Playing Front Mission 3

Anyone familiar with Front Mission 1 (Super Famicom) or 2 (PlayStation) will most likely remember two great games filled with some of the best turn-based strategy gaming around. Giant mechs vs. other giant mechs. You targeted various body parts of an opponent, crippling him and rendering him immobile if you blew out his legs. Or, if the thought crossed your vicious mind, you blasted his arms off, leaving your nemesis unable to attack. If you were of the sort to risk hell and high water, you spent the majority of your ammo on the torso, which had the highest number of hit points and would ultimately subject you to more damage since your enemy's weapons would remain intact. Unfortunately, as fine as these games were, Square stingily did not localize them for the US. Nor did Square localize the Front Mission spin-offs, Front Mission: Gunhazard (Famicom) or Front Mission Alternative (PlayStation). While Gunhazard was a great side-scrolling shooter remarkably like Assault Suit Leynos, FM Alternative was a clumsy "real-time" strategy game, which must have sounded good on paper, but didn't fare so well in execution.

Now that Square has seen the light and gotten busy with another Front Mission sequel, can we expect a return to turn-based greatness, improving on the already great FM2 while addressing its downsides? Probably not.

In a move that will delight some but infuriate others, FM3's presentation must first be explored. As ever, the talking heads pop up, as do the dialogue boxes to saturate the gamer with the story, thereby providing the impetus to draw you into the world war about to take place. Unfortunately, once past the dialogue, you then enter the battle screen. Although FM2 had a beautiful battle engine, both conceptually and graphically, the loading time was enough to make anyone want to cry. Since there was no option to turn off the polygonal battle scenes, you were pretty much stuck. The average battle would take around two hours, making you plan well ahead as to when you wanted to progress in the game. In FM3, the engine does an about face. This game's graphics engine resembled the Front Mission Alternative graphics engine more than FM2's - separate turns within the battle proper are rendered on the fly, as opposed to loading each skirmish individually. As a result of storing more polygonal data in the PlayStation's RAM at once, the polygon counts of the mech models are reduced, making the entire environment look like one big pixel Hell. The amount of texture warping has to be seen to be believed. This is a big step down from FM2. Speed at the cost of graphics, but what of the gameplay? Anyone familiar with the gameplay in the FM series will not likely find fault here. The only problem (and this too carries over from previous episodes) is that the camera angle can be inconvenient at times, while completely obscuring the playing field at others. What was, and is, needed is a pull-away overhead view, rather than the limited isometric perspective. Special effects are not very special, and the gameplay, despite reduced loading times, crawls along at a snail's pace.

There's certainly time for the rest of the game's details to flesh out the experience, but judging from this sample, only the most devoted of Front Mission fans would turn a blind eye to what should be the series' crowning moment. As it is, FM3 looks no better than a jack-of-all-trades.