New friendly fire element really changes how you and enemies move, though pilot types effecting their willingness to automatically just shove a gun into an allies back and open fire to try to hit an enemy through the game's link attacks does get a bit ridiculous (I imagine even more so if I had ever actually tried to use AoE weapons). Enemies even take advantage of this system by attacking you through your allies so they hit one or both of you, while making your counterattack choice significantly more likely to hit your own pilots. A more cinematic focus on cutscenes and character models is a nice change for the series. Hard mode offers good enemy AI changes and the new game+ modes allow you to carry over things that give you more options early.

You can recruit almost every pilot in your squad through characters you meet in each base. This would be a good idea except that they are basically all the same, whoever you had early will probably be higher leveled and with the skill sets you want. Even though they might have very different personalities when you talk to them in the base or by their character description they will all be given the same lines depending on what roster spot you give them in the main or back up roster. There is also no real need to even have more than six main pilots unless you want to bring multiple units of the same types, because you are never allowed to use more and even if you want pilots of a certain type you can't even save more than six wanzer configurations (though it is fast to rebuilt and money is basically pointless). One of the worst thing is having many of the pilot options show up 18+ missions into the game where, other than simulator battles, you only have about nine stages left.

Story covers time periods from before and after the earliest and latest points of the series tying up plot elements of about seven other games while telling its own story, the main issue being that the story it tells really isn't very good (even ignoring that the fan translation is pretty bad, often verging on nonsensical or just getting things completely wrong, going off what one of the people that worked on it said in a let's play). Even when showing negative aspects it takes a more positive view of war than past games, many of the older games had you betrayed, fighting with guerrilla forces to overthrow a US puppet government, involved in more direct political affairs, in this so much time is spent in just more random battles against nobodies until you start fighting one of the guys behind the larger series enemy groups near the very end.

You have a very small supporting cast with the pilots that fight with you only showing personality in the section of the game they were first recruited, or never really showing any personality. Most of the main cast is actually really annoying cliches. Traveling constantly from military and special ops military bases and from battle to battle removes a lot of the world travel and interactions with city and civilian lives of the past games. Many of the female soldiers (main and random supporting characters) are instantly in love with your character for no reason. With even one scene having three women complaining about one of the men saying they should make their tests easier because the women are weaker completely change tone when they realize you are a sexy hero and start thinking about you saving them and how hot you are and another scene where you main love interests starts shooting at another character for telling you things about her obsession with you. Frequent weird stupid/comedic moments with some, at times nonsensical (even outside of the joking scenes), dialogue. I can't imagine it all being the fault of the translation as I don't remember these issues with other titles they translated and some of what is clearly going on in the cutscenes would suggest that that is just often the tone of the game (though the translation is a mess).

Multiple lines and even many times your own conversation choice options you get as a response would leave me having no idea what just happened or what anyone was talking about, these being mixed in with perfectly serious and understandable moments the rest of the time. A larger issue with this game referencing and tying plot points together and seemingly having some characters act very differently is that a lot of things were changed, removed, or toned down in the English release of Front Mission 1 (DS), Front Mission 3, and Front Mission 4 (even references between each other in those games) so you lose out on some of the moments that would likely be one of the main reasons to find Front Mission 5 more interesting. So it's a game with a story heavily based around understanding elements from games that were intentionally translated poorly or with characters given completely different personalities and motivations to appeal more to the perception of American children/young teens combined with a fan translations that both may not have known about original plot points but that also due to the limited time and resources just makes a lot compiling minor and major mistakes and compromises.

Melee feels massively overpowered when combined with its potential for very high damage, multiple hit skills, low AP cost link attacks, combined with the high move speed and armor/avoid the melee focused builds tend to get. Arena AI sim battles are broken, even with the AI being ok on normal and much better on hard, when it comes to having two AI pilots fight the game has no idea what to do and will frequently just take random movement actions without doing anything, this doesn't really matter as it is only the main way to earn money and you can just reload if you lose. Poor shop, a lot of parts end up either being locked more behind fairly hidden events, knowing how to upgrade low level parts down a certain path with parts that quickly become completely unavailable, and the way you do upgrade to more unique equipment is limited and only going to be earned by finding people to talk to or by performing well enough on missions (which isn't very difficult at all on normal to be fair). This can make the first play-through fairly dull near the end as it just doesn't offer enough challenge and you just don't have a lot of part options for customization (practically none if you don't bother with the dull survival sim mode that unlocks new equipment).

Mechanically and visually I think this would be the best of the series if it didn't hold itself back on a first play-through, character, world building, and narrative wise I found this to easily be the worst (going off of what I remember from other games from anywhere from 1 to 15 years ago). If the fan translation was touched up (which I believe includes issues like not even having the room to fit text that is closer to what was said) it would make some spots more understandable but really wouldn't effect the overall story since most of those confusing scenes don't feature anything important or are side conversations anyway.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1240217580893130752