Lost Classics: Front Mission 3 (PS1)

2000 was a good year for Squaresoft and its fans. Square released a parade of hits that year, from Vagrant Story to Chrono Cross, and this game was among them. The Front Mission series is a turn based strategy RPG featuring mechs, which has its roots on the Super Nintendo. However, this is the first time that the series has hit U.S. shores. Front Mission 3 contains 2 different storylines, chess-like gameplay, and deep mech customization. Fans of games such as Final Fantasy tactics and Advance wars will love this game’s strategy action, and robot lovers will get a kick out of the many ways they can outfit their mechs.

FM3 takes place in the year 2112, in which military battles are fought using giant robots known as wanzers. You play as main character Kazuki Takemura (or whatever you choose to name him), a wanzer test pilot. While visiting a military base with his best friend and sister, the place is rocked by an explosion, and Kazuki and his friends are blamed for it. From there, the three get caught up in a war between two opposing factions. Based on a choice you make at the beginning of the game, you choose which side you’ll join, and thus what storyline you’ll play through. Both storylines have their own set of characters, and it’s imperative that you play through both in order to understand the story. The neat thing about them is how they intersect. For instance, a girl who joins your party in one storyline is a NPC in the other, while a couple of guys who will join your team in one storyline will be boss characters in the other.

Your wanzers are made up of arms, legs, and a body. You can outfit them with a variety of weaponry, and they can be customized any way you wish. You can even build a wanzer from scratch and name it. In battle, the system is not unlike most other strategy RPGs. You have a certain amount of action points to preform various actions per turn, and the effectiveness of your attacks are governed by distance, hit percentage, and type of weapon you are using. You can even conserve AP to preform counter attacks. If you get lucky, you can even discover secret team-up attacks that involve two or more wanzers. Between battles, you can surf the game’s version of the internet. You can answer emails you characters receive, go shop online, and surf in-game websites to unlock secrets. It’s too bad that Myspace wasn’t around when this game came out, because a social networking component in the game would have been really awesome.

Kinda pity this game didn’t have any multiplayer. Even so, with two separate plotlines, there is a lot of replay value. Fans of the strategy RPG genre will find an experience just as deep and rewarding as a Final Fantasy tactics or Shining Force game. The game’s sci-fi setting shows how diverse Square can be when creating video game worlds. Although this has yet to show up on the Playstation Network, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it there in the near future.