Shouta said:
It's not a great game, but not bad. Has some decent ideas but suffers a bit of what FM4 suffered from, feeling a bit too stale and slow. That said, being able to play it in English ain't too bad.
I wouldn't really call FM5's gameplay slow or stale. The link system is far more effective both in battle and in the menu (in terms of setting it up) than FM4. Not to mention that the actual enemies in FM5 actually take advantage of links and friendly fire. In contrast, FM4 enemies were both braindead and were positioned in rather odd positions (typically one guy who has his entire linked team on the opposite end of the map). Once you got to the larger battles, I just start skipping the animations, which cuts down the time of battles
considerably. And given the amount of bosses in this game, the missions usually try something new.
Now the story... Yeah, it is definitely aimed at some one who has a lot of familiarity with the Front Mission universe. I would personally count this as a fault, as the story tends to overindulge itself with references, easter eggs, and time skips (although, the time skips are still better represented here than in something like Assassin's Creed 2 for instance). Front Mission 1 and 2 take up a bulk of the references, one of Front Mission 4's characters show up, and the last three of so missions deal with the beginning of Front Mission 3. When considering that I'm betting that more people overseas are more likely to be familiar with FM3, well... it creates a lot of confusion. But the main plot is pretty good and it manages to nail the military atmosphere rather well.
But I thought it was a really good game and one of the better SRPGs out there. I didn't like it as much as Front Mission 3, however. Oddly enough, most of the real die-hard FM fans consider Front Mission 3 to be the black sheep of the series and FM4/5 as a return to form.