Front Mission (Japan) [En by FH v1.0b] ROM

Front Mission is a turn-based strategy RPG.  You and your team pilot mechs known in-game as Wanzers.  You can equip these with a variety of armor and weapons, making for great replayability.
 
In the course of the game, you can pick up quite an assortment of troops, each with various inherent skills which you can exploit or ignore at your pleasure (yes, it IS perfectly possible to turn your hero into a melee brawler or the Mr. Kong into a missile launcher :) ).
 
The translation into English is nearly complete.  There's only one section aside from various death-scenes where it's still in Japanese - and that's a flashback where you still get the gist of what the guy is saying.
 
The only thing it's missing is random battles like in Final Fantasy Tactics.  You get a couple of characters pretty late in the game, and it would have been nice to keep those characters you hardly use leveled along with your main party.
 
All in all, though, it's quite worthy of a playthrough or two ... or three ... or ... ten ...  Quite a shame Square never brought it to the states when it came out.

Front Mission SNES is one of those games that we couldn't enjoy if it wasn't for some devoted fans. At least until they remade it on psx and ds.
When I first played Front Mission, it instantly reminded me of Final Fantasy Tactics, and Advance Wars. The game is basically a turn-based strategy game, with RPG elements. Though FM is much different than FFT.
You basically command a unit of wanzers (robots with guns). And pilots of these wanzers gain experience and skills from using melee/ranged/long-range combat weapons. The weapons are awesome, especially near the end of the game, there's nothing like using the aim ability on the enemy's torso with a vulcan Gatling gun :)
The story, while somewhat simple for a Square game, gets rather complex at the end of the game. However, after seeing the intro video, and playing for an hour I had already a hint of how things would go next. That's not necessarily a bad thing.
If you loved Final Fantasy Tactics, I'm sure you'll love this game as well !