Eh, I don't know. I prefer the aesthetics of the original.
As for the franchise as a whole, it is unfortunate that it doesn't seem to be getting new games. Left Alive was apparently really bad. The mecha genre as a whole seems to be rather dead and not getting any games with decent production values.
My understanding about the situation of Front Mission is that the localizers made a (decently) good call of making the series more enterable (on a scale of 'easy to enter' to 'you must have every piece of media previous', the Front Mission series is the latter, bar none; we're talking you have to have every game in the series (at the time of 4, only 1 and 3 were localized in the US), short-print manga
and book series, and even -get this- a
radio drama to understand it all), the IP Holder didn't like that and kept screwing over the franchise.
Evolved's shoddy work? The IP Holder
withdrew funding in mid-development (and used the B/S device plotline in part!). I wouldn't be surprised that the IP Holder screwed over Left Alive (and the fact that there really isn't much of a spectrum between 'AAA game' and 'Indie' anymore, Left Alive would have been an 'A'-rated -as in the loan type, not the rating type- game) just because he was a complete egotistical jerk that way.
