In fact, Left Alive is the the latest game in the long running, and frustratingly underappreciated, Front Mission series, which began with the eponymous tactical RPG Front Mission on the Super Famicom in 1995 and which last saw an entry in Front Mission Evolved, a much-maligned action game from 2010.

If a single glance at the cover of Left Alive summons a sense of familiarity and history, that might be because it is graced by the art of Yoji Shinkawa, Metal Gear Solid’s lead character designer. And Left Alive, the Square Enix stealth action game releasing March 5th, is part of a long franchise… just not the one the cover art might suggest.

If you don’t know about Front Mission, well, I sadly can’t blame you, as the series rarely found much purchase outside of Japan. But hopefully this article can prep you to step into the city of Novo Slava next week, giving you an understanding of the history of Front Mission, both as a unique game series and a fictional world.

The series therefore broke cleanly with the space opera roots of giant robot fiction. While it was obviously inspired by the work of Kunio Okawara (designer for such series as Votoms, from which Front Mission lifted its iconic roller dashing), it took its roots in military science fiction and wargaming and turned them towards near future real world settings. This was much like what Clancy had done with his own work, and it carried the same hallmarks of late 20th century obsession with tech and communication. But Front Mission was not just a direct Japanese imitation of Clancy’s work. Front Mission was a series with its own voice.

Front Mission is, of course, best known for its “Wanzers,” bipedal mechs that feel more like walking tanks than the high flying super machines of games like Xenoblade Chronicles X or Armored Core 4. But Front Mission’s most distinctive feature was how it used war as a stage for technothriller stories. This made it the cousin of near-future science fiction series like Metal Gear and Ace Combat: full of shadowy masterminds, false flag operations, the overwhelming presence of global communication technology, and troubling stories of the uses of biotechnology and AI. The series’ technothriller focus, influenced by the original works of Tom Clancy in the 1980s, set Front Mission apart from other giant robot properties, and made the collaboration of former Front Mission and Metal Gear creators on Left Alive an understandable project.

Some of the Front Mission stories even bore a resemblance to le Carré’s work of the 1990s, focusing on corporate and institutional abuses of power. The fantasy of the typical Front Mission hero is that they are able to arm themselves, get a grasp of the broader webs of power and conspiracy they confront, and use their capacity for violence to cut through those webs to set things right in a way soldiers implicated in a vast modern military machine rarely can. There is an air of Edward Snowden with a giant robot to each of them.

The stories it told were warrior fantasies, but they owed as much to anti-Vietnam War fiction as they did to Clancy’s mythos of Reaganite jingoism. The warrior heroes of these games were often not soldiers, instead being civilians and guerillas of various types who were forced to take up arms. There was as much of post-Vietnam persona of the war reporter speaking truth to power on display in these games as there was the Clancy-esque independent soldier.

Jumping back in the timeline, Front Mission 4 followed up on the story of the first game, showing how Zaftra (a revanchist Russia, and one of the major conspirators from Front Mission) tries to pull the same trick twice by pitting the USN and EC (essentially our European Union) against one another using false flag operations. A multinational European unit, the Durandal, and a rag-tag bunch of USN soldiers doing policing duty in Venezuela end up working together to foil the Zaftran plot.

Front Mission 4 was a mid-cycle PlayStation 2 tactical RPG that struggled to distinguish itself on any level, suffering from a rushed production schedule. It was developed alongside the 2003 PlayStation remake of Front Mission and the 2005 online shooter Front Mission Online as part of a large scale “Front Mission Project” initiative, with the aim of expanding the story of the original game. Like the Front Mission remake, it told a war story from the perspective of groups on both sides, but its drab graphics and uninteresting characters, especially on the European side of the game, weakened the attempt to create a multi-dimensional story.

This conspiracy aimed to test a new high performance series of mecha CPUs controlled by the harvested brains of wanzer pilots, introducing the series’ first example of biotechnological horror. Clive’s mercenaries eventually destroy the conspirators, and his journalist companion breaks the scandal to the world, but Royd is left a broken man who spirals into bitterness and despair until his death at the hands of the player characters in Front Mission 2.

After becoming a pariah for starting the war, Clive turns to the mercenary life, and is quietly recruited by the OCU to lead a special mercenary unit that spearheads the war against the USN. As the game progresses Clive and his fellow mercenaries discover the truth of the conspiracy that started the war, and how it combined various aims of personal advancement, national revanchism, and corporate profit seeking across borders.

The original game followed the story of Royd Clive, an Australian soldier serving in the military of the Oceana Community Union (OCU), a group of states along the western Pacific Rim, including Japan and Australia. Clive’s unit is pulled into a false flag operation set up by a group of multinational conspirators that incites war between the OCU and the American-lead USN over Huffman Island, a large island in the middle of the Pacific created by volcanic activity and claimed by both nations.

Originally released on the Super Famicom, Front Mission had subsequent re-releases that added to its story up until its final release in 2007 on the Nintendo DS. It was the foundational text for the series, establishing its world of competing superstates, and the tactical RPG gameplay that most entries in the series would expand on and refine.

Okay, but what happens? Below, I’ve outlined the history of Front Mission’s world and story. It spans an extensive connected timeline, and one which has largely remained inaccessible outside of fan translations. The series timeline is presented in order of the world chronology instead of order of release, for clarity’s sake. Spin-offs and minor entries have been omitted for brevity’s sake. And, heads up: All sorts of spoilers below!

