Front Mission 1st: Remake (2023) [Switch] review

I offer only hunger, thirst, forced marches, battles, and death. Let him who loves his country with his heart, and not merely with his lips, follow me.”

-Giuseppe Garibaldi

The Disney vaults are being emptied of ancient, lost games that finally get to see a worldwide release and one of the titles to make the jump from Super Famicom to Nintendo’s latest (and other platforms) is Front Mission 1st: Remake. As the name suggests, it’s a big update to the original Front Mission that launched back in 1995. Affection for Japanese media in the West (not to mention nostalgia baiting) is stronger than ever. Square Enix knows that. Games like Live A Live and Final Fantasy III Pixel Remaster aim to introduce titles to that wider audience, warts and all (in some cases).

It’s interesting to reflect upon “lost” games like these. In some ways they seem like missing links. In the case of FFIIIPR, that’s exactly what it is: the game develops the evolutionary branch of the job system as the series aged. We already had ports (and a remake) of FFIII, so there’s a better example in Live A Live. Here is a prototype many never knew existed, nevermind played, for games released much later in history like Octopath Traveler. In a case like that, it can be jarring to take the step backward in game development toward the more rudimentary, or vapid.

As Square Enix “considers” remastering more titles, plenty of other publishers continue to do the same. So we come to Front Mission 1st: Remake, which saw just one port on the DS in 2007. Forever Entertainment seized the opportunity to take the original, give it a spit shine, and send it out to battle. The tactical RPG has a new lease on life, but has enough been updated, beyond the visuals, to cover the wear and tear of time having passed? Does it seem prototypical, despite its new fangled 3D shtick?

Front Mission 1st: Remake presents two campaigns to the player, not present in the first release: you can choose to play as OCU captain Royd Clive or a second, more difficult storyline following USN officer Kevin Greenfield. Both will involve the user of wanzers, which puts me in the mind of the German panzer but ones that walk: walk + panzer = wanzer. Just kidding, it’s wanderpanzer, “walking tank”.

The bulk of my playthrough was spent with Royd, who has his story punctuated with that good ol’ Square Enix tactic of permadeath! Royd’s fiancée Karen is brutally killed during a mission gone wrong, right at the start of the game, providing players with a personal and emotional motive for playing beyond the cold hard mission briefings and military conflicts.

As a leader of the Canyon Crows mercenaries, Royd moves from mission to mission recruiting new allies, fighting enemy wanzers, building up his mecha, or fighting in the arena. There’s a conflict between personal wishes and official duties that seems to play out among the characters, but I felt the game’s focus was primarily on gameplay. This is a tactical game, after all.

Early gameplay is limited with only a few wanzers and options for equipping them, though the game opens up after some missions to provide more customization options. Soon, there’s more than you could shake a tank at and I found myself in serious want for an optimization button, full knowing that yeah… that kinda defeats the point.

Much time needs to be spent in the garage upgrading each party member’s wanzer with new tech as it comes on the market or as you procure it on the battlefield. This is essential as enemy wanzers can quickly outpace you, technologically, but it’s a lot of micro-work ensuring you equip new right and left handheld weapons, right and left arms, right and left shoulder weapons, bodies, legs, onboard computers, and backpacks, plus anything else I might’ve missed. This also needs to be done with sensitivity toward who is piloting the vehicle and what their capabilities are. It’s not always enough to simply spam the best long-range missile launchers, although I tried to do exactly that for as long as I could (until the options began to look truly meaningful)!

Battles take place on gridded stages where turn-based TRPG movement and attack patterns reveal their familiarity. Close combat becomes an inevitability once you’ve run out of long-range ammunition, though a helpful refueling truck can help you restock later on. Taking nearby cover into consideration can improve your odds of avoiding damage, but that’s a double-edged sword.

It can be frustrating missing so much, which is likely a carry over from the original game’s balancing: attacks, whether long or close, whiff more often than connecting, and on top of that, enemies and allies alike have multiple parts that can be damaged with only the destruction of a wanzer’s core signaling their removal from the battlefield. Certain characters learn targeting abilities, and these are rad as heck. I absolutely developed some sharpshooters who could snipe enemy cores from a distance. It’s cleaner that way. Don’t have to see the whites of the eyes.

It’s perhaps in moments like standing face to face and completely missing each other that Front Mission 1st: Remake shows its age.

The veneer of a completely 3D world with a rotatable camera and atmospheric effects brings Front Mission in the 21st century. I was delighted by the ability to be able to switch between hearing the newly remastered soundtrack and the original with its Super Famicom sound fonts, but I would have loved even more to see the same for the game’s visuals.

As detailed and well-crafted as the 3D update is, I can’t help but feel it looks somewhat generic beside the 2D pixel art of the original game, as if some personality was lost in the smallness, the quaintness of what it once was. On the other hand, in an RPG that’s clearly a bit more adult than what we typically got on Super Nintendo back in the day, the modern look is more fitting.

All in all, we have the opportunity here to play a new old game, and I’m always excited by that prospect. Front Mission 1st: Remake is a lot of game, as well. With the two full scenarios, tons of customization options, and epic mech sorties to sort through, a little inscrutable but not too bad, this is one that fans of the genre won’t want to miss, especially if they haven’t played the previous versions of the game.

Heh. Miss.

We would like to thank Forever Entertainment for sending us a copy of Front Mission 1st: Remake for this review.

PIXEL PERFECT

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Red formerly ran The Well-Red Mage and now serves The Pixels as founder, writer, editor, streamer, and podcaster. He has undertaken a seemingly endless crusade to talk about the games themselves in the midst of a culture obsessed with the latest controversy, scandal, and news cycle about harassment, toxicity, and negativity. Pick out his feathered cap on MageCast X podcast, on Twitter @thewellredmage, or on Twitch at /thewellredmage.