When a series takes a new direction, no matter how subtle or positive it is, it’ll upset fans. Despite Breath of the Wild being one of the most acclaimed games of the last decade or so, there’s still a lot of criticisms of it that are mostly rooted around it not doing stuff like older Zelda games. I’d probably be kinda bummed about the new direction of that series too, if Majora’s Mask didn’t exist, which is basically everything I could want out of that style of Zelda. Incidentally, Majora’s Mask was formerly my favorite game. That was before I played Armored Core: Last Raven, which basically fulfills what Majora’s Mask did for its series, creating an experience so great that I don’t mind the mixup that Armored Core 4 initiated. Pretty much everything is at its peak here. The customization carries over the positive changes from Nexus while balancing it so that ECM and Overheating are important but not overbearing. The missions are varied and have lots of twists and turns that make them super fun. Arena fights are tense and rewarding without compromising the economy. The story, while not incredible, is pretty much everything I’d want out of this kind of game: Unintrusive, but with more under the surface if you’re willing to look. All of it is tied together by the difficulty, which makes you really and truly experiment and optimize your war machine, forcing you to master and consider every part of it for the crushing challenge you’re undoubtedly facing, which expands your knowledge and appreciation of every part, all which make up what is probably the most balanced lineup in the series. Just like how you must reinvent your AC to face your challenges, Last Raven reinvents its story, with multiple paths, which allows for replayability, dynamic difficulty, and a brisk pace. I thought about doing a square-one review for this game, where I explain it as if the reader had no familiarity with the series, but that almost misses the point of the game, which is ultimately a sort of finale for those who already loved this style of the series. If you’ve played earlier games, you know about the customization, the story, the missions, the arena, the worldbuilding, all of it. The best thing I can say about Last Raven is that despite doing all of those things better than pretty much every previous entry, it never makes those games obsolete and feels special, which is everything a game like this should be. And to be honest, it’s not perfect, but I loved pretty much every second about it. Painting my AC. Fine Tuning every detail. Being sent Xbox Live hatemail. Equipping machineguns, Orbital Cores, and energy supplements so I could destroy an enemy in seconds, and then realizing that it doesn’t work on this one guy and going back to customizing. Dropping weapons to go faster. Raiding a town looking for a warlord, only to not find him and learn your employer made the story up to justify you killing competitors. Dodging those deadly, slow missiles before finding them for myself in the shop. Bunny hopping while shooting enemies to save that last bit of energy. Looking at the raven list and realizing I’m slowly fulfilling the game’s title. Taking out the final boss with my last bit of health and ammo. Even failing miserably at a mission. It all contributed to an experience that utterly hooked me, making me want to replay right after the first playthrough. It’s my new favorite game, and I’m not sure if it’ll be dethroned for a while. 10/10.

(To be clear though, Glover is still better, as it always will be.)

Taking place in the last ~22 hours before a full=on war. Last Raven is a panicked rush of a game, like the final minutes before the curtain rises on a stage production. Only instead of the curtain rising, it’s closing on the state of humanity. Rather than every stage hand fulfilling their duties as quickly as possible to achieve a common goal, every bit player is in a frantic blitz to meet their own agendas, annihilating themselves in the process. No matter which of the six story routes you chose, by zero hour– you will always be the last Raven standing.

As the culmination of the third generation of Armored Core, Last Raven signals the event horizon for the “man vs corporation” narrative conflict, with the groups last left floundering in Nexus consolidating into one singular “Alliance”, opposed by the remnants of the Raven’s Ark in the form of Vertex. It makes sense that the dynamic between corporations and their enlisted Ravens has stagnated to the point where most of their laborers fight against them, be it under the pretense of “breaking free from their tyranny” or simply to jump ship to the side closest to having a future (can’t get much more grim). In any case, neither group has the means to sustain themselves for a single day, let alone a war thereafter. Only the strongest survive, only the most “Dominant” will remain.

LR features my favorite narrative since Master of Arena, though much of that is attributed to its structure and multiple endings, giving more purpose to the choices you make to fulfill missions for either the Alliance, Vertex, the odd passerby warlord, or the frankly pathetic leftovers of Kisaragi and their false pretense of "conducting research". As mentioned before, there’s a frantic and distressed pace to the game's events. In less than a day of in-game time (and realistically, an hour in play time), Evangel defects from the Alliance, then is revealed to be a triple agent. What I truly love about this, however, is how reveals like this only become contextualized through certain story routes. Finishing Jack-O’s or Evangel’s routes paints both in dramatically different lights. Both Vertex and the Alliance seek to profit from the morally bankrupt mech economy, yet their leading Ravens are neither sympathetic nor irredeemable. A freelancer like Zinaida may come off a mystifying juggernaut in the ending of her route, or a pitiful victim in the climax of the second Pulverizer route. The characters are consistent, yet are framed so differently across each story path. Each encounter with them is unrelenting, but the path to becoming the sole survivor couldn’t be easy in even the most fruitful of imaginations.

