Suicidal
Arcane
- Joined
- Apr 29, 2007
- Messages
- 2,224
Actually I read somewhere that in general FM's were made to also appeal to westerners, however since it wasn't big success (no marketing, didn't even bother to release second game in west for some stupid reason) they said fuck it and made 5th just for Japan. Could be why characters are so annoying.
The main problem for me was not that the characters were annoying, but that often I couldn't understand what they were talking about - much of the dialogue read like a bunch of logically unconnected gibberish, as opposed to a coherently flowing conversation. This was especially prominent outside of cutscenes when speaking to people in military bases, because you had no way to know who was actually talking at the present moment because there were no character portraits that would show the speaker, no voice overs to distinguish them, so sometimes it seemed like the characters were talking to themselves. Whether this was due to the shittiness of the unofficial translation or the original script, I do not know, but the result was a really hard to follow and badly written dialogue.
Also, now that I've actually beaten it, I think I understand why FM5 story was so shitty compared to the other games. In all the other Front Missions the events followed each other and were related to one another and your jackoff squadron usually had a clear goal to which they were progressing throughout the entire game. In FM5 the story progression is essentially a string of barely connected sub-stories that take place several years from one another - one moment you're fighting against the enemy nation in a war, then the war's over and several years later you're fighting some terrorists... then a year later you're fighting completely different terrorists and etc.
Also most of the time you're just fighting random nameless soldiers with a squad consisting of 2 people who have some presence in cutscenes and 4 random nameless soldiers (they actually have names, but nothing beyond that). In the other FMs the missions usually had a lot more story weight to them, you were often fighting with and against named characters, doing shit directly related to the protagonists' goals and etc. In FM5 apart from the endless stream of generic soldiers you only ever fight 2 named guys - the main villain, who is introduced only in the last quarter of the game and is never mentioned before, and his personal butt boy. You fight them during the last 2-3 levels of the game.
Purely from a gameplay point of view, FM5 is very good and the best in the series, IMO, but the story is so fucking dry and uninteresting and both the writing and the pacing suck, so I understand that quite a few people can be put off by all this.