Squeenix Square Enix revives Front Mission

[Lim-Dûl]

Soulless

 

[Suicidal]

Found some gameplay of the mobile game.

In mission gameplay looks decent but after the mission it shows the opening of a loot box with random mech parts, so, uh... yeah.

Another franchise lost to the cancer that is mobile """"""""""""gaming"""""""""""""".

 

[Carpincho Pampeano]

I only play mobage with cute robot GIRLS, so that's a no for me. Hope to see news for 2 remake soon.

 

[lightbane]

The video reeks of loot-boxes indeed. I'm not sure which one has hurt gaming more: Dark Souls or mobile games.
Also, the game is seemingly going full animuh, as that chick can target multiple enemies with her special railgun cannon and does cutscene kills with twin SMGs. Energy/rail weapons were always rare and usually available late-game, if at all, or used by enemies. Special abilities were always a thing, but hitting multiple enemies was difficult without the right tools (ie: a bazooka).
Dual-wielding guns also used to be useless unless you have special skills that lets you use said two weapons per turn, or to have a gun for different situation (which may not be possible if each weapon weights too much). Dual-wielding melee bots were a fun build, if a risky one. Or shotgun+melee weapon, my favorite.

 

[Rahdulan]

Site is up for FM2: Remake with some screenshots. This is the one I'm excited for since it's never been officially translated, and even the fan translated script couldn't be injected properly meaning you had to keep the translation open on the side as you played.
https://www.nintendo.com/store/products/front-mission-2-remake-switch/

FRONT MISSION 2 blends intense strategy with a deep and involved storyline.

12 years have passed since the second Huffman conflict. The impoverished People's Republic of Alordesh has been suffering a severe economic decline ever since the war ended. In June 2102, soldiers of the Alordesh Army rise up and, led by Ven Mackarge, declare independence from the O.C.U. (Oceania Cooperative Union).

Ash, an O.C.U. soldier, manages to survive the ensuing battle, but Alordesh is completely overrun by the Revolutionary Army. Ash and his surviving teammates infiltrate Alordesh's chaotic underground in an attempt to escape the country. However, they soon discover that there is a huge conspiracy behind the coup.

In FRONT MISSION 2, the perspective switches between three characters: Ash, Lisa, and Thomas, creating a worldview that goes beyond a simple dichotomy between good and evil.

FRONT MISSION 2: Remake preserves the mature story, strategic turn-based combat, and Wanzer customization options of the original. Enjoy the revitalized classic with updated visuals and new features and enhancements!
- Support for many new languages
- New 'free camera' option to zoom in during gameplay and check out Wanzers in detail
- New coloring and camouflage options
- Modern in-game effects
- Renewed soundtrack

 

[Abu Antar]

Release Date for the first game is announced:
https://www.gematsu.com/2022/11/front-mission-1st-remake-launches-november-30

FRONT MISSION 1st: Remake comes back with updated graphics and modern approach! Choose your side and enter the battlefield equipped with the armed Wanzer—the future of Huffman Island is in your hands.

• The game features new game mode and tweaks to the gameplay and mechanics.
• The legendary soundtrack fully reorchestrated.
• Original soundtrack available.

In the year 2090, the world’s conflicts are fought using giant war machines called Wanzers. Huffman Island, the only place where the Oceania Cooperative Union (O.C.U.) and the Unified Continental States (U.C.S.) share a land border is a hotbed of conflict.

With dozens of characters to meet, its mature story, and non-Manichean protagonists, Front Mission is the classic tactical Japanese RPG, finally available worldwide.

 

[Humanity has risen!]

Hopefully this is only a prelude to making actual new Front Mission games.

Looks like my Switch credits from discounted gift cards from Costco is going to be finally put to use.

 

[Humanity has risen!]

Gameplay trailer.

Release date on November 30. Pre-orders start on November 16 with a 10% discount.

 

[Humanity has risen!]

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/front-mission-3-remake-coming-alongside-1-2-remakes/1100-6507426/

So nobody had posted yet that FM3 will eventually get a remake as well?

I have mixed feelings about it. The story and world was more elaborate, but they reduced the number of units to 4 and as such the strategic element was overall dumbed down.

 

[lightbane]

To compensate, the story in FM3 was absolutely BONKERS and hilariously bad and worth experiencing. No idea if it was due poor translation issues or what, but everyone here was insane, incompetent, or both.

