The History of Front Mission

Development began with discussions between Square and G-Craft, the first time Square had another developer make a game for them, and planning moved slowly before an agreement in the fall of 1993. Tsuchida proposed a game called 100 Mission. Producer Shinji Hashimoto’s first reaction was that the proposal was too radical to approve. Square, a house of fantasy games, repeatedly told Tsuchida no robots, and that development could not be driven by a creator’s passion alone. Tsuchida answered by obtaining development hardware and building a prototype. Square was the only publisher willing to consider the project, and agreed in part because a new genre would be stimulating, and because this was a game Square probably could not have made itself.

The collaboration stayed hands on. Hashimoto insisted lighter moments be included, characters hanging out and playing cards, against the game’s dark mood. At the developers’ request, the game opens without the usual Squaresoft branding, because the team disliked text heavy introductions. Hironobu Sakaguchi’s love of plastic models led to hiring modeler Kow Yokoyama, who helped design the wanzers as if they were real weapons. The team debated whether a game children might play should show a brain in its opening scene, and kept the brain.

A wanzer, from the German Wanderpanzer, walking tank, is four modules: body, left arm, right arm, and legs, each with its own health. Destroy the body and the machine is gone; destroy an arm and its weapons go silent; destroy the legs and it crawls one space at a time. Between missions the player rebuilds every machine part by part, trading weight against power output, fitting computers that govern accuracy and unlockable skills, backpacks that carry reloads, and four classes of weapon from tonfas to missile launchers that can never be counterattacked. An Arena pays cash for exhibition fights, and a briefing lays out the enemy before every mission.

The war story is serialized and grim: the Larcus Incident, a staged attack that restarts the Huffman conflict, a disgraced officer named Royd Clive hired into the Canyon Crows mercenaries, and underneath the war an experiment called the B-device, soldiers’ brains grafted into wanzer computers, run by the Nirvana Institute for the manufacturer Sakata. It is an anti war story told through procurement and salvage.

The score was shared by Noriko Matsueda and Yoko Shimomura. Sakaguchi requested Shimomura as the experienced hand beside Matsueda; Shimomura, occupied with the Super Mario RPG soundtrack, intended to decline, and changed her mind after meeting company president Tetsuo Mizuno and finding she could not refuse in front of him. She wrote mainly the action themes and the opening, and called the resulting soundtrack passionate, the product of a motivated pairing. Hidenori Iwasaki arranged the score for the PlayStation and DS remakes, and two of Shimomura’s themes were later orchestrated for the Drammatica album.

Front Mission did what Hashimoto hoped: it gave Square a genre it could not have built alone, and a studio it would absorb, G-Craft becoming Square’s Product Development Division 6, which made the later games in house. The original’s strange Western path, third game first, first game twelve years late and doubled in size, is told on this shelf’s question page. What began as 100 Mission became the founding document of Square’s military science fiction shelf.