Furthermore Front Mission was unusual because of its international orientation, its creators really had an interest in the world around them. The series was certainly shaped by the prejudices of a Global North perspective, but it never centered Japanese characters above those of other nationalities in the way that, say, Marvel comics tend to treat their American heroes as the center of their stories and view the narratives through their perspective.

In the context of Japanese RPGs, Front Mission was also set apart by having protagonists who are adults with careers and distinct social standings, not teenagers with the leveling social status of students and given fortuitous access to devastating high tech weaponry. This was not necessarily uncommon in real robot stories like Votoms, nor in technothriller genre stories, but it set Front Mission well apart from most JRPGs.

After the events of Front Mission, the OCU has fallen into internal chaos, with nationalist ambitions of many of its member states being barely suppressed by the Union’s federal government. The flashpoint for this conflict ends up being Alordesh, a country that was promised prosperity for joining the Union, but was abandoned to rust after the economic boom times of the past had gone.

The story of Front Mission 2 was outstanding. It is one of the few games ever made to take place in Bangladesh (renamed Alordesh), and grapples with the problems of decolonization and deindustrialization.

Like Front Mission 4, the second game in the series finds its strengths in exploring the dynamics of imperialist exploitation and the dilemmas of independence struggles, but unlike its sequel , Front Mission 2 is clearly focused on this topic and gives it a deeper and more considered treatment. With three interwoven narratives and very strong themes, the second game in the series was arguably its narrative high point, but it was hamstrung by technical problems so deep that they are difficult to overlook.

The USN side of the story was by far the more interesting, as Front Mission 4 was the only game in the series to highlight independence struggles against the USN, and included guerilla independence fighters as characters with relatable motivations beyond the abstract machinations of international politics. In light of the conflict over the future of Venezuela currently happening, those themes feel especially relevant today.

The game opens with a cinematic of rusted and decaying machinery, and everywhere you visit in the game feels dismal and squalid. It never misses an opportunity to point out that this is a conflict primarily motivated by terrible material conditions, and fought over because of differing material interests. Its story of a coup d’etat organized by the Alordeshi officers corp is reminiscent of the politics of the 1970s, but it brings those events into the context of globalization and ominous AI technologies developed through the exploitation of the Global South. Towards the end of the game, the story tends to collapse into Clancy-esque techno thriller tropes, but as a whole it is a real and notable accomplishment that subsequent games have rarely matched.

The game opens with a cinematic of rusted and decaying machinery, and everywhere you visit in the game feels dismal and squalid.

At a technical level, Front Mission 2 is an exemplar of PlayStation era overambition. It strove to have massive wargame-style battles that would put the strategy in “strategy RPG,” alongside brief 3D cinematic cutaways to show the giant robots slug it out and maintain the player’s interest. The problem was that these cinematic interludes and excruciatingly long load times actually made the game grind to a snail’s pace and drew the battles out into long hour-plus affairs, with no mid-mission saving allowed.

The game’s strategic scope helped to bring the picture of a country in devastating civil war to life, but it also meant that the player could make early battle blunders that would cause them to fail the mission 45 minutes in with no recourse to address their mistakes. It is a challenging game that rewards persistence and careful thinking, but it’s not hard to imagine why Squaresoft decided not to localize it for foreign audiences. Of all the games in the series, it is undoubtedly the one that would be best served by a full remake.

Front Mission 3 (2112-2113, released 1999-2000)

It is easy to heap scorn on Front Mission 3 because of its introduction of misplaced shonen anime tropes to the series and often weak story beats, but in retrospect it is clear that it attracted the interest of Western audiences not only because it was the first game in the series to be sold outside Japan, but because of real strengths.

Front Mission 3 is primarily a road trip story, with the protagonists hopping from country to country in pursuit of the game’s MacGuffin, a nuclear weapon stolen from the USN called MIDAS. MIDAS is stolen and stolen again by various self-interested actors, and it's up to the heroes of the story to track it down and put an end to it. Alongside this main plotline is the story of genetically engineered super soldiers from the Eastern European Republic of Ravnui meddling in international conflicts, and the story of the OCU unravelling after Alordesh gains independence in the wake of Front Mission 2. The accomplishments of this broadest of entries in the series are all the more clear in comparison with Front Mission 4, which had more modest storytelling goals and could not achieve them with anywhere near the same degree of flair and aplomb.

While its micro-level storytelling was often weak compared to its predecessors, Front Mission 3 managed to weave together three main storylines across two alternate timelines and a setting that stretched around much of the Pacific Rim. Additionally, it improved enormously on the technical problems of Front Mission 2, and returned to a focus on tactical combat that was snappy and dynamic rather than plodding and anxious. Front Mission 3 also featured incredibly impressive world building, facilitated through its “Network” feature, a mock World Wide Web that acted as the game’s lore codex, and which was updated dynamically as events progressed in the game, bringing the Front Mission world to life.

Front Mission 5: Scars of the War (2070-2121, released 2005)

Front Mission 5 is a strange beast. Despite its impressive visuals based on an upgraded Final Fantasy X engine and solid turn based tactics play, it never was localized for western audiences until the Front Mission Fan Translation Project (of which I was a part) released a translation patch in 2009. Looked at one way, it’s such a meta-narrative about the whole series that preceded it that nobody without hundreds of hours invested in the earlier Front Missions would get much out of it. But looked at another way, it’s actually one of the most straightforward stories in the Front Mission series, to the point that it feels somewhat unsatisfying in comparison to a game like Front Mission 2.