 

[Rahdulan]

More info about Classic and Modern modes.

The latest Front Mission 1st: Remake details show off what the Classic and Modern gameplay modes will involve and look like. A new trailer went over each one’s features. After that, it showed a clip that offered examples of how gameplay differs between the two.

The Classic Front Mission 1st: Remake gameplay will be more traditional. Should someone choose that, they’ll only have an orthogonal view of the battlefield. The game will feel like it did when it appeared on the Super Famicom back in 1995. It will also use the original game soundtrack.

The Modern version switches up the camera, perspective, music, and other adjustments. It will offer a perspective view. You will be able to rotate the camera and change the pitch to see the full battlefield. Some gameplay adjustments will be in effect for quality of life changes. For example, you can see movement ranges in the example video. It will also play the remastered soundtrack.

 

[somerandomdude]

I hope we're not getting this:

 

[Abu Antar]

Yet another new trailer.

 

[Modron]

You think the VO meant to say tactical RPG and not tactile RPG?

 

[Nutmeg]

Just completed Front Mission 5 normal mode, no arena, no survival sim, battle simulator missions only once.

Reminder of how I think about games, which is just as cute and valid as any other way to think about games, but might not align with how you yourself think about them:

Spoiler

I hate mindlessness in games. The opposite of mindlessness is mindfulness, more commonly called challenge, i.e. when player's neurons are forced to fire in order to win.

Given a game, potential mindlessness is the most mindless approach a player can take and still win. Alternatively, this may also be viewed as minimum challenge - the minimum mental effort a player needs to exude to prevail.

Potential challenge is the how mindful a player must be, on average throughout the course of the game, to optimize some axis of game performance, which has no bearing on the outcome of the game.

Rewarded challenge is how mindful a player must be (again, on average) for game noted achievements beyond basic win conditions e.g. score, rank or clearing "post game content".

Why do I make a point of saying "on average"? To account for mindless chores e.g. re-rolling (in various forms) or navigating through tedious UIs.

Challenge when playing for game time efficiency is a universally applicable measure of potential challenge and a good substitute for rewarded challenge in its absence. Henceforth called "Universal substitute challenge".

What is game time efficiency? It is simply minimizing the amount of game time (in turn based games, turns, in real time games, real time) passes before victory is achieved.

Specific substitute challenge is challenge in the presence of reasonable, clear cut, and easily executable self imposed restrictions. For example, in the classic Capcom brawler "Armored Warriors", not using the "Turbo Jet" legs. For non-example, fighting each enemy no more than once on the way to the boss in Falcom's "Y's Origins" - how are we to standardize routes? What if the player accidentally goes the wrong way and repeats a kill while backtracking? Should this invalidate the whole run, even if the player avoids a group of enemies deliberately later? This is neither clear cut nor easily executable.

(A/D/J/S)RPGs are interesting because they usually have almost 0 minimum challenge, i.e. they can be played entirely mindlessly, but they also may have decent substitute challenge (usually hampered by how infrequently they accept player inputs), and sometimes rewarded challenge.

Anyway, on to Front Mission 5. The best things about the game are the "link" battle system, the use of Action Points to abstract time, the way weapons work spatially, and the squad and mech management.

What is "linking"? Linking is just the fact that nearby mechs (within weapon range) will generally join in an attack initiated by some other mech. I say "generally", as they might not join in depending on the pilot type (e.g. "support" types might not join in if the chance of friendly fire exceeds a certain likelihood, while "tactical" types won't join in if their AP is below half the maximum, conserving it for their own action or counter attacking), and of course whether they have enough AP for an attack.

On top of linking is skill stacking and chaining. Skills are associated with pilots, and provide bonuses such as increasing accuracy by 20%, or the amount of shots fired by 20% etc. Chains are when multiple skills from different pilots activate in a linked battle, providing a damage multiplier on top of all the skill bonuses - 5 skills activated one after the other will double damage. However, there's build strategy and trade-offs here, as some of the better individual skills not only don't chain, but break chains. Skills proc randomly, with the probability of procing being different along the chain.

