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Good entry point for Front Mission beginners; Great worldbuilding, buildcrafting, and tactical combat; The 90s-style fake Internet is a remarkable and charming relic of a more innocent age
Very buggy; Visual appeal compromised by altered wanzer designs and sloppily redone art
Arguably no series in Square Enix’s portfolio has had its potential squandered quite like Front Mission. In the series’ first decade (1995-2005), the company put out five mainline tactical RPGs and three spinoffs, all imagining a grim future in which supernations waged both direct and proxy wars using fearsome walking tanks (“wanzers”) manufactured and marketed by a dozen or so different global defense contractors. Front Mission was, in its prime, gritty, worldly, and thought-provoking.
In the following two decades, stories about the threat of humanity being crowded out by machines have only grown more relevant, yet Square Enix has put forward nothing but mobile games, ports, model kits, and two DOA “reimaginings” that were doomed to please nobody (2010’s Front Mission Evolved and 2019’s Left Alive), least of all fans of the original run of games. The only sign of life in the past five years has been a series of three remakes which have all launched on Switch first, culminating with the new Front Mission 3 Remake.
Front Mission 3 was the first game in the series to get a western release, on the original PlayStation back in 2000. Compared to Front Mission 2, Front Mission 3 was optimized for series newcomers, featuring smaller skirmishes, a faster pace, and more emotive protagonists than its predecessor. The main characters are two friends, hotheaded Kazuki and laid-back Ryogo, who work for a wanzer company. A delivery to a Japanese military base goes sideways and the two of them find themselves almost immediately on the run, pulled into a vast geopolitical conspiracy centered on a new — and newly missing — superweapon.
Unusually, the game has two full stories. There’s an innocuous butterfly effect choice that Kazuki makes right after the tutorial battle, and that leads to two entirely different campaigns, usually referred to as the Emma campaign and the Alisa campaign because those are the names of the first character to join Kazuki and Ryogo on each path. The campaigns don’t just have you fighting on the opposite sides of the same maps. These are meaningfully different journeys, even through different countries. The two campaigns reveal different facets of the geopolitical realities shaping the game’s events, and while each campaign is a complete story on its own, the additional insight gained on the alternate path will deepen the player’s understanding of what happened and why.
The meat of Front Mission’s gameplay is found in customizing and tuning up your squad’s wanzers and engaging in turn-based, grid-based combat. Wanzers come pre-built but their body, left arm, right arm, and legs can all be swapped out independently, giving the player a framework to understand the wanzer archetypes but with a lot of freedom to customize. Broadly, wanzers fit into one of several types:
- Grappler types are sturdy, mobile, and designed for melee combat, but cannot carry heavy weaponry
- Assault types are like grappler types but trade a little durability and mobility to be able to carry something like a shotgun in addition to a melee weapon
- Gunner types specialize in medium range burst-fire weapons like machine guns, and are more accurate than grappler or assault types, but are less durable and mobile as a result
- Sniper types specialize in long range single shot weapons like rifles, and are the most accurate wanzers, but are relatively frail
- Launcher types are the least mobile and durable, but as a tradeoff are capable of carrying the heaviest weaponry like missile or grenade launchers
Any character can build and operate a wanzer that mixes and matches all of these archetypes. You can mix a Sniper type left arm, a Grappler type right arm, a Gunner type body, and Assault type legs if you feel like it. There is exactly one hard limit – every wanzer part, and every weapon or shield, has a set weight, and every wanzer body has a maximum amount of weight it can support, with Launcher type bodies able to carry the most and Grappler type bodies the least. But outside of that, so long as you don’t go over your weight cap, the sky’s the limit in terms of flexibility. While every character has their own weapon specialization (e.g. Kazuki is more talented with melee weapons and Ryogo with burst-fire weapons), you can absolutely ignore that specialization if you’re not min-maxing.
Compared to other tactical RPGs, Front Mission is very deliberately random. The world of war is heartless and unpredictable, and RNG is everywhere in this game. It’s not just that you have a chance to hit and a chance to crit like most RPGs. No, in Front Mission 3, learning new abilities is governed by random chance. Using your learned abilities is governed by random chance. Hell, even the part of an enemy wanzer that you strike with your attack is governed by random chance. You can disarm an enemy if you destroy their weapon arm… but you might just hit their legs instead. For some players, random chance can feel anathema to the very idea of tactical gameplay, and Front Mission 3 will not accommodate them. Instead, Front Mission’s idea of tactical gameplay is for the player to accept a band of possible outcomes and be responsible for playing a bad hand to the best of their ability. As you move through the game you will gain abilities that make certain tactics more reliable (for example, learning an Aim Arm skill that guarantees you’ll hit an enemy’s arm… when it activates, at least). But more importantly, you will still have to grapple with the outcomes being fundamentally unreliable.
