REVIEW: Front Mission (DS)

Scribbled on November 17th, 2007 by Jonathon Howard
Filed in Nintendo DS, RPG, Reviews, Strategy

Square Enix is becoming infamous for it’s endless re-releases. Usually the victim is their most successful franchise, Final Fantasy, but they’ve thrown out re-hashed versions of Dragon’s Quest games and the Mana series. Now you can add a new one to the list, Front Mission (FM). FM is a turn based strategy game, like it’s more popular cousin, Final Fantasy Tactics, but instead of knights and wizards, you’re given control of a team of giant walking tanks, known in game as “Wanzers”. This is without a doubt very cool idea… so why am I bored?

The story of Front Mission, like all good JRPG games, has ridiculously a byzantine and ultimately unimportant storyline that boils down to revenge. Can you guess why? If you said “lost love” you’d be correct! Give yourself a gold star! Front Mission takes place in the future, on an island. The island is important for its mineral deposits, so world powers are fighting over it. Eventually, war breaks out between two of them: the OCU and the UCS. Your character was involved in the escalation, and, somehow, the war resulted in the death of your fiance. He resigned but now he’s back, and maybe his fiance isn’t dead, and something is happening on the island that is a little fishy… and on and on. Like I said, it isn’t important, and it’s the same boring story that appears in two-thirds of every console video game ever made. Good thing FM has deep game play and customization, right?

Well, kind of. There is a lot of customization here - you can alter every part of your team’s Wanzers (head, legs, both arms, body, shoulders, CPU, weapons, etc.) This is the heart of the game, what every FM fan raves about; it’s also what every critic hates. There is too much here, and all of it is obscure. The names all sound foreign, and have nothing to do with what they are. There are graphs and charts to look at, and lots of numbers, and everything has numbers and percentages attached to it. The manual helps a little to explain all of the numbers, but a tutorial of some sort would have been nice. It’s easy enough to get a hang of the combat on your own, but not all the tinkering that is required to give your team the best chances in a battle. In addition, do we really need so many nested menus?

This leads to the actual gameplay, I used the word ‘chance’ above for a very good reason: it doesn’t matter how experienced your team is, and how tricked out their Wanzers are. If the AI in a mission plays right, you are toast, period. Re-play that mission, and you’ll cream them. Do it one more time and … You get the idea. It seems completely arbitrary at times. Beyond the coin toss that will be the battle, there isn’t much depth to the combat. It’s a lot like Rock, Paper, Scissors, but in this case it’s Rocket, Melee, Machine gun. It gets even easier as your characters level up, because they earn skills which allow you to target specific areas on your enemies. An enemy without arms is really just moving target practice. There’s really not much here, but that isn’t a surprise considering it’s 13 years old property, which makes playing the game for extended periods pretty boring. At least they put a quick save option in there, or just flip your DS closed.

The real problem with FM is that it’s what it’s not only dated, it’s antiquated. Advance Wars is Rock, Paper, Scissors too, but it looks better, sounds better, and plays better. The only considerations Square Enix made for the game is for the DS’ touch screen and Wi-Fi. You can select menus and move units with the stylus, though its actually faster to the controls with the standard buttons. You can play other people over Wi-Fi too, but they need to have the game and be within 30 feet of you.

Square Enix should have been working on a new FM that takes advantage off all the DS’ capabilities, and I’m sure I wouldn’t have been so bored if they had. Unless you are a hardcore fan of the series, you can spend your money in better ways.