Beaten: Front Mission 3 (on 5/18/13)

System: PS1 (Played via PS1C on the PS3)
Status: Beaten

Front Mission is one of my favorite series of all time, mostly because it combines two things I love, giant military styled 'realistic' robots, and turn based strategy. It is too bad that we never got most of the main-stream games in English, and the series has kind of died off (don't mention the action-game thing they released recently, that's not Front Mission).

Front Mission 3 is a pretty standard game gameplay wise. You control each character piloting a mech, trying to kill your enemies piloting mechs. There is not much innovative about the base gameplay, though the fact that your pilots can eject from their mechs (or be ejected if hit right) is interesting, because it lets you hijack other mechs mid mission, or even non-mech vehicles like helicopters. In practice though, its so dangerous to have them running around on the ground that you likely won't have them there if you can at all help it. There are a few missions where you protect ground-pounders and they can shoot mechs for a little damage while walking around.

Story wise, the game actually splits into two different stories entirely based on the first choice you make in the story, with significant differences, so the game is at least playable twice for that alone. The story I played through this time was ok, typical Front Mission fare of geopolitics and people trying to stop a super project of some sort. It was forgettable, but that doesn't mean much, I forget a lot of good games' stories.

The game has an internet function, where you can browse the in-universe internet, go to websites and access things. You get passwords for places from missions or by sleuthing around and downloading programs, and that lets you access more background and information, and sometimes get access to gear. I'll be honest, after looking around it a bit, and not being able to figure out clues, I just looked up all the passwords that did anything. It was an interesting idea, but actually playing with it is not fun in the least, and requires way more use of note taking than the main game ever does. If you do play it, just look up the passwords, and only the important ones, the little bits of story aren't worth the effort to read through all the text.

I finished the 'Rebel' storyline, which leaves the 'Chinese' storyline for completion.