(A repeat playthrough of FM1 in general, not this specific version.)
Ah, Front Mission. Always one of Square's coolest second-string series.
This is the Switch remake of the DS remake of the PS1 remake of the first game in the series. Each version iterated on the previous one somewhat—the PS1 version added a whole second story that I swear I'll go through at some point, the DS version added a bunch of side missions featuring characters from FM4 and FM5, and I'll get into the Switch version's changes (though, spoiler alert: they're nothing so impressive). The Switch version was done by Forever Entertainment, who have a bit of an infamous reputation that I'm not entirely up to speed on, and interestingly enough Square Enix actually let them publish it instead of just being developers. Why they would do this I can't say, though if I were to hazard a guess I'd assume it has something to do with what happened the last time Square Enix put their own name on the series...
For the quick version of what Front Mission is all about, these are strategy RPGs with giant robots called wanzers (short for "wanderung panzer," which is bad German for "walking tank"). They take place in a future full of dark political intrigue between a number of space-filling empires. In this game, the main ones that are relevant are the Oceania Cooperative Union (an alliance of most of south and southeast Asia, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand) and the Unified Continental States (the USA after conquering the rest of North America). It's also probably worth noting that the U.C.S. was renamed in the English versions starting with FM4, with the original Japanese name being the United States of the New Continent (U.S.N. for short)—presumably they tried to find a more plausible name for a future expanded US, though really the more plausible alternate name for the United States of the New Continent should probably be the United States of America because you know nobody in Congress would be willing to let a rename go through.
Anyway, the game itself takes place on Huffman Island, a fictional volcanic island that is the center of a territorial dispute between the O.C.U. and the U.C.S. which has been pretty much left to simmer after a prior war. The protagonist, Royd Clive, leads an O.C.U. recon squad who are illegally sent into U.C.S. territory to scout out a factory. Naturally, it immediately goes sideways—a U.C.S. squad discovers them and one of their members, Karen Meure, gets killed by the U.C.S. leader, a man named Driscoll who pilots a mysterious high-powered wanzer. Following this, Royd's squad become scapegoats for the incident, which completely fails to prevent the cold war on the island from turning hot. A year later, the outlook isn't great for the O.C.U., and Royd, who's been spending his days as a gladiator, meets a man named Guri B. Olson who recruits him to lead an elite mercenary squad, the Canyon Crows. Royd finds himself drawn back into the war he himself started, fighting for the country that betrayed him—and Karen's circumstances may well turn out to be more relevant than expected...
For pretty much the entire first half of the game the plot sits in the background, waiting for its moment to strike while leaving you with only the occasional bit of foreshadowing beforehand. Honestly I'm not sure how I feel about this, since it does work and the plot is interesting once it starts up but on the other hand there's a lot of missions where nothing much really happens. Front Mission 1st also has the problem a lot of strategy RPGs of this type have where individual characters outside of the small handful the writers have made directly relevant to the plot don't get much of a chance to make an impression on you. It doesn't help that there are seventeen party members, the standard deployment cap is eleven, and there is nothing, nothing in the game that demands that many characters to complete. But overall, these are the kinds of problems you only notice once the game's finished and it works well in the moment.
The mechanics are where things get really interesting. Front Mission games have a few things they do that you don't really see in other strategy RPGs, and the big one is that they have hit locations. Each of a wanzer's body parts (body, left and right arms, and legs) has its own health bar, and attacks are randomly distributed between them. Which creates some unavoidable tension, because at any time an attack that you could easily absorb if its individual hits are distributed between your limbs might instead deliver nothing but body hits and suddenly you're fucked—and it works both ways, so you can potentially have your attacks be just as swingy. And depending on how you've got your weapons set up, losing one arm might be bad but survivable or it might mean you lose your entire ability to deal damage. It also makes healing more complicated, since healing items only work on one part at a time.
There's also three types of attacks, divided between the Melee, Short, and Long skills (there's also a Dodge skill, which makes you better at defending). You're mostly expected to use Short attacks, which include machine guns, rifles, shotguns, flamethrowers, and so forth. Long skill is used for missiles, which are terrifying when enemies use them but often frustratingly ineffective in your hands. Melee is for punching and occasionally hitting people with sticks, but Short attacks have priority over those so you're opening yourself up to potentially deadly hits every time you use it—which naturally makes it hard to justify splashing melee on anything that isn't dedicated to it. Skill levels increase your damage per hit, which eventually makes multi-hit weapons superior to single-hit ones because the damage formula is additive. As such, all your non-melee builds generally coalesce around the machine guns and missile launchers that do the most hits, while melee wanzers just use the small handful of arms that have the best punch damage.
(This is another issue with the large case, because having effectively one best build for each skill type makes things less interesting than they really should be.)
Building up skill levels also gives you battle skills, which are where you really get to break the game. Melee wanzers get to randomly move first (which works even on enemy turns), stun enemies on hit, and do multiple hits at once, which combine to make high-level melee builds ludicrously strong. Short skills let you fire again if you've got weapons in both hands, do extra shots with multi-hit weapons (which further expands machine gun supremacy), and, in a skill type shared with missiles, choose which body part you attack. That last one is a game-changer, because remember how machine guns are built around not knowing how many hits will go where you want them to? Well, now you can just choose to have all of those shots hit the target's body. Suffice to say once you've got your skills in order the game suddenly becomes a lot easier.
Which isn't to say this is a particularly difficult game to begin with. Really, there's exactly one map that I'd consider difficult at all (ask anyone who's played the game about Hell's Wall) and they never do much to reach that level of challenge again. This reaches its ultimate conclusion in the final boss fight, which is completely challenge-free for extremely silly reasons.
And then there's the matter of what the Switch version does. This is the kind of remake that focuses on graphical updates over any mechanical changes, which on the one hand I personally don't mind because I like how Front Mission 1st plays but on the other hand it's probably a bit less interesting to new players. The new graphics are...not great. I wish I could consider this the definitive version of the game since it's the easiest one to get ahold of these days and it has everything from the DS version but really, these graphics hurt it a lot. Everything looks almost toy-like, without the level of grit that a serious war story ought to have. Which is honestly a shame because they clearly put a lot of effort into making these models and they've got plenty of detail, and they could've been great if only they'd applied a better graphical filter. There's also a few changes to non-wanzer mechanical designs I'm not fond of, namely changing the design of the ubiquitous supply trucks from, well, trucks to some ridiculous future-thing that doesn't mesh with the rest of the aesthetic design at fucking all.
There's another thing, which is that when you start a new game in this version you're presented with a choice between "Modern" and "Classic" mode. Modern mode adds the ability to rotate the camera and zoom in, in addition to adding a simple tactical map. But it also leads to the worst thing the remake did, which has to do with how wanzers move. In Modern mode wanzers zip around on boosters, which I don't have a problem with because that's a thing that existed in the series before, albeit not until later in the series. But the booster-based movement isn't really any faster than movement in the original sprite-based game, so Forever Entertainment have taken the honestly really dishonest measure of slowing movement in Classic mode to a snail's pace to make Modern mode look faster. Seriously, what the fuck? At least they add the option to speed movement up, but even the fastest setting leaves Classic mode wanzers moving noticeably slower than they did in previous versions.
As for the arranged soundtrack, I could take it or leave it. Some of the arrangements are great (I'm particularly fond of the new take on the final mission's theme), some feel like they miss the point in a big way, and there's a fair few that are just sorta there. You can use the original soundtrack, though, which is nice and also lets you compare them.
So, where do I stand on Front Mission 1st? It's a great game and a landmark SRPG despite some issues, and while you should probably get the DS version if you can this is a perfectly acceptable alternative