A lot of you are probably wondering 'What is Front Mission?'. Well you people should be ashamed of yourselves!... Ok, maybe not.
Front Mission 4 is the 4th installment of a series that has a fan following in Japan. It's not well known in the States because the first two installments where for Japan only and the third installment is a very hard to find PSX game that not a lot of people played or even heard about. In the game, you switch between two characters that are in opposite sides of the world. The story is that there are two major factions, the EU, which is comprised of many European nations, and the UCS, which is composed of North and South America. One character is a Wanzer tester (Wanzers are abbreviated names for the mech suits they use in the game) who's team gets involved in a plot by a military equipment producing state to hurtle the EU and USC into war. The second character is part of a forward UCS unit in South America who stumble upon and steal some gold belonging to the dictator whos' army they are fighting, also helping freedom fighters in the area in their fight against the dictator. As you play, you switch between the two stories and watch them slowly intertwine with each other.
The game has two major parts. There is the planning and story part, which involves talking to characters and progressing the story, and allows you to buy and equip parts and weapons for you Wanzers, customize their appearance, buy computer upgrades and programs to build up stats, and even try sim missions to build up experience and money. The second part of the game is the actual battles. Here, your characters will fight in their mechs against bases, military machines, and other mechs. The battle systems are turn based and on a grid, very similar to games such as Final Fantasy Tactics. Your weapons will have different effects depending on the weapon and any skills you may have. Missiles work good for long range attacks that never miss, bazookas are good for causing lots of splash and fire damage, shotguns are good for up-close splash damage, machine guns provide good damage and have good ammo storage, mortars can harass a group of mechs, and rifles can apply hurt from far away. Each weapon has a style of attack; blunt, piercing, and fire. These can be combined with skills to get around armor, since armor can only be designed for one type of attack for each wanzer. Shotguns and machine guns can be dual wielded, rifles must be held in two hands, rockets and mortars have to be held on shoulders, and hand weapons can also be dual wielded. Your mech's stats depend on the parts they are equipped with. Some parts have high HP, but may weigh a lot or have lousy movement capabilities. Your equipment is limited to how much your wanzer can hold based on its power and the weight limit of it's legs. Actions are limited to how much AP your characters and mech's have.
The game only has a few downsides. For one, its pretty short, which means you will have to make the best out of the set numbers of battles as you can. Next, while the graphics in the battles are good, the graphics in the story part of the game are usually confined to simple 2-D backgrounds and character sprites, though the Character voice acting is fairly good.
This game is an interesting buy and worth it to anyone who likes a good strategy game or who likes mechs but gets tired of getting their butts handed to them in games like Armored Core. Be sure to keep a look out for this game since they are currently developing an online MMORPG version of it due out at a later date.
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