Tribute

Today marks the final release of the French edition of Front Mission Dog Life & Dog Style. More so, this is the final release of any product bearing the Front Mission name. As such, we think it’s time to pay a tribute to one of the most unique works of art not only in video games, but among all media as well.

To begin, we have prepared our final patch for Front Mission 2. The patch will be available for download on our project website once our maintenance tasks are complete.

Front Mission 2 – Final Patch

In addition, we have also released a special tribute package on our project website. Even if you have not fully immersed yourself into the world of Front Mission, we believe that you will enjoy what you see.

Team Commentary

On Front Mission 2: We were able to push out an extra 5% through our testing of the video game’s programming, but that’s as far as we got without having the game crash or glitch up. As much as we would like to insert the remaining 25% of text assets into Front Mission 2, it would take a great deal of time to completely figure out the programming. Definitely more time than we needed to translate Front Mission 2 (which we completed in Summer of 2010). Since we don’t have much free time these days, we decided it was more productive to move onto other Front Mission products to work on. At the very least, we did get the whole thing localized and inserted more than 50% of the text assets back into the video game. And as some of you may know, there are other teams who have ran into similar issues and have decided to move onto other works, such as the Mother/Earthbound team.

On A Tribute To Front Mission: Given that so many people haven’t been (and still aren’t) exposed to much of the Front Mission franchise, we decided to create a tribute package of all sorts of things Front Mission. We may create a few more tribute pieces, but as it is, the tribute package says a lot about this one-of-a-kind franchise. It compliments our other articles, especially our transmedia analysis (go read it if you haven’t – it really explains what makes Front Mission so unique), and will help you appreciate the brand more. We especially encourage you to read the Completion Commentary tribute piece; we translated the epic blog posting that the developers made when Front Mission 5 ~Scars of the War~ was finally released.

A: Can’t believe it’s almost 6 years since we started the Front Mission 5 project. A lot can happen within 6 years. Back then, I had thought that localization was an easy process. Now, I think it’s almost as hard as making a video game! When you work on things like this, you really gain an appreciation for the professionals who make them. You also realize how crazy you have to be in order to survive in an industry like game development! Summer of 2009 made me realize that – we were dedicating 20-30 hours a week (in addition to other stuff) to stay on schedule with our self-imposed deadline in localizing the bases! Needless to say, “never again” and my dreams of working in that industry are dead. Then again, any company can make video games these days as long as they’re making software.

K: Was it really that long ago that we began our journey into exploring the world of Front Mission? Time flies by pretty fast. I remember when we first started up, things were pretty messy and as a translator, the scripts were so hard to follow. My Japanese wasn’t JLPT Level 1 ready back then either. I can tell you that the first few text scripts we worked on took like a month to finish. Things massively changed when we got our roles ironed out and everyone knew what they were supposed to do. By Front Mission 2, everything was so neatly organized that I breezed through the small files within a day or two! It was also nice working on the Gun Hazard Radio Drama Series, mainly because it was so short. I’m glad I got on-board the projects because now I’m very fluent in speaking, reading, and writing Japanese!

W: I never expected that just chipping in with Front Mission 5 would lead to a ton of fun adventures. Or that I’d run into a bunch of cool like-minded people who share a lot of commonalities. Even more, I found it amusing that like 1/3 of our team happened to be Canadians haha! I even managed to get to know one of them in person and we’ve managed to strike a friendship since then. So for those naysayers who argue online interactivity doesn’t translate in real life, take that! Anyways, I loved learning all the layers of the onion that is Front Mission over these past 6 years. It’s also a shame when you learn how much of that onion was hidden from the rest of the world for so long. I am glad for the French releases of Front Mission Dog Life & Dog Style, because I kind of need to keep my French skills sharp!

T: Hey now, triple-A video game development sucks! Indie game development is where it’s all at (and if you want to retain any ounce of sanity)! Anyways, I had a blast working with the Front Mission projects we’ve done. Shame we can’t do a Kickstarter thing and actually get paid for our work, since all of the cool fan-made stuff are funded by Kickstarter these days.