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Today marks a pretty big day for the Front Mission brand, both officially and for the fans!

Officially, Front Mission Dog Life & Dog Style 09 was just released today. And in predictable fashion, this omnibus volume was gobbled up by hungry fans! Even Kyle, who’s back in Japan for a while, raced to get his copy before it was sold out at a bookstore…and that’s just today! It may not be selling faster than the earlier omnibus volumes, but Front Mission is still beloved by the Japanese! And the series is still on-going with Young Gangan so a tenth volume is guaranteed…and it’s all but assured that the story will continue into 2013!

And for things that are not official, we have finally released Patch 2 for Front Mission 2! And as a bonus, we have also released Prototype Patch 1 for Front Mission Alternative! That’s right, the team hasn’t forgotten about this nifty genre spin-off! Patch 2 for Front Mission 2 pretty much covers the most our programmers have been able to decipher in terms of re-inserting back the text assets. You can read our earlier blog posts on this matter…I’m not rehashing it again! And the Prototype Patch 1 for Front Mission Alternative is bare-bones, but hey, it’s a start!

Our development of Front Mission 2 from our last prototype build is worth a shout because for whatever the reason, all of us decided to really go for it and get things done. While it doesn’t match our heroic 4-month effort to work with the 1,000+ page tome for bases section in Front Mission 5 ~Scars of the War~, nearly a month’s worth of working with at least 100 pages of dialogue was heroic enough.

There’s a few other new updates, but none of them really compare to the above two patch releases. On a parting note, this day and month is significant in the Front Mission universe. Why? Because it’s the day that the Alordesh coup d’etat in Front Mission 2 officially ends! Neat coincidence, eh?

Well, since no one from our team wants to make a posting, it looks like I’m back on the PR duties for the time being! Just don’t count on me doing this for long…

If you checked out the new update that Wilson recently posted on our project website, then you should know that we’re getting closer on the road to Front Mission 2. And more details of what happens in the lives of various cast mates in the Front Mission story, at least from the video game side of things! There’s not much else I’d like to say before I sound like a broken record on the whole development progress of Front Mission 2, haha!

Speaking of roads, here’s another road we’re getting closer to…

This is only a mock-up of the final product, but here is the first of (hopefully) many teasers for Front Mission: The Declassified Documents! We’ll try to get at least one teaser for each of the major sections in our reference book project, just so everyone has an idea of what to expect. If you haven’t read our analysis of Front Mission as a transmedia, read it. Not only does it shine light on the true design origins of Front Mission, but the analysis does give away a fair bit of what will be covered in greater detail in the reference book. Anyways, enjoy the more-in-English Front Mission 2 prototype test build and this teaser of Front Mission: The Declassified Documents!

Happy Easter!

Wow, I didn’t realize the project was approaching the 5 year mark so soon! It wasn’t a long time ago that all of us on the team were chugging away at making Front Mission 5 ~Scars of the War~ less Japanese and more English. Time sure does fly fast haha! The more I look back at it, I’m surprised we actually managed to get that project done at all. What we did feels less like reality and more like some fable these days…

First off, I want to thank each and everyone of you for supporting the project since day 1. Although I don’t spend much time anymore with the Front Mission projects, it means a lot to me that what I helped start back in December 2007 is appreciated by many. Everyone on the team shares the same sentiments as I do, and they will do their damned hardest to bring out the Front Mission 2 translation to completion. The text work was actually already done back around the release of Front Mission Evolved, but we were stonewalled by the game’s advanced encryption methods as Tyler already mentioned months ago. As much as we would love to just release the scripts and be done with it, that wouldn’t enhance the gaming experience now, would it?

Anyhow, I’m writing for today to tell you about something that all of us on the team were working on for a few months now. As you may already know by now, Front Mission was never just about the video games. For as much as they are awesome and wonderful to play through, the video games only represent one piece of a greater whole. The team had this feeling that we were missing out on so much more, and having gone on an adventure to explore the rest of the brand since fall 2009, that feeling was validated in huge way. As we started to uncover the comics, the novels, and even oddities like a radio drama series, all of us were taken aback at the true scope and vision of the franchise. Front Mission was no mere series of video games. Nope, it transcended video games and was something on a whole other level…that level being transmedia. Upon this realization, we all decided that everyone outside of Japan deserved to know the true nature of Front Mission.

