Front Mission 3(PS1)
2000 Squaresoft

The Short Version- Fragile robots and oddly hardy humans duke it out over a massively destructive MacGuffin.

The Long Version-

It’s kinda cool to dip into the PS1 Classics catalog up on the PSN now, even though they haven’t really done much screening for compatibility with the PSP. With the Wii Virtual Console, it warns you in advance you need This Doodad or That Contraption to play a game, and won’t let you boot say, an SNES game if you have something without enough buttons plugged in. Meanwhile, on the PSN, Sony will happily sell you direct ports of old games playable without a hitch on your console, or god help you if you have only a PSP since it’s missing an analog and second set of shoulder buttons. The first thing I did when I wanted to test out the ‘Remote Play’ gimmick was pop in Misadventures of Tron Bonne and found it really, really hard to aim. So, buyer beware there. On the one hand, the PSN’s shop is a lot more user friendly and Sony lets you back up or use your DLC on another system should your console break down. On the other, Nintendo’s online service doesn’t sell you something you can’t fully use without warning you first.

That digression aside, Front Mission 3 is the first PS1 Classics game I’ve bothered with since I already own pretty much everything on the PS1 I want. I was debating Armored Core 3 Portable or one of its spinoffs, but which one!? About then, I randomly found out that Front Mission 3 had been released online for $5.99, so I figured it probably wouldn’t burn me much worse than a Taco Bell combo deal.

The thing about Front Mission is that even though they’re made by Square, they just don’t feel like Square games. About any time a cutscene would begin in FM3, I would momentarily think I’d found some Metal Gear Solid spinoff. It’s got pretty good graphics, PS1 style anyway, and uses the in game models to good effect. Most battle scenes have a beginning and ending cinema sequence to set things up and offset the fact pretty much every other non battle sequence in the game involves character portraits and lots of talking.

So, this is the part where I go over the basics for anyone who isn’t familiar with the Front Mission series. It’s basically Final Fantasy Tactics with customizable mechs called Wanzers, and a whole lot of espionage and personal drama, rather than the tropes you’d usually expect from anything Square was involved in. In fact, the CGI mostly avoids feathery-haired porcelain horror dolls pantomiming at each other like most pre-voice-acting Square games. Instead we get scenes of (what amounts to) nuclear weapons exploding and helicopters gunning down fleeing cars.

The game has two storylines in it, too, which I didn’t realize until I was well into the Emma storyline. In retrospect, the fact my save file said “Emma Version” should have tipped me off. It’s presented in a pretty dynamic way for a SRPG, feeling a lot more like a journey than the FM1 formula of “Fight, go back to town, take a mission, fight, go back to town” (ad nauseum). In the path I took, the heroes wound up needing to flee the country and having to keep finding ways to transport their GIANT ROBOTS unseen across police checkpoints. It was a lot more exciting of an approach, even if it makes things pretty linear. And who’s saying linear is necessarily bad? It’s nice to have a well paced story if a game is going to be story heavy after all.

FM3 adds the element of pilots being able to exit their mechs willingly, or sometimes forcibly if the game feels dickish and makes you eject. I’m not even really sure why there’s an automatic ejection feature since your pilots don’t die with their Wanzers or anything. But you are able to hijack other wanzers or fight on foot if you want to for some reason. People are pretty hardy in the Front Mission universe, though. Even an NPC scientist can take a punch from a 30 foot robot or a few bullets before dying. Also, people explode, just like the vehicles. What the hell are they eating in the future?

In addition to buying new parts, you can also upgrade old units to keep them current, which is a pretty nice way of getting around the late game issue the original had of rebuying parts that look like your starting set, except better stat wise. On the other hand, it makes changing your Wanzer around pretty pointless through most of the early game, except for maybe some weapon shuffling. It’s also kind of a letdown that you can’t play with the paint job and emblems like in fellow custom mech game Armored Core, but this is a 2000 Playstation 1 game here. Don’t ask for miracles. In addition, pilots can learn special skills that randomly trigger on their turn, and best of all, one going off doesn’t mean the others won’t. Nothing’s quite as satisfying as Double Assault chaining twice, followed by a random Body Tackle or other unmemorized skill triggering and utterly annihilating a foe in one turn.

I should probably bring up the Pointless Minigame Sequence though. It wouldn’t be a PS1-era role playing game unless there was some largely unnecessary side game to eat up time. In this case, your character takes time between missions to check his email and surf the internet for current events and such. It fleshes out the universe a bit, lets you ogle turnarounds of the robots, and vote in beauty contests among other things of epic, earth shaking importance. I’m sure down the line I’ll probably miss out on some game breaker weapon or something because I didn’t vote my sister for Miss Teihoku or something, but for a first time through, I don’t really care.

All in all, if you like MechWarrior or tactics games, or especially if you like both, for crying out loud, grab Front Mission 3. And not Evolved. It’s cheap, and if you have both a PS3 and PSP, you can transfer your save file back and forth whether you’re at home or on the go. I used to dream of this day.

Sweet.