Which brings me to the opening sequence. Executed with typical Square FMV prowess, the beginning cinematics truly start things out with a bang. The wanzers (mech units used in the game) are depicted in beautiful CG as massive, lightning-fast, war machines. Though things quickly cool down as the actual game starts, where the wanzers are reduced to fractions of their former selves and patience becomes a virtue. Not that it's wrong to have a kick ass opening sequence. It just creates a stark contrast that sets the tone for the rest of the game: disappointment and a little boredom.

Lets get one thing straight. Front Mission 4 is not all about crazy, mech action. Things are much slower and more detailed - as any turn-based strategy title should be. So lets start with what Front Mission 4 does well (very well actually). Wanzer customization and character development are the game's shining points, and are very necessary to staying alive. While choices start off very limited, things quickly open up to an array of options, and wanzer part customization that would make even Armored Core jealous. Throughout each battle, the pilots operating your wanzers gain experience points much like they would in an RPG. Those points can then be used to buy all sorts of skills and abilities, or to level up causing different stats to rise. It's up to you to decide what skills to get and equip, which adds much more player involvement than just acquiring experience and watching your characters improve on their own.

But what's even better than building up your pilots is completely customizing your wanzers. Front Mission 4 puts you in complete control of your battle machines. All sorts of parts - including any choice of weapons - can be swapped for others acquired throughout the game, and each can have a drastic impact on how the wanzer operates. What's cool is that you can custom tailor each unit to do different things in battle that fits how you like to play. This adds a huge layer of strategy and variety not possible in other games of the genre.

Menus work fairly well, but can become tedious during heavy customization. Granted, that's something that's bound to happen with this kind of game, but it would have been nice if a little more thought had been put into the menu system as a whole. Another problem with the wanzer customization is that there's no way to tell ahead of time how things should be set up for the next fight. With all these options at your disposal it would be great to be able to set things up with a strategy in mind for the upcoming battle. Am I going to need extra medics? Should I equip fire, piecing, or impact resistant armor? Will there be some good opportunities to put snipers to work? Who knows. All these questions could have been answered with a simple mission debriefing and map before each battle. The only existing way to set things up with any knowledge of what to set up for is to play through a mission, lose, then retry after you make some changes. This is definitely where the patience part kicks in, as some missions can take an insane number of retries to finally get right. Trial and error at its finest.

But moving on, the actual battle system in Front Mission 4 is actually quite good. Things work great, and much strategy is allowed for. New to the series is the ability to link units together. Multiple wanzers can form bonds between themselves to help each other out in battle. Linked units have to share AP, but each can provide assistance to the others as they fight. The link system is a huge gameplay improvement, as it adds more strategy and encourages unit formations. Other than that, I won't go into much detail on how everything else works (that's what the manual is for), but rest assured that it's a solid system that's fun to use.

Front Mission 4 runs into the most trouble with its enemy AI and level design. Put simply, these two things just aren't nearly as good as they need to be. The AI has some massive holes that just shouldn't be there. Enemy units often don't seem to understand basic tactical priceables and logic. Many times its easier to just exploit these problems rather than actually carryout a strategic plan. Especially when your patience is running thin from retrying a level a dozen or so times. For instance, enemy units will almost always stay put until you come within a certain distance of them. With this in mind, it becomes incredibly easy to take out each enemy individually without having to worry about any of his friends coming to help.

Despite the spectacular opening visual display mentioned earlier, Front Mission 4 is not an incredibly gorgeous looking game. In fact, Front Mission 4 isn't even an average looking game. With just a quick glance, most might categorize it as a PSone game. Just take a look at some screen shots and you'll see what I mean. But to be honest, the graphics don't bother me one bit. After all, the graphics should almost always come dead last in importance to other things like gameplay. It isn't receiving a low score because it looks bad, but because there are some glaring problems present in some of the other, more important areas of the game.

Because Front Mission 4 has so many things going for it, it's really disappointing that a few major design flaws ruin an otherwise great game. Maybe some of its weaknesses could be more easily forgiven if some kind of multi-player had been included. Front Mission 4 begs for online play. A robust online mode might have changed everything, but this is not the case. Nevertheless, if you can look past the flaws and have a lot of patience, Front Mission 4 can still offer up a lot of fun. But for the most part it should left to hardcore strategy and mech fans only.