Lastly it's worth noting how the game's weapon types interact with the AP and link systems to give players (theoretically) a lot of potential for optimization and pushing their turn counts lower. Some rifles can "penetrate" through one mech and hit a number of mechs behind them, all bazookas cause damage to the 4-connected tiles from the target, while melee weapons favor targeting the body over other parts (killing the body, kills the mech). When attacking, you have the initiative, but you need to be very careful with your positioning not to convert potential damage on the enemy to damage to your mechs, to avoid your own mechs taking heavy damage from enemy links during their phase and (more easily) their counter-attack, and sometimes to avoid attacking altogether because there's more potential for damage on your own counter-attack. For example, it might be better to have your out of range rifle move last, so as not to waste their AP in links, to set up a counter that will penetrate and hit 2 enemies instead of 1.

All that said, for my first run, even though very restricted in terms of (IMO pointless) power gaming, I only had to do quick, off the cuff thinking about all the complexity above and was still able to hit par times in all missions, only losing 1 mech (bless you Christine Coolridge for your selfless sacrifices) 3 times in boss battles. Aside from missing the RP bonus for no more than 1 mech loss on normal (0 on hard?), and potential XP for your pilot during combat, there's no penalty to losing a mech.


Squad management and building consists of recruiting pilots (four things to consider: their starting level and job levels, their job specialty, whether they're S types, and whether they're "aces" or "veterans" - the latter important only to unlock other pilots and a simulator mission AFAICT from reading a guide after the fact), and building mechs from parts. After the initial set of "tutorial" type missions where you field less than 6 pilots and their mechs, you will always field exactly 6.

I used a very simple strategy for building mechs that is probably close to optimal without using survival simulator parts and grinding for CP (i.e. cash) in the arena - favor getting better weapons (or backpacks, in the case of a mechanic or jammer's mech), if weapons exceed current body power, upgrade the body, only upgrade legs with priority when new models increase movement, and arms only when they start getting shot off too easily (and not even then tbh, as I was always low on CP). I didn't every have much reason to use anything but 0 evasion penalty, high output bodies (Gust) and high evasion, high movement legs (Numsekar and Mungoss), with the exception of using low weight 4 or hover type legs (they have high movement, but low evasion) on my gunners so they could carry bigger guns. I used underranked Recson (high accuracy, low weight during late game) arms on everyone's gun hand(s), and very low rank Storms (then mid rank Frosts) on everyone's off arm. Launcher type mechs could possibly be optimized with other bodies, but I didn't use a launcher. So, while I didn't find much room for specialization and most of my mech frames were samey, being short on CP till the very end meant I would be careful with which mech I favored for upgrading ahead of the rest of the pack, so there was some degree of decision making here.

I found that out of the gunner (medium-long range) weapons, rifles were best, although bazookas might have the most potential if played carefully (and without running striker (melee) centric tactics, as I did). Likewise for assault weapons I found machine guns handily superior to shotguns and flamethrowers. I didn't use launchers, but I did put a grenade on my assault mech for one or two missions. I mostly forgot to use it, but a low rank, mass grenade strategy in mech building might potentially be superior to placing full priority on hand weapons and never having enough CP for a shoulder mount, as I did.

Pilots are leveled up in simulators and missions, and I found that new pilots I could recruit were always underleveled compared to the ones that had been hanging around a while. However, since the most important pilot attribute is their "type", I replaced my much higher level gunners with lower level "support" type recruits at some point to avoid friendly fire (gunners have long range, and often you don't even realize they're about to blow off your striker mech's arm in a link).

Since I skipped almost all dialogue in the game, I never read any hints to the benefits of S rank pilots (if there are any such hints), and when scouting them, they seem strictly worse than normal pilots (as they seem the same, just more susceptible to status damage). After my clear, from reading a guide, I learned they get some very nice skills other pilots do not. Again, room for optimization on a more serious hard mode run.

I briefly mentioned backpacks, but they're actually a big part of mech specialization. Aside from being simply useful, an EMP backpack's abilities are how pilots can level up the jammer job and gain jammer skills, and a repair backpack is how pilots can do the same for the mechanic job and skills. Carrying these backpacks restricts your weapon choices due to their high weight costs. On the other hand, there's also the turbo backpack (although you can't buy these), that increases output - very useful for striker (melee) builds, as excess output gives a percentage damage bonus for melee attacks.