Thus, we set out to write a massive 50-plus page analysis of the franchise that would explore what was underneath the tip of the iceberg. With assistance from sources who truly live and breathe Front Mission, we are very proud to present to you our analysis of this transmedia entity on our project website. I strongly urge each and every one of you to read it, because what you’ll learn will truly blow your minds away.

For those who read the analysis and remembered a year ago that we would do an article on the similarities of Front Mission and 24, I will just do a quick summary here. Since if you already read it, you would know that we made a few 24 comparisons in that analysis…

1. Front Mission and 24 pioneered the art of transmedia storytelling in their respective mediums.
2. Both brands were intentionally designed for the mature, adult audiences.
3. Front Mission and 24 featured very strong Western overtones, from cast to settings.
4. The stories were penned by a team of accomplished writers, all handpicked by their creators.
5. Front Mission and 24 exceeded the expectations of their creators, still existing in some form today.
6. Western fans want access to all of Front Mission, while Japanese fans want access to all of 24.

That’s about it for quick comparisons of the two franchises. A major comparison between the two would be how both employ transmedia storytelling creatively, in that the viewpoint of the story is told differently between the media platforms. In this sense, Front Mission video games (the original source material) focus on the world, whereas the other media focus on the individuals. In the case of 24, the television show moves at a fast pace telling the story in a 24-hour time period, whereas the other media moves at a slower pace telling the story over longer periods of time (involving the numbers 2 and 4 – 24 days, 24 weeks 2.4 months, etc.). It’s hard to describe this, but if you try watching a 24 season and then dive into say one of the novels, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

Whew, I think I’ve said enough about the topic of transmedia. That was more tiring than I thought. Well, I hope all of you learned something about all of this because as they say, don’t judge a book by its cover!

Happy extra February day to all!

As you might have already seen, we have a bunch of neat items for all of you to check out at our project website. Most of these pertain to Front Mission: Gun Hazard, which certainly deserves more love from us Front Mission fans. If you haven’t been there yet, I’ll sum up what the team has released:

1. An updated Gun Hazard Radio Drama Series, now with information on its conception and never-before-seen Yoshitaka Amano artwork of the radio drama cast. If you haven’t seen it yet, go do so now!
2. A very rare “behind the scenes” insight into the making of Gun Hazard film! Many thanks to Kyle for going on a secret mission for us during his recent stay in Japan, acquiring these details from insider sources we cannot name. You’ll never find this kind of top-secret information outside of the country, so we hope you enjoy it!
3. A new article on the “Engrish” advertisements of the Front Mission franchise in Japan. We could have added more examples of this, but I think all of you will like what we have covered.
4. 50 Faces of Front Mission character collage. It doesn’t show the complete recurring cast of the video games, and this would have been much bigger if we threw in the expanded universe media. Still pretty neat nevertheless and it’s done in a timeline-styled manner!

The team promised to unveil the secrets of Front Mission’s expanded universe to the world  (sans Japan) back in 2010, so we hope that you enjoy these details about the Gun Hazard universe. I know some of our team members are appreciating this, as they now have a more complete grasp of the Front Mission: Gun Hazard story, from events leading into it to unexplained mysteries in the video game. You can imagine how this unveiling of the story happened in Japan, where the fans were first introduced through its radio drama series and the film, followed by the video game itself, then a novel, and finally the manga series. This is what transmedia storytelling is all about, and is what Front Mission really is. Even Toshiro Tsuchida coined it as such in several interviews! We’ll explain all of this in a new, upcoming article about Front Mission and transmedia. For now, take a look at this…

If you think the above list of recurring characters looks impressive and tight-knit for a transmedia, you haven’t seen anything like the one for the main Front Mission universe! Can you guess how massive and crazy the list would look!?