Front Mission

Front Mission brought the hardest thing you could ask for on a handheld console to the WonderSwan Color: a sprawling tactical RPG with combat robots and a story that has little to do with heroism. The conflict on Huffman Island, where two great powers clash, is seen through the eyes of mercenaries whose lives the war has torn apart, and the narrative keeps a raw military tone full of political intrigue, betrayal, and people fighting for money. At the time, this was a noticeably more mature theme than what fans of Japanese RPGs were used to.

The combat takes place on a square grid, where machines called wanzers move around, take cover behind terrain, and target specific parts of the opponent: the torso, head, arms, or legs. Destroying the legs limits movement, losing an arm ends fire from that weapon, and so it's possible to defeat an even stronger opponent by aiming at the right spot. Between missions, machines are assembled from parts, weapons change, and pilots learn new skills, making preparation almost as important a part of the game as the battles themselves. The WonderSwan Color version managed to bring both the grid and the detailed combat screens to the small display, and one-handed controls feel surprisingly comfortable.

At the time, this was one of the most technically ambitious titles on the whole console and proof that Square didn't skimp on the WonderSwan. Front Mission itself is a cornerstone of the mecha tactics genre, and its combination of damaging individual robot parts with deep equipment customization influenced a whole range of later games. Today, the main obstacle is Japanese, since the story carries a large part of the experience, but the tactical layer is legible even without it. Anyone who enjoys slow, deliberate turn-based combat will find one of the best games ever released for the WonderSwan here. It's especially valuable that the game is never in a hurry: between missions there's plenty of room to rebuild machines, test weapons in the arena, and for the player to develop their own style of command. It's precisely this calm between battles that makes Front Mission a title you can keep coming back to for months of evenings.