YMMV / Front Mission 3

• Anti-Climax Boss: Jose Astrada. Introduced as a climax boss during the Taal Base missions where he pilots a Jinyo Mk.110, a grunt unit. If you fight him in the Taal Base runway missions, he starts right next to you... and you take him out on the first turn.
• Arc Fatigue: Arc Stall example. The Da Han Zhong arc is much longer in Emma's story, as it introduces too many new characters and features scenes where the team is forced to split-up. It also has some subplots, like Moneymaker's betrayal, an old friend of Dennis, meeting Li Xiang Mei, Linny and Kwang, and a couple of battles against the Wolung mercenaries.
• Ethnic Scrappy: Linny Barilar and Pham Luis are both party members of Filipino-descent and rich, spoiled aristocrats who think way too much of themselves and seem to have some rather poor interpersonal compatibility with others around them.
• Game-Breaker:
  • By successfully forcing an enemy to eject (or just gets really lucky), the player can have a pilot hop out of their wanzer and into the enemy's vehicle. Most of time, the CPU will resort to shooting your death machines with their pistols instead of stealing your empty wanzer. The player doesn't even need to stay in the new vehicle; he can switch back to his wanzer if he prefers and there's nothing the computer can do about it. If that wasn't enough, you get to keep wanzers you "capture" this way.
  • The Smash abilities. You can activate them with melee, sniper, or missile shots. They WILL hit the enemy regardless of accuracy. A body smash is a straight up instant kill. An arm smash will ALWAYS destroy the left arm first (and the game never equips weapons on the right arm, only shields), which means you screw over your opponent from doing any significant damage to you afterward, since all they can do is punch you with a Hard Blow.
  • Stacking ROFUP1. Very few enemies in the game can withstand it if it decided to chain.
• Goddamned Bats: Enemy foot soldiers can be very annoying due to their high evasion rate.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The Japanese Defense Forces can participate in conflicts alongside its fellow OCU members while maintaining a defense doctrine. Guess what they're planning to do with the real-life Japanese Self-Defense Forces. As of 2020, Article 9 has been officially reinterpreted that the JSDF can be deployed overseas to help its allies.
  • By the 2010s, tensions have risen between China and several South East Asian states like Philippines and Vietnam over disputes in the South China Sea, mirroring the Cold War between OCU and DHZ.
  • Furthermore, Philippines in real life is facing a series of internal conflicts against the Moro separatist movement as well as communist and Islamist rebels, which has intensified by the 2000s and 2010s, and a peacekeeping mission, of which Japan is a member, was deployed in 2004.
• Informed Wrongness: For unknown reasons, Kazuki paints his father (Isao Takemura) as a greedy and selfish individual who only cares about himself and the JDF, and even accuses him of being involved in the coup. Despite that, Isao is a polite and Reasonable Authority Figure, and everyone but Kazuki shows nothing but respect and admiration for him.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Without a guide, finding out the network passwords to learn more about the plot and characters is a very boring and time-consuming task, no helped by the PS1 load times.
• Scrappy Weapon: This is the first game where Rifles become their own distinct class of hand weapon. Unfortunately, experienced players have found their potential to be sorely lacking. Supposedly, they're a compromise between the power and range of Missiles and the speed and portability of Machine Guns. The problems that hold them back are anemic accuracy and attack power which means they're unreliable at max range and their damage output doesn't scale up well when compared to Shotguns and Machine Guns. And unlike Shotguns and Machine Guns, Rifles only get one hit per attack meaning if they miss, they do zero damage unlike Shotguns and Machine Guns that can potentially do at least a small amount of damage.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Lukav's effeminate face and earring would be enough to make a player make an incorrect guess at his actual gender.