MIDAS, which he used right away to little effect. His name is Lukav, but anyway, now we're in not China. Not China is in an unrelated state of civil war, so our heroes decide to tip the balance of power and throw the rather large nation into chaos.
Are you following so far? I'm impressed. You're about seven hours in. The story becomes an ever increasingly insane soap opera that always hurts to think about. It's a stumbling train wreck of ridiculousness that can only be matched by R-Kelly's Trapped in the Closet. My favorite highlights of this acid trip include a fight against a number of robot's that run on cow shit and a post-climax sequence where our heroes drop onto the South Lawn of the White House, murder some police officers and then hold the president hostage in the name of peace. Did I mention the mechs are called “wanzers”? Well they are. You can even get a weapon called the “wanzerfaust”. I'll just let that sink in.
In hindsight, the story might be the best part of this game, although not for the reasons the designers intended. There is potentially cult gold hidden within the text scrolls of this one. I should clarify that I find this game more funny in retrospect and I was just bored during parts of it. The anime dialogue portraits help a lot though, and the best bits are when the emotion of the anime face fails to match up with the text on screen. It'll make you chuckle more than you think. If you have a patience for reading and you are exactly the right type of cynical, I would recommend this to you without hesitation.
As I said earlier, this is the best aged game of those that I have played so far. That might be a bit of a misnomer, though, because grid-based combat controls haven't exactly changed since the 1980s. None-the-less, there are three solid pillars to this game that keep it structurally sound. There's the turn based combat which can feel a little shallow sometimes compared to some more recent handheld games. Second, there's the RPG aspect of the game where the meat of the experience lies in weapon upgrades and mech-crafting. Finally, there's the mid-mission meta game which is easily the weakest part of the game.
The most disappointing part of the combat itself, is that you will only ever bring four mechs to a fight, despite the fact that you eventually have as many as eight fighters to equip and keep track of. Additionally, there are only four spaces to place your fighters at the beginning of a mission, meaning that there is basically no placement strategy. Having you chose a spot to place your machines is like taking a sugar pill for the flu. You might be able to trick yourself into thinking it's having and effect, but it isn't.
Your mechs can have melee, mid range, and long range attacks which, depending on the weapon, can do certain different types of damage. Enemies can be strong against a type of attack, so a lot of the strategy involves using the right weapon. You can also pick to be strong against certain attacks, but you do this at the start of every mission with little idea of the enemy's weapon types. You would do best to look at the enemies during cutscenes and if, for instance, you see a lot of wanzers holding machine guns, you should chose to protect against piercing damage. Truth be told, I figured this out thirty hours in, but I still never really ran into trouble.
This game has more than a bit of trouble telling you about it's systems. I was also at least ten hours in before I found out I could choose the order in which I moved my mechs and if there is a way to change your defense bonus in the middle of a fight, I never saw it. I also never really understood what happened to a mech when it was “confused”.
There's a slight element of chance to the combat. You'll see the aim percentage of every attack before you chose to pull the trigger and critical hits will stun enemies and sometimes even cause their pilots to eject. Ejected pilots can be mopped with a single machine gun burst, finishing the enemy off a couple turns early. You'll also get random attack bonuses that you earn and equip during a battle. They appear as you use a mech and depend upon the type of weapon your current pilot is wielding.
I only ever lost a fight, because I felt like I got a couple bad dice rolls. This made the combat a little disappointing, but the mech-crafting more than made up for the difficulty shortcomings. There are body, arm, and leg types as well as a backpack. Equipping your mech is a game of balancing weight and durability. You might not mind your missile machine being so fragile as it fires rockets from the rear, but your melee bruiser is going to need 1000hp and a shield. One of the more interesting tradeoffs is that certain backpacks can hold no healing items or extra ammo, but they allow you the power to carry a bigger gun… or three.
If you're not blasting dudes or buying weapons with which to blast dudes, you're hanging around bars, talking to your crew, and surfing the shittiest fake internet ever. You'll probably avoid this part of the game at all costs, because this is where it begins to drag. You might think that talking to people will allow you to effect your mission path, but it barely ever does. Sometimes you might get a password to a website out of it which could lead to an incredibly miniscule amount of money that you are already swimming in. I guess there is some lore building to be had by exploring Front Mission 3's internet if you want it, but you'd have to be a very boring person to give a shit. I used it for maybe twenty minutes out of a more than forty hour playtime and I never thought I was missing out.
I continue to write about the graphics and audio in these PSOne game and I don't know exactly why. They all look about as good as you would expect and this game is no different. The mechs look robotic, but not in the right way. Maybe I shouldn't be disappointed that everything is a two dimensional sprite until someone is attacked, but all the sprites look like a blurry mess. All your units turn gray after you use them, and they can be hard to tell apart. What I really wanted from this game was a classic Square soundtrack and some elaborate CG sequences. Neither of which are really there. The soundtrack is generic and there are only two short CG cutscenes after the intro.
At a staggering $6 on the PSN store, you really can't do much better in terms of value than Front Mission 3. If you have a SONY handheld and a daily bus ride, than this is the perfect game to help you ignore strangers for the next few months on your way to work. For now though, you've made it through a two thousand word review. You deserve a reward, so here are a couple of professional screen captures of this game's incredible dialogue.
