Thanks to Forever Entertainment for the review code
Title: Front Mission 1st: Remake
System: Steam (PC)
Price: $34.99
Release Date: 06/30/2023
Story
In this strategy RPG, you take control of either the OCU or the UCS Forces, as they each embark on their own quests in the battle of Huffman Isle! The OCU campaign is the original SFC campaign, and that was the one I primarily focused on here; despite being a SRPG from the Super Famicom days, the plot here is intriguing and has some good threads to keep you engaged to find out what’s next, while the UCS campaign from the PS1 port helps fill in some gaps and show the other side of the conflict, while being a bit more complex in level design.
Presentation
Unlike a lot of recent Square RPG ports/remakes, Front Mission 1st Remake wasn’t worked on by Square Enix at all; instead, this game was remade from the ground up by Forever Entertainment and , and while I had some doubts on if they could transition from the great pixel art to a 3D setup, especially from how rough Forever’s Panzer Dragoon remake turned out, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Front Mission turned out to get some pretty solid presentational upgrades, making it great for newcomers like me.
For starters, the game allows the option of a “Classic” or “Modern” style, and while Modern allows you to rotate the camera and touches up some parts of the gameplay to make it flow a bit better for those used to more recent SRPGs, the Classic mode sticks to the locked, isometric perspective of the original versions, and even uses the original SFC OST, albeit in its DS incarnation. I was a bit worried the remake treatment would mean the isometric perspective would block out enemies or make things not work due to focusing on the newer style, but surprisingly even when enemies are obscured behind buildings and other stage aspects, the UI and grid for Classic style works out pretty good.
Modern style ended up being tolerable and the rotating camera is handy for seeing enemies in those bigger levels, but I ultimately preferred Classic and stuck with that for my playthrough, though I did find the Modern music remixes to be surprisingly well done, with a lot of the battle and map themes retaining the high energy of their original counterparts. In fact, regardless of what style you pick, the battle music will definitely get stuck in your head, for better or worse, since you’ll be hearing it a lot during the course of this adventure.
Gameplay
Front Mission 1st tasks the player with the goal of clearing each stage one after the other by defeating every member of the enemy forces, and as noted before it is split into two campaigns, with the original SFC campaign of the OCU, and the newer, PS1-added UCS, with both campaigns being based off the DS version, meaning that some secret missions have been added to take on if you manage to stumble upon their location, and general balancing has been done compared to the original SFC edition.
After an optional tutorial or getting the hang of your first stage, you’ll realize that even though this may appear to just be yet another grid-based SRPG, it does have quite a few things to make it stand out, with the most intriguing aspect to me being the Wanzer mecha that all of your characters pilot. Sorta like the future Medabots series of games, each robot has their own body part, with their own unique attributes and weapons. You can equip the main hands with melee, short or long range weapons, adjust the shoulders with defensive shields or long-range, limited ammo weapons, and tweak other aspects of your Wanzer such as their body, backpack, legs, and even CPU type, each changing their stats along with their capabilities. No matter how offensively strong your Wanzer is however, destruction of the body will immediately blow it up, making that the most essential part to keep safe in combat.
Each campaign has their own characters to recruit, and they each come with their own Wanzer. Of course, you can still heavily change them if you so desire, but slightly tweaking their pre-existing build can work for a little while as well, though eventually you’ll have to upgrade if you want any chance of taking out the enemies, especially since better weapons will trigger your Wanzer’s weight limit, and thus you’ll have to change out parts to sacrifice some stats to lower the unit’s weight. Do you stay heavy and defensive, or strong, speedy but fragile?
Those sorts of decisions are what make the units in Front Mission more than just preset characters, and that honestly made the game really fun to delve into. If a character came with weapons or a body type I didn’t particularly like or that just made them suffer against enemies, then I could just sell some unused items and buy better ones to improve their capabilities. What makes combat even more fun while still making certain characters unique comes from the skill system. This takes a good chunk of time to unlock for members of the party, but once you manage to nail a satisfying skill such as one that lets you manually target enemy Wanzer parts, the combat gets really darn fun, leading to the lengthy missions never really feeling as if they drag out that much, especially since you’re able to skip animations and speed up the flow of battle quite a bit, making time fly right on by.
