Front Mission Online

~ the eulogy ~

I missed this one on every axis at once. It was Japan only, and playing it on the PlayStation 2 meant a network adapter and a hard disk on a console that was already a rare object in a Turkish living room. The PC version arrived seven months later and was still locked to the same Japanese service.

Front Mission is a Square series about mechs, called wanzers in the fiction, fought over a place called Huffman Island in grid based turn based battles. Online kept the island and threw out the grid. Toshiro Tsuchida directed it, the same person who had been running the series since the first game in 1995.

It went live on 12 May 2005 for the PlayStation 2 and on 8 December for Windows. Real time and third person, parties of up to twenty, with voice chat built into the client at a point when that was not standard anywhere. Hardcore Gaming 101 describes urban battles running as high as fifty players at once.

Square Enix's online games of that era all sat behind PlayOnline, the same account layer that Final Fantasy XI used, and PlayOnline is where the wall was. Final Fantasy XI at least got an international service with English servers. This one never did, so the route in from Ankara was an import disc and a Japanese account, which is to say there was no route in.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it was ~

You picked a side when you made an account, the Oceania Cooperative Union or the United States of the New Continent, and everything after that happened on Huffman Island. PvE pushed the story forward through military operations, some of them one-time events that ran once and never came back. PvP was territory. You picked a zone and fought over it, and holding it changed which missions the other side could take.

Wanzer parts were gated behind military rank rather than behind money, so progression read as a service record. You could also defect to the other faction once your combat proficiency was high enough. Defecting cost you a rank and everything you were not currently carrying.

~ the unraveling ~

A console MMO in 2005 was already a narrow proposition. The PlayStation 2 hard disk was an accessory rather than standard equipment, so every online PS2 game was built for the fraction of owners who had bought one and set it up.

The Windows client in December widened the base and split it at the same time. Underneath that, the audience the game was drawing from was a turn based tactics audience being asked to play a real time shooter with a rank ladder. Square Enix kept the story running for three years and then stopped.

~ what got buried with it ~

The servers went off on 31 May 2008. There was no offline mode and no single player campaign, so there is nothing left that runs. The whole 2nd Huffman Conflict, an entire stretch of series canon written and released as monthly live content, exists now only in what players happened to record at the time.

The series itself went quiet for a long stretch afterward, then came back as remakes handled by other people entirely. Forever Entertainment put out Front Mission 1st: Remake on 30 November 2022 and Front Mission 2: Remake on 5 October 2023. Online is the piece that cannot be remade, because it was never a game you could ship, it was three years of a war that fifty people at a time were fighting on one island.

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