I've found myself playing the old PS1 game Front Mission 3. I had a long train journey, and I was bored with SRWJ, so I set it up on a portable. In the absence of a major project, I've revisited a few old habits, but I digress. As a game its pretty good, holding up well, but I have thoughts I’m going to try to express.
I wrote a review way back when I last played it, and while I largely stand by that, I've had more experience since, and my writing style has shifted. I've played a lot, a hell of a lot, of Super Robot Wars since then, which puts the game in a different light. First off a correction. I spent some time acknowledging the graphical limitations of FM3, but compared to the roughly contemporary Super Robot Wars Alpha, which I’ve also messed with, its a revelation. That game was still pixel art, but not well animated or creative pixel art. Graphics aren't everything, especially in a turn based game, but FM3 pushes harder in that aspect. Front Mission 3 doesn't look good these days, but it doesn't look cheap and certainly didn't back then. It plays with camera angles and visual effects, trying to be cinematic. Hell, it arguably looks better than the initial Armored Core games. I just have the suspicion that the engine can't handle more than four robots on screen at once, resorting to sprites on the map screen. That's the number of units you can field, and there seems to be a soft limit on the number of enemies of maybe ten? This feels confining after SRW, but fits the vibe. The combat is very gritty and personal, while the location based damage invites comparisons to BattleTech. I did find myself thinking in terms like "missileboat" and "brawler" with this play through. However two elements are grafted to the gameplay loop, and honestly don't sit well. Element 1 is the acquisition and use of battle skills is randomised and obtuse. I swear, there are entire skill families I’ve never seen because you'd need a FAQ to know what the prerequisites are, and it may not trigger anyway. These really needed to be controllable, but the execution instead feels like something borrowed from Final Fantasy 7, flashy but not functional. That's not a bad comparison to make, TBH, things are a bit more roleplay than tactical at times. You can't really build a strategy around them as you cannot trigger on the skills on demand, and occassionally your mecha just overperform, throwing me off my rhythm. The Internet functionality meanwhile feels ignorable a lot of the time, a way to handle worldbuilding without overloading the already lengthy cutscenes. There's stuff you can dig out here, like the best mecha in the game, but otherwise its a slow-slow-slow password hunt. Overall, there’s meat to the game, but perhaps not as much as I once felt.
As a little side note, it turns out that FM3 discourages power-levelling. I discovered that if you have a guide, you can get training maps way before you should. You'll probably die, but you can get a lot of experience that way. But if you do, you'll get marked down at the end of a mission. For a long time. Until you are where the game thinks you should be. Yay.
Coming back to graphics, that remake that just came out, or is about to come out as I write this. Let me embed some video here.
First, a longplay of the original.
Here’s the remake
There's been several remakes in this franchise recently, and while I've not tried them, something has always felt off. The remake of the first game annoyed me as it was 3D not pixel art, changing the entire vibe. That felt more like a budgetary limitation than an artistic choice, as its probably cheaper to remake the whole thing in Unity or sommat than redraw the pixels. FM3 was already 3D, so why am I reticent about this one? Well, it looks too shiny and quick. The PS1 version had very deliberate movements and a dirty look to the visuals. This was almost certainly the result of technical limitations, the console chugging away, but it was part of the game's character. That isn’t really present in this remake, everything looks too new. The remake is probably closer to the original intent, and objectively better looking, but I would have preferred the Ludicrous Edition treatment. Then there's the other changes, which seem to be AI generated for fucksake. I'm not in a hurry to play that remake.
Where am I going with this? Nowhere, really. Its a good, if old game. And it's easier to play now, at least. And I may have played it too much….
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