Square’s ‘other’ strategy RPG series besides Final Fantasy Tactics is Front Mission. Although the series has more overall entries than FFT/A/2, they didn’t start arriving in the US until after 2000. This is odd, because the games are full of giant robots embroiled in tense political situations, punching, dashing and hovering their way to victory. Maybe Square thought the US market couldn’t handle the awesomeness. Anyway, in 1996, Square released an action RPG set in kinda sorta the Front Mission world, subtitled Gun Hazard. It was never released in the US, but AGTP translated it a few years ago and the ROM is not too hard to find.

Aside: Reading between the lines, it may or may not have been Square that developed Gun Hazard, and it may or may not have been intended as a Front Mission game. Although the robots are certainly Front Mission-esque, the story and locations don’t seem very similar at all to the Front Mission games. It’s quite likely that a couple of Front Mission elements were bolted on late in development and that the game was intended to be an anonymous game about awesome robots.

You can approach an action RPG from two directions; an action game with RPG elements, or an RPG with action elements. Square had already covered the latter with the Mana/Seiken series. Gun Hazard instead starts with an action game, much like the later Castlevania games. Although I don’t like the core gameplay as much—too much shooting, too few whips—the sense of level progression is much better. This is Square after all.

And since this is Square, the action game proper has a couple of faults. Not big ones, but some levels are pretty empty, or rather pretty and empty, especially near the beginning where the game is supposed to be easier, and you’re supposed to be marvelling at the Awesome Graphics. Also the aiming system is too complicated for its own good: when standing still, you can swivel your gun up and down. That’s cool, but in practise it’s too fiddly to be any good, and you’ll end up aiming on the move just by holding up-left and up-right the way people have always done.

But the levelling is great. Everything levels: your weapon levels, your special weapons levels, your AI partner levels, your robot levels (by taking damage; it works in action RPG, unlike FF2). An interesting design choice is that when you find an upgraded weapon, it may actually be less useful than your old weapon. Because it will eventually be more powerful, it’s nearly always worth it to switch. (Except when facing the last boss: I had a maxed-out shotgun-3 that was more powerful than a partly levelled shotgun-4.) The dilemma is even more interesting for robots; each model has strictly more HP than the model before it, but starts with 0 armour. This makes upgrading to the last two models quite painful, because your shiny new robot can withstand less damage than the previous model until you level the armour a bit. Since there’s not much you can do to shape your character’s level progression, the upgrade dilemma makes up for it.

The graphics remind me a lot of the SNES Contra III. The levels look decent, a bit repetitive but with cool environmental effects on the levels that get firebombed or have the sun setting in the background. I suspect that most of the cart’s memory is devoted to the robots themselves, though. The robots are seriously cool. All of them are well-animated, especially the main character’s robot. Even though the sprites are not huge, they have a sense of scale. That’s reinforced when you press Select to make the pilot leave the robot and walk around on foot as a tiny 8x8 sprite. There’s even a level where this is necessary to infiltrate security in order to open a way large enough for the robot.

The soundtrack is also notable because the main composer is Nobuo Uematsu, along with other Square composers Yasunori Mitsuda, Junya Nakano and Masashi Hamauzu: basically the FFX team crossed with the Chrono Trigger team. Many of the tracks are similar to FF7 tracks; Gun Hazard was the project Uematsu did immediately before FF7. The instrumentation is better than FF7 (no MIDI here) but it seems like there are a lot more throwaway tracks than FF7. Also, the the mood of the music doesn’t match the mood of the level as well as in FF6 or FF7 either. For example, the levels in the last stage play this awesome organ music that sounds a lot like Kefka’s end-boss music in FF3, but it doesn’t really fit the frantic pace of the action.

The translation by AGTP is professional quality and really makes the game interesting. Although Gun Hazard is quite playable in Japanese, the story supports the game pretty well. I’m not saying this is Final Fantasy or even Metal Gear, but I managed to care about the main characters by the end. Well, mostly. About as much as Snake and that Soviet ex-skater chick in Metal Gear 2. The only nitpicks are that occasionally the text drawing routine drops a letter. Also, apparently all black characters speak Black American English, even when they’re from the fictional African country of Zambolo. But that was probably in the source material, because Square’s next black character has the same accent, despite being an eco-terrorist in Midgard.

I played this game while visiting my parents this Christmas. If you’re wondering about how much fun Front Mission : Gun Hazard is, compare it to the competition I had with me, FF7 : Crisis Core. I beat Gun Hazard instead of Crisis Core. Both are decently fun action-RPGs, but Gun Hazard is a little more fun. (Like Crisis Core, it has some of the best graphics on its console, too).