You begin Front Mission 3 as Kazuki Takemura, a 19 year old student and Wanzer (mech) test pilot for Kirishima Industries. While testing out one of the latest machines, Kazuki and his friend and fellow test pilot, Ryogo Kusama, get the opportunity to go along on a simple delivery assignment. Of course, things don't go as smooth as they should. A mysterious explosion occurs, and somehow, Kazuki and Ryogo are blamed, and caught in the middle of the incident. The real story basically begins at that point. The plot has as many twists and turns as you would expect from any Square developed RPG. Subjects such as long lost siblings, mind control and government conspiricies are all covered, and rather generously. The storyline does have a few branching points, which are determined by certain decisions you make during the game.

At heart, Front Mission 3 is all about strategic warfare. After the story segments play through, you are placed on a strategic map in a conflict with the enemy, whomever they may be at the moment. The scenarios are varied, as are the locations you do battle in. Everything depends on the story path you take, and the current situation you are stuck in the middle of. The maps all have various real-life structures, such as buildings, cars, hills, trees, etc. that can be destroyed, climbed upon, or used as defensive barriers. In typical strategy RPG fashion, you can make a move, attack, look around and use items all while in the overhead "move" mode. After making a move, depending on the number of Action Points available, you can attack, use an item, or end that turn. If an attack is made, then the game zooms down to a dramatic battle view, with fully polygonal Wanzers firing at one other, using hand to hand attacks, counter attacking, unleashing special moves, and so on. The resulting scenes are quite cool, with great camera work, and special effects.

In order to survive the onslaught of the enemy forces, it is imperative that you learn to maintain/equip/upgrade your Wanzer. Everything from the body, to the legs, to the various long range and melee weapons can be bought, sold, repaired and exchanged. As you survive battles, and take out enemies, your weapons and Wanzer parts gain experience, and go up classes, and become more powerful. There are a number of different stats that are taken into account when battling, such as accuracy, power, defense and evasion. All can be raised by gaining experience or buying upgrades. It wont take long until your stock parts don't quite cut it any longer. Instead of magical spells, Front Mission 3 has special attacks called "Battle Skills". Depending on the Wanzer parts equipped, the pilot's computer, and the situation, a battle Skill can be unleashed on the enemy. Skills can range from an increase in accuracy, to a double melee/ranged attack, to a punch that can eject an enemy pilot. There is not much in the line of ridiculously powerful magical-style attacks. Everything is fairly realistic, at least as compared to other strategy titles. Front Mission 3 is actually pretty easy to get into, and after putting in a decent amount of time it will be more obvious that the gameplay is deeper than it may first appear to be.

Visually, Front Mission 3 isn't going to win any awards, but what is there works well. My main gripe with the game, is the pixelized textures. At first, everything looks a bit on the rough side, but to be honest, it didn't really matter much after a few hours of gameplay. The Wanzers and battlefields do look nice, and thankfully the texture quality does little to effect the quality of the game. Square used a couple of nice particle effects and motion blur techniques, but in a very non-Square like fashion, nothing was overdone. Sound effects and music are right on target, and both fit the game quite well. In general, the soundtrack is sort of typical for the genre, but it is usually just present in the background.

I found the difficulty in Front Mission 3 to be just about perfect. The missions never get too hard, and you are bound to lose a few here and there, but it never becomes frustrating. More frequently, you will get into situations where you just win the battle by the skin of your teeth. The only real fault I can find in the game, is that a few of the battles become a bit drawn out and boring. Also, the story and virtual web modes, while interesting in the beginning, seem to drag on too long thanks to the large amount of text to wade through.