Front Mission 3 (フロントミッション サード), released 9/2/1999, developed and published by Square

This is the third SRPG entry in the Front Mission series, and the first one to be released in English. I haven’t been a huge fan of this series so far — I finished 1 but found it pretty mediocre, and 2 was just too slow moving for me to put up with the difficulty. I think FM3 is better than either of the first two, although some of the same issues that made me dislike the first two are still here.

The story takes place in the same world and timeline as the first two FMs although it doesn’t seem like they share many characters or direct plot elements. It’s 10 years after FM2, and involves a cold war between the OCU and the Chinese DHZ groups. The OCU is continuing to experience separatist violence with countries wanting to go their own way. There are two separate storylines you can play in the game (after the first tutorial mission). I don’t know different they actually are in story or gameplay. I went with the Emma route.

The gameplay is fundamentally the same as the first two games. You still build Wanzers from parts (body, right arm, left arm, leg) and equip them with a variety of weapons, shields, missiles, etc. The game uses the AP system from the second game, albeit in a simplified form. You still use AP to move and attack, and remaining AP can be used for counterattacking (or shield defense) on the enemy turn. They got rid of the “team” system where you recover AP based on how many of your own units (or enemy units) are around you.

One welcome feature (at least for me) is that you can always upgrade your wanzers and train in a simulator between missions, even when it makes no logical sense in the story. This of course makes the game considerably easier than FM2, but I am not a fan of games where you can get softlocked if you don’t build your team in the correct way — especially since there’s often no way to tell whether the game wants you to focus the XP on a core team, or spread the XP around to your whole team.

I still don’t like the random skill learning, which doesn’t seem to have been improved much from previous games.

The levelling system this time works by giving you XP for each type of attack (shotgun, machine gun, missile, etc) and using a letter-based grade system. You also gain a different type of XP from destroying parts or complete mechs, and these levels increase your available AP. In addition to using the AP for moves in battle, you can assign AP before a battle to improve evade, hit rate, and other things. These lower your maximum available AP for each turn.

Another new system is the “surrender” system. If you do enough damage to a unit, they might stop attacking and consider surrender. If you make another attack without killing them, they will surrender and leave their mech (but not the weapons) behind. You can then put your own units in the mech, or sell it. Certain attacks will also force the pilots out of their mechs, and if you kill the pilot it will be the equivalent of a surrender.

The best way to ensure a surrender attempt doesn’t kill the mech is to have one of your own guys exit their mech and shoot at it with a handgun. Although in some cases this isn’t necessary if you are pretty sure that your attack will not kill the Body of the mech.

One thing I haven’t been doing much with is the “forum” system, which is rather complicated at least in appearance. You mostly just get additional lore from this (and maybe some maps for training). You can also send and receive e-mail, which also seems to be mostly backstory and lore.

The Emma route has 70 stages, which means the game has a fair amount of content. I’m about halfway through the game now. After some experimenting, I think my preferred setup is to ensure each person can have a missile launcher, a shield, and then either a gun or a melee weapon. In some ways I feel like the guns are better overall — the melee weapons do a lot more damage but it’s completely random where the damage will go. So you might just be taking off half the Leg HP which is not necessarily very helpful.

I think this is why I’m still not completely sold on the Front Mission gameplay. FM1 was way too easy because the ability to target parts meant that you could just target Body and often kill enemies in one or two hits. But when the part targetting is random, it means that there’s a huge amount of luck involved. If you fire three missiles and get lucky you may eliminate a strong opponent on the first turn, or all the shots might go to 3 different parts which is significantly less useful.

I will say more about the story next week. It starts off with Kazuki and Shogo, test Wanzer pilots for OCU. Kazuki’s sister is a scientist, and when he hears there was an explosion at the base she’s working at, he’s determined to find out if she’s OK. With the help of the mysterious Emma, they make their way into the base and see the aftereffect of a powerful weapon called MIDAS. Because they’ve seen this military secret they are pursued by the military, and the three of them escape Japan to try to locate both MIDAS and Kazuki’s sister. (The other route is the Alicia route, who is Kazuki’s sister, but I think the story still involves MIDAS.)