Front Mission Series Gun Hazard (フロントミッションシリーズ ガンハザード), released 2/23/1996, developed by Omiya Soft and published by Square

This was the second game released under the Front Mission title. It’s not really an RPG, it’s more of a side-scrolling action shooter with some RPG-derived elements. But it’s a fun game so I played it to the end.

The game takes place in an alternate timeline from the rest of the games. In this world, the entire world had come together to build a space elevator to make it easier to launch ships, but it was never finished because the countries of the world started fighting each other.

The main character, Albert, is part of the military of the republic of Belgen. At the beginning of the game, the republic’s military is taken over by Ark, who leads a coup d’etat against the prime minister. The first episode of the game involves Albert trying to protect the prime minister from the coup.

In most stages you just move from left to right and shoot everything. There are also base stages where you have to explore around in a base, and sometimes the side scrolling stages will have underwater sections or the like. New enemies will appear as you kill the existing ones, although there is (I think on every stage) a limit to how many new enemies can come out. If you look at the top right of the screen, when that part with ENE turns beige, that means no more enemies will appear.

After each stage, Albert will get money and XP. As he levels up, the HP of his Wanzer increases, and he is able to use new weapons (although you also have to find a shop that sells them). You can upgrade the wanzer with body, vernier (to fly), shield, and dash units. In addition to that, you can equip one of four main weapons, and a certain number of subweapons depending on the Wanzer body.

There is an overworld map of the entire world, and then in each place there are a number of areas. Some areas just have enemies to fight, others advance the story. You can often repeat areas as many times as you want, so it’s pretty easy to level up and buy everything. I mostly used the Shotgun weapon and the Knuckle as the subweapon, although the healing field and the armor plate are useful as well. (The Spark Gun is pretty good also, especially for certain fights — it locks on to an enemy and does damage as long as you hold it down).

Fortunately there is a map you can check, that shows where the enemies (and loot boxes) are.

Because you can level up easily and buy a lot of repair items to use, the game as a whole is pretty easy. There are a few bosses where you need to learn the attack pattern to survive enough to kill it, but for probably 80% of the game you can just hold down the attack button and jump around, and use your shield to block the projectiles if needed. I’m not great at action games but even I didn’t have much trouble.

You can also get out of your Wanzer and fight on foot (with hand grenades and a gun); the advantage of that is that you can duck and avoid all damage, but generally it’s not something you want to do unless you have to.

Finally you can have companions for the battle but I didn’t find this very useful. The ones that actually appear in mechs get killed too easily and then you have to pay money to get them new stuff, and the game just isn’t hard enough to where I thought it was worth bothering.

At the end of the first episode, Albert is branded a traitor and has to flee Belgen; he goes with a woman named Brenda Lockhart to the US where he becomes a mercenary. The next few episodes are seemingly unconnected stories where he goes to various areas to deal with unstable situations. Slowly though, Albert hears about an organization called The Society that seems to be behind what is going on, and eventually he decides (for various reasons) to try to find out who they are and stop them.

The music is quite good, as you might expect from that composer list. The graphics are pretty good as well.

Overall, although it’s not an RPG, I did enjoy it — there is a fan translation so I would definitely recommend giving it a shot.