I was let down after getting a handle on the purpose of the medal ranking system in Front Mission 3 - it's yet another pointless "sidequest" that ends up achieving nothing. Consider: after each story battle, you get a scorecard of sorts, with bonuses and (mostly) penalties. Among them is, you get penalised if your weapon ranks (skills) are too high. Low penalties = good score = platinum medals. Scoring a certain number of platinum medals makes a high-experience-rewarding wanzer appear in a certain simulator map (yep, that's the only reward for getting good scores i.e. platinum medals).

Getting that high-exp wanzer on the map will mean your weapon skills will shoot up = higher penalties on your battle scorecard = no more good i.e. platinum medals. The thing is, you only get enough platinum medals near the endgame to get that reward. Which means, most of the game you'll be struggling with low weapon ranks trying not to get high penalties, and consequently suffering in battle... and the reward allows you to raise your weapon ranks higher (i.e. get lotsa exp) = high penalties.

The whole premise is stupid. You might as well abuse the simulator and get good weapon ranks at the start of the game, so as not to have problems in the story battles. There's no other reward for getting good medals. None. It's a waste of time. Which reminds me of Tales of Destiny 2 which I just completed prior. It's an RPG with a great fun battle system, but the sidequests in the game - ugh. Too many of them are pointless and unrewarding. Example, the arena. Not only is it pretty damn short and you win crap, the one unique fight in it (apparently cameos of characters from one of the prequels) only ever happens once - you beat that fight, that's it - the arena will only ever be the same crap 3-in-a-row fights again.

Then there's stuff like the chamballoon thing (sp?), or the big one, some sort of card game - it's not that great in the first place, and the reward is a piddling amount of the alternative "cash" which is only valid in the game's obligatory funfair / minigame town. Don't get your hopes up here either, you can only play the cardgame there, or the auction - which is really more like a game of "hope the bids on your items double instead of bust", and you don't get cash back, just more of the alternative "cash" thing. The point of getting that basically is just to trade it in for some items hard to obtain elsewhere. The sheer amount of it you need to get even the crap items is the only challenge.

Back to Front Mission 3, I'm going to ignore the medal count just like I did for Emma's story (I'm playing Alisa's story now) and concentrate on the bits which I really enjoyed - the story. Yep. The battles, to be honest, aren't really that fun - there's too much of an element of luck involved (i.e. how to get your battle skills to trigger). No other turn-based mech game beats Titans of Steel, which I'm still playing btw. The inclusion of a random map generator boosts it from awesome to untouchable. And this just makes me more pissed off that well-known large publishers (Square, EA, etc) are content to foist off crap games on us.

Oh sure, their games LOOK great. After all they have to show what the development money got spent on. But gameplay? Fun? Replayability? Most of them get poor to failing grades. There's a reason I've always gone out of the way to look for my own games, rather than sit and read some gaming mag, or wait for updates from some gaming website (I repeat from a previous post, I'm on GameSpot mainly for comparing player reviews - I don't really care for the front page news). My favourite games are still mostly non-mainstream ones. You won't find Empire Deluxe or Demise or Titans of Steel on many other profiles. Yet those three games alone have given me way more gaming hours than any hundred-odd well-known titles that you'd care to name.

Oh well. At least the Front Mission 3 story is pretty enjoyable. Can't say that for too many games, once you get past the shiny surface.