Outside of the traditional missions, there’s still a few extra things in towns that you can do to pass time or prepare for the next challenge. Whether that be the constantly updating shop of Wanzer parts, (with inventory that thankfully carries over to all towns, instead of having to go to a specific one to get a certain piece you want) or the Arena, a very handy training tool where you can gain EXP or double your bets depending on the difficulty level of the opponent. Since Front Mission has no permadeath at all, this pretty much means the only thing you lose by failing the arena is your entry fee, which is a lot less than the repair fees you have to pay up if a unit loses during a mission.
Despite the towns all being menu based, both of those features work rather well, and of course you also have bars to talk to NPCs and learn more about them, along with being able to check in on your commander to progress the story. Since some secret missions can be stumbled upon by checking bars and talking to certain NPCs at certain times, it is especially helpful to poke around and return to older locales, as unlike the shops, the NPCs available at bars are distinct to each location. All in all, you have a pretty great gameplay loop, with the OCU campaign being immensely engaging and well worth the price of admission alone.
Having played this on Steam Deck for the sake of review, I figure I should also make some observations on how the game ran for me on Deck, since I did notice some oddities and bugs, including a few that were particularly annoying. The good news is the game does hold a good 60FPS target rather well, especially if visual details are lowered, and it makes the snappy combat even more fun to play around with. It also scales rather nicely to a television if you have a dock. However, the game is a battery hog, as most of my sessions would drain the deck’s battery percentage a lot after 1-2 hours of play. Still, I really enjoyed playing this on the go, and the ability to save anytime during a mission really makes it perfect for pick up and play purposes.
Saving anywhere also helps with Front Mission’s other, more concerning problems, and those related to how the game seems rather unstable at points. Generally when I’m in a town or a mission, things are typically fine; combat turns work alright and the game plays great, as do the towns. However, I did notice a few instances where unit commands would sometimes blank out and do nothing, and I’d have to back out and bring the menu back up again to have it function. A bit annoying, but not terrible. One slightly more irritating issue was when the enemy phase began on a mission a third through the game, and the enemy wouldn’t even move an inch at all, softlocking my game. Luckily, reloading the mid-battle save I made and redoing that player phase fixed things up, but that was a bit more concerning.
The biggest and most consistent bug by far however, comes from the loading screen leading into a battle (pictured above) completely freezing the game at the last minute, with seemingly no way to predict or tell when it would pop up. I had hoped the first set of patches would fix this swiftly, but alas, each patch I downloaded led to no remedy, and I still run into the occasional game freeze when loading a mission. Thankfully Front Mission autosaves, so even in the instances where a manual save isn’t available between missions, I really had no consequence besides having to reload that autosave and hope the loading bar worked that time. Compared to the other bugs I noted, this is also the most common for me on deck, and I have no idea if it also crops up while playing on a typical computer, but hopefully this annoyance can get patched out soon for a smoother experience, since otherwise this is a damn fun SRPG and a solid remake.
Conclusion
Being a newcomer to the series, I was definitely curious to see how well it would hold up and if this would hook me the same way some other SFC RPGs like Metal Marines did, and I’m rather surprised to say that Front Mission holds up pretty well, and it eased me in rather nicely. The focus on customizing your Wanzer leads to a lot of variety for equipment and battle loadouts, and the main story is rather intriguing, and one I’ll definitely keep playing through way past this review period. It also helps that it runs relatively smoothly on Steam Deck, albeit with those aforementioned loading screen hangs now and then, which I suppose is why there’s an autosave.
Content and polish wise, while the new 3D look may not be for everyone, I definitely feel the way Forever remade Front Mission made it turn out a lot better than their prior remakes, since the game’s original charm is still very apparent even in this new form, and the rearranged OST is pretty good, with the original style being a great and easy option to stick with if you’d rather play this like the older versions. The different difficulty options and new game plus potential is very welcome for replay value, although I really wish there were more than four save slots as a result.
Nevertheless, this was a really fun good SRPG, and a great starting point for this series, and I’m eager to see how the remakes of Front Mission 2 and 3 turn out, especially with how well 1st Remake managed to hook me in despite some flaws and minor frustrations here and there. I definitely recommend this to fans of old-style SRPGS, but with the high MSRP and some minor freezes here and there, I do feel it may be best to get it on sale or wait for a bit more patching before giving it a spin. Still, this is a great SRPG, and well worth a full play of at least one of the campaigns; the other is a wonderful extra!
I give Front Mission 1st: Remake a 7 out of 10.