Front Mission 5: Scars of the War (2005)

Front Mission 5 is a competent tactical RPG that lacks the flash or the substance to keep things fresh across its 40-hour runtime. This middling experience is further dragged down by a bizarre compulsion to spout off sexist bullshit whenever a woman is onscreen.

The tactical combat plays exactly how you'd expect "Fire Emblem with mechs" to play, and it's mostly fine. Piloting giant mechs instead of squishy swordsmen means that your units can safely take 7-8 hits instead of 1-2, and the map design makes effective use of this tankiness by placing your team in overwhelming situations and forcing you to carefully claw your way out. A smart Action Point system ensures that no one super buff unit can predominate, requiring coordinated assaults from your whole team to find success.

Once you've found a winning strategy, though, each fight for the rest of the game plays out exactly the same way. None of the skills gained from levelling up your units or their job classes change the basic approach to combat. Upgrading and customizing your rides, which should be a strength of any mech game, is needlessly obtuse and offers few meaningful options for branching out from your base equipment.

Story isn't something I come to this genre for, so I didn't personally mind that the narrative is just an excuse to set battles in different locales around the world. I didn't mind the characters mostly being interchangeable ciphers, or the awkward dialogue of the English fan-translation. But the non-stop depiction of the only important woman in the game as a sex object or vicious harpy whose life revolves utterly around the male protagonist really grated, and ultimately soured me on the game as a whole.

There's potential in all the ideas here. With deeper combat, more rewarding progression systems, and better characters, a modern update to this series could be something pretty special. But this one ain't it.