How does hard mode differ from normal mode? Well if you don't play with any self imposed restrictions, it's easier, as you can grind to rank 12 parts as soon as you get access to the arena and survival simulator (which give you access to infinite CP and RP respectively), while normal mode caps how high you can upgrade your parts based on your progress through the regular missions, so your max power is limited even if you grind. I'm not exactly sure on how the survival simulator works in hard mode - whether you can access all floors right away or they get unlocked as you progress through the regular missions - but in any case, you will, along with the infinite RP the survival simulator gives, have access to very OP parts either straight away or after a few missions. This is true in normal mode as well, except again, for the aforementioned rank cap. Now, on the other hand, if you play on hard and restrict access to the arena and the survival simulator, you will get more challenge (theoretically - enemy pilots are higher level and have better mechs (I think?), and you get even less CP and RP (not that I've ever been short on RP) - but I've not seen the difference myself), with also more room for mech specialization through overranking parts at a high resource cost. Probably the most enjoyable way to play the game.

Finally, I need to note the rewarded challenge in this game, which consists of getting remodeling points for completing missions within so many turns and under so many mechs lost. It's very easy to meet these conditions on normal mode, employing very intuitive off the cuff field tactics and build strategies. I can't imagine how easy it would be if you could grind. Likewise, due to unrestricted part rank, it would be even easier on hard mode without restricting grinding. That said, my simple tactics and strategies were already buckling, especially on boss fights, so I can imagine hard mode requiring some thought to meet par when playing with restrictions. Of course, going under par (low turn counts) seems rife with potential.


The game's UI is good but not great. You can skip battles (but you don't get any battle trace, so you have to watch them to understand exactly what's happening - luckily you can watch them at double speed), all cutscenes, and fast forward through dialogue. Great for players like me who do not care at all about "story" (except as told through player actions) or even players who do but who are replaying to push their tactics. You can get most information at the (nicely indicated) press of a button, or it's just there already, *except* a visual indication of enemy weapon range or movement range - you have to count squares. Perhaps this is because multiple modes of attack and weapons can be equipped by the one mech, but I can think of ways the developers could have worked around that. Outside of battle the main pain point for me was the lack of a "trade in" option when buying frame parts, although I could work around it by selling all weapons and non turbo backpacks, adjusting bodies with a full bag of cash, and then buying back weapons.

The main point against the game, IMO, is the mission variety. They are all very similar. Out of the 20 battle simulator missions, I can only note 2 (the one where everything is a helicopter, and the one where new mechs were spawned whenever you killed one of the initial leaders) the rest fit into one of two categories - kill squads randomly scattered throughout the map, or regroup, as your squad itself begins scattered, and do the same. Out of the 26 regular missions, the boss levels were notable, and only a few others (the uneven terrain (arctic) mission, the flood mission, a couple of (or was it three?) indoor missions (no grenades or rockets allowed), one of those but with turrets, the train mission, and finally the protect the cargo, base and plane missions). Some of the aforementioned were actually boss missions, so all up about 8 to 10 missions? The rest were just take out enemy squads scattered around the map, no different from most battle simulator missions, and even out of those 10 or so "notable" missions mentioned, most devolved to the same thing, as their specific gimmick could mostly be ignored or quickly trivialized (perhaps less so on hard mode? I don't know). As a point of comparison, Fire Emblem missions also work with only a few primitives (fog of war, terrain, enemy composition, and reinforcements), and even fewer gimmicks, yet feel more different.

This is a typical "problem", or not, depending on how you look at it, with some games in the genre - chess has only one map and mission after all, but infinite variety. From the perspective of potential to optimize turn counts through tactics, the missions are fine. For the purposes of forcing the player to tailor their pilot and mech builds to meet the challenge, the missions fall short except only a handful few (the ones where you can't use AoE weapons, and the ones where you better bring the correct leg type).

I've noted elsewhere on this forum, but the survival simulator, while it can be abused to trivialize the main game, is in itself a fun rogue-like from what I've played of it. I might spend some time playing just that with no regard to the rest of the game some day, except maybe to see how cheesy it can get with all the OP parts.