Not as if you could adequately prepare for any of the bosses in this game, as AI is designed to counter whichever built you go for. There is no “taking advantage” of an enemy by building an AC that’s strong against them, and few have any discernible weaknesses. This sort of goes at odds with the common theme across all prior AC games, to not get married to a specific build and instead focus on experimentation from mission to mission, fight to fight. The best bet for Last Raven is to make a jack-of-all-trades build, the only thing the player truly needs to invest in to level the playing field being speed. Some may not like how this de-emphasizes Tank builds, but lightweight bipeds have always been my preferred playstyle, so Last Raven speaks heavily to me and how I enjoy playing these games. It somehow manages to compliment my preferences as it violently hands my ass back to me.

While it sometimes feels reductive to center conversations about this franchise, or rather all From Software games around their difficulty, few other games in their catalog better embody this motto of survival through their difficulty like Last Raven. I don’t blame anyone for dropping this game, or picking up cheats in order to get through some of the more sadistic and unfair missions (as I admittedly did, a handful of times), but it was this unrelenting, almost comical degree of punishment that immersed me in the world more than even AC3 or Silent Line. For all their mechanical refinement and relatively tight structure, getting mauled by Human PLUS AC after Pulverizer after Human PLUS AC just after I thought I was in the clear gave me more drive to push through than any game in the series prior.

Though previous Third Gen titles offered more polish in their Arena modes or better mission variety in their campaign, the way LR strikes its balance between challenge and brevity makes it uniquely replayable. Each story route will only take you an hour tops, assuming you don’t hit a wall with certain enemy encounters or struggle to maintain sufficient resources for the duration of a mission. Should that obstacle be too much to handle, however, the game gives an option to restart your route from the first mission, keeping all your equipment and credits in the process. The lone, pseudo-roguelike bone they throw the player’s way is exactly what this game needed in order to make sense of its often mean-spirited level of difficulty.

That’s not to say Last Raven is devoid of all forms of forgiveness, as they managed to walk back a multitude of the questionable, aggravating design choices introduced in Nexus. The menus have been fixed so they’re far easier to navigate, heat mechanics have been better balanced, the Arena isn’t a complete hot mess, and you can now tune your AC parts for free. Some of these fixes came with Nine Breaker, but their benefit is best felt in a more campaign driven game like LR.

It’s a good thing these changes were added, because for every aspect they tweaked from Nexus to ease player frustration, they added another mechanic to further drive frustration. Several parts can now be damaged or full-on break, forcing you to pay full price to repair them in the latter case. Enemy explosions can now cause slight damage, meaning you have to be more careful about melee blitzing every enemy you see. Neither of these were dealbreaker issues, I seldom ran into the former, beyond the one time I entertained using the feeble hover legs and they immediately shattered on me, but they still felt like little nuisances particular to this game. The only time I wasn’t fully enjoying myself in the game was attempting to fill out the last handful of miscellaneous, non-story route missions, stuff like “Destroy Power Generators” which involves you having to escape the tightly enclosed facility in an extremely limited set of time (while requiring night vision). These are general old-gen AC issues, though, and not particular to Last Raven. The frustration that comes with the newer gameplay additions feels far more intentional, though, better tying into the game’s ethos, far more than any technical choice made in Nexus– beyond the soundtrack.

Conversely, I’ve heard mixed things from fans about Last Raven’s soundtrack, some critical of its lack of melodies compared to prior titles. This lack of colorfulness or range to the music feels most applicable for the unnerving and cruel nature of the game, best exemplified with the progression of the garage/menu themes as you travel further down one route of the game, each track growing increasingly more demented and droning. The “song” used for the final level of each route is such an inscrutable mess that I got a headache listening to it, yet in-game kept me entirely locked into the act of strafing and bunnyhopping for my life. I don’t know the full extent to my own mental illness, but I imagine the nadir would feel similar to hearing “I’ll Talk You” on repeat, 25 hours per day, 366 days per year.

Last Raven is systematically designed to break you down and rebuild you through both its audiovisual and mechanical feel. I don’t know the full extent to which Miyazaki was involved in this game’s design, considering this was the first game he worked on midway through development, but as tacky as it is to say, I managed to get Souls flashbacks the first time I got completely jumped by a Pulverizer. The sheer level of mobility and aggression, how quickly it shed the AP of the build I thought would take me through even the first route of the game. I was burned, sliced, and maimed, but came out tougher for it, and with a greater appreciation for getting skill-checked to shit and back. Considering how short the runtime of this game is, it's been about 7 years since the last time I felt this much physical and mental exhaustion attempting to beat a game, and as such, it's only fair I put at least a fraction of that brain fog-inducing energy into writing about what I think makes it work so well.

I don’t need to become mentally stable again, I worked tirelessly to become what I am.