Front Mission 3: Remake follows the adventures of Kazuki Takemura. Kazuki is a test pilot for Wanzers, which are humanoid walking tanks that are the primary method of solving military conflict in the world of Front Mission. While on a routine delivery mission, Kazuki is quickly embroiled in a mysterious plot. A deadly super-weapon known as MIDAS, which is like a nuclear weapon without the radiation, has gone missing. Every country around the globe is scrambling to find MIDAS for themselves, and Kazuki's friends and family are quickly caught up in the global conspiracy. Now he must put his test pilot skills to use and find a way to stop MIDAS before it ushers in a new era of disastrous warfare unlike anything the planet has ever seen.

Front Mission 3 has two separate plotlines. One follows Emma, the scientist responsible for the creation of MIDAS, who is desperately trying to recover and destroy the prototype weapon before she becomes the person responsible for ushering in the greatest slaughter mankind has ever known. The other follows Kazuki's adoptive sister Alisa, who is a Japanese scientist whose research brings her in contact with MIDAS. In both stories, the plot quickly descends into a global conspiracy with a massive number of different factions vying for MIDAS and Kazuki caught in the middle. It's a pretty compelling story, even if it starts to get absurd near the end, and it manages to keep a good pace that makes it genuinely enjoyable to follow. The only real problem I had with it is that some of the language and characterization is slightly dated, but considering the era it was released, that's more a product of the time it was translated more than anything else.

Probably the coolest feature of Front Mission 3's plot is the Network, which is a fully fleshed out in-game internet that you can browse during any intermission. It's delightfully old school, nearly perfectly capturing the zeitgeist of mid-'90s internet browsing, with most major and minor factions in the world having their own webpages you can visit to get more information on the world and characters. There are also fun puzzles to solve where many pages are locked with a password, and you need to puzzle out what the password could be from information you find or by going to shady websites and downloading illegal hacking tools to help you crack information. Most of this is just for flavor (you can get some cool items if you dig deep enough), but it adds a sense of verisimilitude to the world that enhances the plot and characters.

Front Mission 3 continues the tactical mecha-based combat of the previous two games in the series. You can deploy your Wanzers to the battlefield and battle enemies in dramatic turn-based strategy combat. The core gameplay is built around the fact that Wanzers are comprised of several parts (body, legs, and both arms). When attacking an enemy, you damage specific parts of it, depending on the weapons you have equipped. A machine gun inflicts small damage to random body parts, a shotgun hits everything at once for medium damage, a melee weapon or rifle will hit a single body part for massive damage, and so on. To defeat enemies, you need to disable their body, but eliminating their arms or legs can disable their weapons or prevent them from moving quickly, so you can leave injured enemies alive to focus on greater threats.

New to Front Mission 3 is a system where each different part of your robot also has an associated skill. The leg part may have a skill that reduces the cost of attacks significantly, the arm may have a skill that instantly destroys an enemy's body part or allows you to attack more quickly or raise your accuracy. These skills will trigger randomly, but you can equip certain gear that allows you to modify the chance of activation. Once a skill has been activated, your character "learns" it and can equip it to their built-in computer, which allows you to retain access to that skill even if you change parts. Perhaps most importantly, these skills can chain together, which not only gives you more powerful attacks but also allows for multiple attacks in a single turn.

There's some genuinely fun customization to be found. Most skills have multiple levels, and you can decide if it is worth equipping a lower-level skill that takes up less space in the computer, so you have more chances of a skill activating or higher-level skills that are less likely to activate but hit much harder. Depending on how you build characters, you can create a sniper who has a strong chance to blow up enemy arms every time or a melee character who inflicts debilitating bad status effects on enemies with every hit. The design of the game tends to reward quantity over quality, but there are still potent builds that benefit from high-value skills. Some skills are exclusive to specific weapons, such as the Double Assault skill, which requires you to have a shotgun and melee weapon equipped at the same time, while others can be used with anything.

One of the coolest and most distinctive features of Front Mission 3 is that pilots are now a significant part of combat. Pilots can be directly targeted and have their own HP pool. Defeating a pilot causes the Wanzer to become disabled and available for looting after the fight. However, not only can you target the pilots, but you can also demoralize them into surrendering or even hit the Wanzer so hard the enemy pilot goes flying out and allows you to target them on foot. This can even happen to your own pilots. An advantage to this is that you can hop in an enemy's Wanzer and steal it, so if your own mech is low on health and you've managed to safely capture an enemy's machine, you can swap to get a health refill or access to different weapons.

The combat in Front Mission 3 is genuinely a lot of fun. Early on, it can be extremely lethal, with enemies doing a whole ton of damage with a single attack. It's balanced out by your characters having access to skills and upgrades that make them individually more powerful. It's very easy to lose units in the game, but there are enough options available that it rarely feels oppressive, and the more units you get, the more powerful you feel, until in the last game, your characters are firing four to five times in a single attack and nuking enemies with ease. I think it is the most fun Front Mission title until at least Front Mission 5, and part of me even prefers Front Mission 3 despite that.

The game also has a simulator option that allows you to grind experience points between levels. The levels aren't very difficult, but it's nice to have the option to bring weaker characters up to par. The only downside is that the game has a scaling level system when it comes to getting post-battle ranks. You're rewarded with a ranking (up to Platinum) on every stage, and having stronger characters can make the rating more difficult to achieve. This only unlocks a few minor things, so it isn't necessary.

Front Mission 3 is a pretty lengthy game with two full-length campaigns that are chosen based on a seemingly innocuous decision near the start of the game. While both campaigns tend to tread similar territory and have some overlap in levels, they're distinct enough that both are well worth playing. You'll probably take about 20-ish hours to get through each, assuming you're burning through from start to finish and not spending a ton of time on the Network.

Front Mission 3: Remake doesn't contain a ton in the way of new features, most of which are quality of life changes. You can now skip or speed up combat animations, which is a nice boon. The combat maps are fully rotatable in 3D, which can help make some of the environments and enemies more visible. In general, most of the changes are to the game speed so players can move things more quickly. They're mostly good changes, and I can't complain about them, but they're also not revolutionary.

Visually, Front Mission 3: Remake is a sideways upgrade. You have fully 3D maps and environments and higher-res models than the PS1 version, but the upgrade is rather lackluster. In some cases, I preferred the PS1 design for the Wanzers to the Remake's version. I also found the map a tad harder to read at times, since enemy mech designs would sometimes slightly blend into the background. It looks far better on high-resolution screens than the blurry and pixelated PS1 version, but I think the art design took a hit. The music is quite good, offering both the original soundtrack and a new remastered modern version that did a good job of remixing the music.

Score: 8.0/10