I'm giving away a boxed copy of Front Mission to celebrate 2,100 subscribers

Hello ROM crew! I'm still taking it easy for the remainder of the holiday period, so it'll be a bit before our next regularly scheduled newsletter. But I mentioned a month or so back that I wanted to do something to signify passing the milestone of 2,000 subscribers, and in the time I've dilly-dallied another 150-ish people have signed up! We're well on our way to 2,200, and I hope to indoctrinate a whole bunch more folks into the emulation, er, lifestyle(?) next year.

But for now: Giveaway time! As with last year's Fire Emblem freebie, I've got a boxed copy of a Super Famicom gave to send to one lucky ROM reader. This time it's Squaresoft's tactical RPG Front Mission! Sure you could play the remake, but does it come with a box and paper manual full of lush Yoshitaka Amano artwork? Sure doesn't! Honestly, I bought this game on a trip to Japan 10 years ago primarily to put it on a shelf and appreciating how cool it looked, and it has served that purpose very well for the last decade. Now you, too, have a chance to gaze upon it and be content.

How to enter the giveaway

All you have to do for a chance to win is be subscribed to Read Only Memo by Saturday, January 4th 2025 at 8 am Pacific. At that point, I’ll pick a random winner from the subscriber email list and message them. If the winner doesn’t want the game or I don't hear back within 2 days of, I'll draw again.

If you aren't currently a subscriber but subscribe for the chance of winning — I hope you stick around! If you're into games like Front Mission, I think you'll find a lot to like in this newsletter.

The giveaway's completely free, of course, and shipping’s on me! In the last few months several of you have been very generous with your tips to help cover the costs of publishing ROM, and I'm happy to keep paying it forward.

More about Front Mission

There's a great collection of interviews about the original Front Mission on Shmuplations, covering how upstart dev studio G-Craft managed to pitch its first game to Squaresoft, which at the time developed Final Fantasy and all its other projects in-house. It goes over Final Fantasy director Hironobu Sakaguchi and producer Shinji Hashimoto's enthusiasm for mecha and theirf influence on the game; it was Sakaguchi's idea to bring in famous designer Kow Yokoyama to work on the game.

There's a fun anecdote from some of the developers about how much effort they put into some of the fonts:

"Normally on the SFC, the font letters are stored in 8×8 sprites—and they have to be displayed like that, so you can’t bunch them up real close (each letter has to occupy its own little 8×8 space). We had to do some programming to get around that limitation. Hopefully, in terms of visual impact, players notice it looks different from your average SFC game." - Director Hideo Iwasaki

This exchange between Sakaguchi and G-Craft writer/producer touches on how the focus shifted purely from robots to the humans that piloted them:

"...something that emerged from conversations with Sakaguchi, the idea that a game about robots would be ripe for a story about human drama. That was his idea, that in this game themed around war, we should try and include human drama as well." - Tsuchida

"I said, let’s not abandon or compromise on the tasteful, refined aesthetic that the G-Craft team has created, but let’s see if we can also include some human drama that would evoke the realism of war. In that sense, I think Front Mission ended up becoming a very mature, adult game." - Sakaguchi

And maybe my favorite bit, this exchange between the two illustrates how new Front Mission's combination of strategy game and storytelling was at the time:

"The way I see it, strategy games really take place in 'symbolic', not realistic, worlds. We can’t really show the experience of an air strike, for instance… you have to use your imagination to an extent. That’s why it was very important, I think, to have RPG-style framing to help players visualize what’s happening leading up to, and during, the combat—hence all the events at different times." - Tsuchida

"By having the events occur within the missions, it also forces players to watch and engage with them. I think players get bored if it’s always the same pattern of “destroy enemies, watch cutscene, destroy enemies, watch cutscene.” The way we did it, players will have no idea when an event scene might come, and that element of unpredictability is very important, I think. We really poured our hearts into the different events. There’s so many, in fact, even I can’t remember them all. (laughs)" - Sakaguchi

After Front Mission, G-Craft developed the RPG Arc the Lad for the PlayStation alongside Sony Computer Entertainment, and then partnered up again with Squaresoft for Front Mission 2 before being bought and incorporated into the Square mothership a first-party development studio.

The Front Mission games started releasing outside Japan with the PS1's Front Mission 3, released in 1999, but those localizations proved sporadic. At least the games developed enough of a following over the years to receive fan translations, so it's possible to play the original versions or the remakes (currently only covering Front Mission 1 and 2) in English.

• Front Mission 1
• Front Mission 2
• Front Mission 5

Related, you may be interested in this end-of-year status update on the fan translation of Sakura Wars 2, a Front Mission tactics RPG contemporary. It'll likely be released sometime in 2025.

Thanks for reading throughout 2024. Onwards into the new year!