Because of its randomness, the game is not particularly tightly tuned – even if things go wrong at times, you can usually pull through. Like other Square games of its era, Front Mission 3 gives you incentives to play better without outright requiring it. There’s a scoring system to give you feedback on your performance. The game also gives you a monetary incentive for performing well in a certain way; every enemy wanzer you capture is yours to keep or sell. That means that you have reason to try to not just blow up every opponent, but to see how many enemies you can either coax into surrender (e.g. by blowing off their arms) or eliminate by killing the pilot while sparing the wanzer. It keeps even the easier battles engaging throughout, especially when there are rare wanzers like the Qibing 0 or the Lenghe on the battlefield.
Even if the rest of the game was a failure, Front Mission 3 would still be noteworthy for its bizarre and ambitious fake Internet, the Network. Despite taking place in the 22nd century, the game’s vision of the Internet is unmistakably 90s. No social media, no streaming, no Google, no UI/UX best practices, just crusty JPEGs and lightly populated bulletin boards. It’s like if Hypnospace Outlaw had been made as a time capsule instead of as a deliberate period piece. What felt charmingly hokey in 2000 has only come to seem increasingly unreal in its innocence, and still charming. Engaging with Front Mission 3’s network is entirely optional, like the audio logs or lore entries in other games, but unlike in other games, while it can be occasionally byzantine, it is honestly compelling.
Fundamentally, Front Mission 3 is a fantastic tactical RPG. Gun to my head, I’d still give Final Fantasy Tactics the nod among Square’s tactical output, but Front Mission 3 is still a must-play, and I’d love to grade this an A and wrap up the review. Unfortunately, this is the point at which I need to start writing not about the 2000 classic but the compromised and buggy 2025 remake.
Like the recent remakes of Front Mission 1st and Front Mission 2, this was contracted out to Forever Entertainment. And like those two recent remakes, Front Mission 3 Remake is laden with many changes, some of which may be intentional and some of which almost certainly are bugs. Among the likely intentional changes are a rebalancing of the power of grenades versus missiles, as grenades were underwhelming in the original. Also, the nerfing of the Tieqi 4 wanzer, whose body was previously an outlier with both strong durability and weight allowance.
Other things which are most likely bugs include the Shield Attack skill sometimes doing zero damage for no clear reason; at least one line of Ryogo’s dialogue remaining in Polish in the English version; random status effects (Stun, Confuse, and Eject) happening far more often; gear upgrade prices being incorrect; Eject only working once per enemy; and most unbelievably, the formula which governs the rate at which characters gain AP is not working properly, which means that in normal play your characters will top out at ~16 AP instead of ~30 AP. In practice that means flamethrowers and beam cannons are less viable, and means that the player has to choose between upgrading their accuracy, evasion, and defense instead of being able to tend to all three. Frankly, the fact that this issue was not caught before release beggars belief.
What is truly strange, and which I write almost begrudgingly, is that the game still works this way. It’s more difficult with the more common Stuns and reduced AP gain, but since the original game was too easy for its own good and the game is fundamentally about dealing with bad RNG, it honestly still works. As I went through the entirety of Emma’s campaign, while I disliked the AP issue and while I groaned when I would get stunned or ejected at inopportune times, I was still having a great time every time I booted up the game.
As far as I know (I looked), there are no announced plans to patch these issues, nor confirmation of which changes are even bugs versus intended.
It’s not all bad news. The remade battle maps look good in HD. The load times were already pretty good in the original version (especially compared to Front Mission 2) but are even better here. The small QOL tweak to the Network that will prompt you to input passwords you’ve already learned is unintrusive and a nice touch. And there’s a rearranged soundtrack which honestly does a good job of capturing the feel of the original. I don’t normally like reorchestrated soundtracks but found myself going back and forth between them in Front Mission 3 Remake’s case, enjoying both.
Finally, while the battle maps do look good, many other aspects of the game’s visual presentation are… suboptimal. I won’t detail them line by line, but other reviews and discussions have already pointed out a large number of art assets in this game which appear to be not just upscaled but redrawn. And redrawn using AI that didn’t know what it was looking at, mistaking a fountain for a floor, or making a soldier hold a gun like it’s a camera. Whether you approve of the use of generative AI in game production or not, I think we can all agree that sloppy use of generative AI, without careful human-led QA, is unacceptable. Nor do the game’s visual sins end with AI, as various iconic wanzer designs (remember, whatever Square Enix’s shortcomings as stewards of Front Mission, they at least respect the wanzer designs enough to sell model kits of them) have been skewed and altered for the worse. Things that were sleek are now chunky or awkward.
All of this together means that while it is very easy to give an unequivocal recommendation for Front Mission 3, the remake is a mixed bag as a remake. If you can play an original disc copy or own a PSN copy, you will be better served sticking with that. The slight improvements in load time aren’t worth the various downsides, at least at this point. Still, if playing the original version is not an option, I would generally recommend the remake, but only once patches start to roll out. At the very least both Ryogo’s Polish line and the AP issue need to be addressed.
