Since my previous blog post I have been playing several games, most notably FRONT MISSION 1st: Remake. Today I completed the second campaign having already completed the first last week. I have therefore added the game to my sparse list of completed games since I started blogging. Readers of my blog might remember my blog post for Front Mission 3, probably one of the best games I have ever played. If you did you would understand when I say that I was really excited when I learned the first Front Mission game had been remade, especially since to my knowledge it was never released in Europe and I have never had the opportunity to play it.
Front Mission is set about 70 years in the future where two of the main world powers are the USN (United States of the New Continent) made of the unified North and South American countries and the OCU (The Oceania Cooperative Union) which is an alliance of the nations of South Asia, South East Asia and Australia. Between these powers is the fictional Huffman Island, located in the pacific ocean where a war is fought between the USN and OCU. In the first campaign you follow the story from the perspective of OCU’s Captain Royd Clive and his squad where as in the second campaign you’re given the opposite perspective with the story from USN’s Lieutenant Kevin Greenfield and his squad.
As with Front Mission 3 the overall story telling is excellent, but it would have been nice if there was more of a story for each of the members of your squad. You can talk to them between missions and can get a feel for their personality, but there isn’t much of a story for most of them. This however is a particularly harsh criticism since this is a remake of a game that was originally developed in 1995 for the SNES (Super Nintendo Entertainment System) and the contents of the game could only fit on a cartridge which stores no more than 8 megabytes of data. The combat is turn based strategy and you have an opportunity to customize your squads wanzers (large mechs used in warfare). There are also arenas which enables you to test your wanzers and their pilots in combat.
Front Mission 1st: Remake has a lot of replay ability. I have found that once I have completed a campaign it’s possible to play through it again and keep the skills developed for each of the characters and keep the ‘stock’ of collected items. There is also new equipment available when playing through a second time with a variety of different difficulty settings to keep things interesting. While I am tempted to play through the game a second time, for me the most satisfying part of games like this is the story.
While I might not play through the game a second time, I am really excited to learn that Front Mission 2 and Front Mission 3 are also likely to be remade. This is simply a dream come true for me, I have always wanted to play other Front Mission games and the fact that one of my favourite games of all time will probably be remade with better graphics and so on gives me goose bumps.
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