Paradise for lovers of the original Front Mission; superb graphics, animation, voice acting, customization, and more.
In my opinion, it's great that the story is actually interesting (and not really typical), but with the machines and buildings being so intricately detailed and fluidly animated, I would accepted any excuse to take the main characters into battle. Front Mission 4 provides some of the best eye candy to ever be found on the PS2. Each battle takes place on a scalable, rotatable battlefield, divided into your standard strategy-RPG squares. Whenever a wanzer attacks, the camera zooms in for a cinematic view. Square-Enix took ample care to breathe life into every little part of each wanzer and their weapons--it's just gorgeous to watch. It makes me feel as if I've really got a miniature world of my own where it's all happening.
Wanzer customization is at an all time high in Front Mission 4. There are dozens of colors to choose from when customizing the color scheme of each wanzer, although the camouflage colors are limited at first. Setting up your wanzers in certain ways can really give you an edge, and there's more depth to it now that you can "link" your characters to each other. What this means is that you can have a second character follow up the attack of another automatically (without losing their turn). The advantage to this is that you can potentially get more out of your attack phase, and finish off enemies that might otherwise live on to attack during the next enemy phase.
Another high (or low) point of this game is that it can become extremely difficult if you don't spend a little time training your pilots. I went from battle to battle thinking I'd be cool, but suddenly I was fighting with some very overpowered NPCs. Fortunately, you have the option to earn extra experience points by participating in battle simulations against computer controlled wanzers.
For fans of the original Front Mission, there are more weapons, attack types and customizations in Front Mission 4, and everything is generally deeper and more involved--but without taking away anything that made it a Front Mission game in the first place. I will never sell this game!