Strategy role-playing games have become more and more popular recently with the likes of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, Fire Emblem, Disgaea: Hour of Darkness and La Pucelle Tactics just to name a few. Square Enix' Front Mission series has been one of the top SRPGs for some time now. The latest PlayStation 2 incarnation of the series, Front Mission 4 is finally upon us, and it takes the SRPG genre to a new level.

When you first put Front Mission 4 into your PlayStation 2, you'll be treated to one of the best looking CG intro scenes you've ever seen. This is followed immediately by another CG cut scene when you begin the game. On top of the amazing quality of these two CG marvels, they serve to really get you into the game you're about to play. However, you immediately hit a brick wall when you're tossed right into the thick of tutorial on how to play, followed by a bevy of text mixed in with a few segments of voice work.

Compared to Final Fantasy X and X-2, Front Mission 4 features a lot more text than voice work. This wouldn't be so bad if there wasn't so much text to wade through between missions. Sure, there are several occasions where you'll hear the characters talking, and the story is actually quite intriguing, but when you get to a point where you read some text, move from one room to another (through text menus), read more text, move to another room, read even more text, then move to a fourth room for even more text before any battle preparation, things get a bit tedious.

This brings us up to another aspect of Front Mission 4 that has both a positive and negative swing. Before just about every battle you are met with an abundance of customization options. The pre-battle preparations are unmatched in Front Mission 4, and with the addition of more mech units (known as Wanzers) as you progress through the game, it can take upwards of one hour to get all of your units tweaked the way you want them.

What's so bad about that? Well, things wouldn't really be that bad if you knew what you were facing before each battle. Instead, the intensive preparation and strategies used during battles become more trial and error than anything else. When you spend forty minutes or more preparing your squad for the impending battle, then spend an hour duking it out, you lose your ambition to continue the game when you find your strategy and configuration where completely wrong. It's one thing if you know what's coming and your simply have bad preparation, but when you literally have no idea what you'll be facing next, there's very little you can do to be prepared. Trail and error tactics don't work well when the complete process takes two hours or more.

During the battles themselves, you have a few different options. If you just want to get through the battle with a win at any cost, you can use a tactic that works in most SRPGs. Simply move your units precisely in order to confront one enemy unit at a time and take them down with all of your units. This method works well, but it's also extremely time consuming. So while you'll get the job done, it will take you well over an hour to do it. Your other option is just to go all out with your available units, but since you don't know what you'll be facing beforehand, chances are you won't be ready no matter how much time you spend preparing. So you'll fall back into the trial and error strategy that will take even longer. Either way, battles will take a great deal of time.

Let's get one thing straight. Front Mission 4 is not a bad game. In fact it's probably one of the deepest and most customizable RPGs available for the PlayStation 2. However, it certainly will not appeal to everyone. Final Fantasy is a mainstream RPG, and Front Mission 4 falls at the complete opposite end of the spectrum. SRPG enthusiasts will be in heaven with FM4, but everyone else will find the tedious trial and error and endless customization to be a negative toward the title. If you can get past the varied nuances in Front Mission 4, it could be your game of the year, it's just getting around them that's the problem.