The game has a very clean Japanese take on Bush Jr. era US army aesthetic, with a little hint of anime. The writing (or translation) is all over the place, along with the characters generally being quite juvenile for my tastes (but not so bad within the genre), so I just started skipping everything around mission 8 (or whenever it is your mechanic buddy dies) and have no idea what the rest of the game was about. Still, I appreciate the look of almost all the maps, and also the intermission locales. Music was OK, mostly techno stuff, a bit of annoying bagpipes, with an overly dramatic finale - most of it reminded me of Armored Core's music? Maybe my mind is playing tricks on me due to other similarities, as I don't really remember Armored Core's music.


Overall, I liked the game, and can recommend it to people who like the SRPG genre. I will also note that the game has reaffirmed, in my mind, the superiority of the SRPG genre to the DRPG and JRPG genres for challenge and gameplay oriented players, having played it just after Valkyrie Profile and Shin Megami Tensei, two of the most praise lavished games in terms of gameplay in the JRPG and DRPG genres respectively.

 

[Morenatsu.]

TIL you poast on shmups.system11. Nice copypasta!

 

[Trans-Financial-Man]

I am looking forward to emulating this game on my Steam Deck. Thanks for being such a great Third Party dev for Valve, Nintendo.

 

[Palomides]

You know a game is decent when shit-tier journalists such as Nintendo Life complain about it and recommend playing on easy to enjoy the story as opposed to the actual game . They gave it 5/10 and even the comments there are riled up.

Anyway, speaking of difficult there are quite a few to select, from Recruit (enemy hit points and damage are reduced by 50%) up to General (enemies hit points increased by 900% and damage by 100%).

There are two grahpical settings you can modify: gamma and blur.

Now, on to the game.

 

[Abu Antar]

Bought it, will play in 7 years, like all other backlogged games.

 

[somerandomdude]

Anyone here tested this on Yuzu or Ryujinx? How does it run?

 

[Retardo]

Played coupl'a missions, runs great on ryujinx.

The portraits have a weird feeling of either being upscaled by some shitty algorithm, or just made by a cheap artist.
Don't know why they've went with 3D remaster though, old pixels were looking actually better.

 

[Palomides]

It's one of the ways Square Enix (and others I imagine) can 'justify' the outrageous prices they set for very old games.

 

[Palomides]

So anyway, how do you like to set up your characters/wanzers? I know that some people have predispositions for some charaacters, like Royd with Short weapons/skills, but personally I like turning him into a melee beast.

 

[Hellraiser]

So anyway, how do you like to set up your characters/wanzers? I know that some people have predispositions for some charaacters, like Royd with Short weapons/skills, but personally I like turning him into a melee beast.

When I played the first one I used, IIRC:

rifle+mg+whatever missile launcher I could still fit (missiles OP)
double melee weapons+shields+and heavy armor or whatever
grenade launchers+double missile launchers and light loadout

and appropriate skills for all. I think the game allowed 6 wanzers fielded so I had 2 of each of those 3 kits? In general hitting first with high damage single shot weapons and following up with dakka was always a good strategy. Man I love one shotting enemy mech limbs and blowing weapons off. MGs are for finnishing off whatever could survive one hit and make sure your second missile/rifle attack kill another limb.

In FM3, which I have yet to finish, I use a different setup so far due to the weapon changes and different balance. Forgot what it was TBH, but not much different from the default kits. Mostly MGs, some shotguns for the MC and his bro, the bro with the sniper rifle got a clone kit to the one I gave the russian waifu with sniper+missile launchers. But I think the sniper rifles are not so good and would be better to go for as many missiles+melee on one wanzer (the russian waifu) and make the other guy another assault dude with shotgun/MG plus rifle or something.

 

[lightbane]

Melee + shotgun tends to work quite well, especially in FM3, although it's a risky combo due lack of shields.

In FM3 sniper rifles suck unlike the other games. FM3 is also the strangest of the lot regarding weapons (barring FM2 and the Border of Madness japanese game which I didn't play due lacking a translation), as it takes forever to level up your proficiency with them, sniper rifles work like (faulty) melee weapons, and having new weapon types introduced VERY late into the game. Specifically, flame-throwers, which are awesome but hard to use due faulty aim (unless you abuse "rapid fire" skill tricks), and the energy beam (which to be fair is a secret weapon).

Chainguns are also an awesome subset of machineguns in most FM games but cooler, except for FM5 where they became their own thing. I remember having a sniper guy using a chaingun with hilariously long range and bigger rate of fire. It had terrible accuracy, but the rate of fire was so high I still hit something eventually ork style, kek.