FRONT MISSION 2: Remake

I keep a shortlist of SRPGs that punch above their budget in the mechanics department, and FRONT MISSION 2 has always sat near the top of that list on reputation alone. Now that Storm Trident has finally delivered the first-ever western release of the 1997 PlayStation original, I can confirm the reputation is earned and the execution is... complicated. The core of what makes this game worth discussing is the AP system. Friendly adjacent units supply action points while enemies drain them, which means positioning is not just about attack angles but about the entire economy of how many times a Wanzer can respond during the enemy's turn. Get surrounded and your unit may literally run dry mid-counterattack, leaving it defenceless. Keep your squad tight and you can starve an isolated enemy of AP until it stands useless. The RPGFan review described it well: the dynamic washes out as a fluid push-and-pull, almost like the board game Go but with guns and mechs. On top of that, weapons are split across melee, short-range, and long-range classes, each with ammunition limits. There is an elemental layer too, with fire, shock, and armor-piercing damage types playing against Wanzer-specific resistances. The coliseum lets you farm additional parts between missions, the Network feature gives lore-hungry players a pseudo-internet of background fiction to dig through, and the shop-and-equip menus are intuitive enough that min-maxing build variety never feels like a chore. For a pure mechanics-depth argument, this is the most ambitious entry in the remake series so far. The frustration, and it is a real one, is the RNG targeting. When you attack, the game randomly selects which body part absorbs the damage from a pool of legs, arms, and chassis. Each part has its own health bar, and depleting one can disarm, immobilize, or destroy a Wanzer entirely. The problem is you cannot choose which part you target. In a game that is otherwise asking you to make layered tactical decisions around AP conservation, flanking, and elemental matchups, handing the most critical micro-outcome to a dice roll feels like a deliberate friction point rather than a design feature. Community veterans have built workarounds, particularly around high-mobility short-range builds using shotguns and machine guns to quickly shred weak limbs, but newer players will hit a wall before they find those answers. The other issue is the localization. Multiple reviewers flagged it as the single biggest obstacle in the game, and post-launch patches have improved things, but in-game tutorials still occasionally produce sentences that read like they were passed through a translation layer without a native speaker anywhere in the pipeline. For a game this mechanics-heavy, where even a character mid-battle is supposed to be teaching you the elemental resistance system, unclear text is a genuine accessibility problem, not just a cosmetic one. The developer has patched the game repeatedly since launch, including localization fixes in Patch 1.0.9, so the situation is better than at release, but it is not resolved. For strategy fans who can tolerate the rough edges: the bones here are genuinely strong. Three difficulty options let newcomers adjust the punishment level, and the Wanzer customization depth, body-part health management, pilot skill trees, and the per-mission setup screen give you real decisions at every layer. This is not a game that respects absolute beginners on day one, but anyone willing to spend an evening with the official Player Guide series and accept that early missions are essentially a tutorial in disguise will find a tactically rich SRPG that was unjustly region-locked for over two decades. Just go in knowing that the remake team delivered an incomplete polish job on a genuinely interesting game.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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