Anyone who follows me on this website probably knows I like Armored Core. Depending on how good later games are, I could see myself calling it one of my favorite game series. I love the customization, the interesting approaches to difficulty, even many of the games’ stories in how they present their themes. However, even I think this game feels tired.
The main thing that I heard about Another Age before going in was that the story was sparse and there’s no arena. Instead, there’s around 100 missions that can be tackled in a non-linear order. This kind of concerned me, because the arena was my favorite part in Armored Core 2, and while I wasn’t huge on that game’s story, I was hoping to see some improvements instead of a removal. Plus, the arena is important for balancing. If you don’t have the arena, there’s nothing to really stop players from deep debt, even if Human+ sticks a band-aid on the wound.
Well, that’s the first thing: Losing missions no longer loses you money. Ammo and repair is still costly and the payouts are usually lower to compensate for the lower risk, but I’m still not a fan of the new focus and the consequential changes. Project Phantasma and Master of Arena were certainly expansions on the first game, but they had original stories and added new things. Another Age, by comparison, removes stuff. Little story, no arena, and not too many new parts. I did get a lot of use out of the quick turn extension and a laser rifle, but the rest are nothing special. There’s nothing wrong with changing and even removing stuff. However, most of what they did was simply remove the most unique elements in the series.
It should be clear that the game lives or dies on the missions. And so, the game dies. These missions went for quantity over quality. There are some cool ones. For example, there’s one where you shoot escape pods so they destroy the MTs inside before they land. There’s another where you jump from plane to plane fighting enemies. However, for each good mission, there’s at least two boring ones and a bad one. For an example of a bad one, there’s one mission where you have to go from floor to floor on elevators defeating enemies. All this really entails is killing enemies in a room, sitting in elevator for 20 seconds, reaching the next floor and repeating. What really sticks out about this mission to me is that they took an already boring mission (Kill all enemies/destroy a bunch of stuff, which already makes up like half of the missions here), and just stuck in elevator rides where you do nothing. It’s also worth noting that the missions in this game miss two major things:
1. A sense of continuity
2. A sense of dynamism
Let’s start with the first of these two. Despite having pretty much no story, this game does have a few mini stories within mission groups, but they don’t really leave much impact. Other than that, there’s really no overarching story. This is obviously because the game is non-linear in terms of what missions you do, but it ultimately means there’s no sense of escalation. Was it really worth sacrificing pacing for non-linearity? Even with the non-linear structure, there could’ve been a better attempt at worldbuilding or something. I mean, even the first game in this series, despite not having an arena, had a Raven ranking. It served no gameplay function, but it enhanced the world and encouraged the player. Players see themselves going up on this ranking and want to hit #1 by completing more missions. The only thing encouraging you here is your own intrinsic motivation (Which for me wasn’t particularly high), and the mission completion %. That’s it. What we have here is pretty much nothing. Nothing feels important or intriguing. Very few characters even have names.
What about the second element though? It’s always exciting in any game when you go in expecting something simple and end up on a greater quest. The most basic and common application of this in this series is ending a few missions with an unexpected AC boss. It happens a lot because it keeps the player on edge and makes missions a little more interesting. The biggest issue in Another Age is how often there’s no dynamism with missions. They’re too straightforward. Very rarely does your mission objective stray from the briefing. I honestly think that a better approach would’ve been fewer, longer missions that have a lot of variety and are dynamic. The developers would’ve had to make some changes to how the game handles resource management probably, but I think it could’ve been done, and it would’ve been much better in my opinion. At the very least, they should’ve prioritized quality over quantity, as I can’t take playing 100 of these generally middling missions.
That brings us to the final nail in the coffin: This game makes you complete every mission to beat the game. As if this game wasn’t repetitive enough. You can’t choose missions that you don’t like, only the order in which you play them. This did honestly mean all of the final missions were really tense, as they were the ones I skipped over before, but it doesn’t make the ending any less disappointing. Upon beating the final mission (Which has no real plot significance, of course), the game immediately goes to credits. No cutscene or anything.
Also, the game still doesn’t use analog sticks for movement and camera. Come on, you couldn’t just add that in? Ok, I guess this is an expansion game. They better add it in Armored core 3 though.
To be honest, while I have been critical of this series, it’s just very easy for me to keep playing them in a way that I don’t with other games. I finish them very fast. It was a little harder for this one though, taking me much more time to complete. Maybe that’s partially because it’s simply longer and I’ve returned to school, but I still beat Armored Core 2 very quickly. Overall, I’d say it’s the worst in the series I played so far. Well, aside from Armored Core V maybe, but that’s a story for another time…
In my Master of Arena review, I said that Armored Core was very similar to Pokemon. It’s clear that my comparison was far more apt than I initially thought. Both series have a very good basis with a lot of customization, but it seems that just like Pokemon, this series is pumping out releases in a way that isn’t good for these games. One-year development cycles weren’t uncommon in the 90s. The thing is, as technology has grown, so has the timeframe needed to take advantage of that tech. I’m afraid that as this series goes on, FromSoft won’t compensate for this. Hopefully I’m wrong. 4/10, very close to a 5.
The main thing that I heard about Another Age before going in was that the story was sparse and there’s no arena. Instead, there’s around 100 missions that can be tackled in a non-linear order. This kind of concerned me, because the arena was my favorite part in Armored Core 2, and while I wasn’t huge on that game’s story, I was hoping to see some improvements instead of a removal. Plus, the arena is important for balancing. If you don’t have the arena, there’s nothing to really stop players from deep debt, even if Human+ sticks a band-aid on the wound.
Well, that’s the first thing: Losing missions no longer loses you money. Ammo and repair is still costly and the payouts are usually lower to compensate for the lower risk, but I’m still not a fan of the new focus and the consequential changes. Project Phantasma and Master of Arena were certainly expansions on the first game, but they had original stories and added new things. Another Age, by comparison, removes stuff. Little story, no arena, and not too many new parts. I did get a lot of use out of the quick turn extension and a laser rifle, but the rest are nothing special. There’s nothing wrong with changing and even removing stuff. However, most of what they did was simply remove the most unique elements in the series.
It should be clear that the game lives or dies on the missions. And so, the game dies. These missions went for quantity over quality. There are some cool ones. For example, there’s one where you shoot escape pods so they destroy the MTs inside before they land. There’s another where you jump from plane to plane fighting enemies. However, for each good mission, there’s at least two boring ones and a bad one. For an example of a bad one, there’s one mission where you have to go from floor to floor on elevators defeating enemies. All this really entails is killing enemies in a room, sitting in elevator for 20 seconds, reaching the next floor and repeating. What really sticks out about this mission to me is that they took an already boring mission (Kill all enemies/destroy a bunch of stuff, which already makes up like half of the missions here), and just stuck in elevator rides where you do nothing. It’s also worth noting that the missions in this game miss two major things:
1. A sense of continuity
2. A sense of dynamism
Let’s start with the first of these two. Despite having pretty much no story, this game does have a few mini stories within mission groups, but they don’t really leave much impact. Other than that, there’s really no overarching story. This is obviously because the game is non-linear in terms of what missions you do, but it ultimately means there’s no sense of escalation. Was it really worth sacrificing pacing for non-linearity? Even with the non-linear structure, there could’ve been a better attempt at worldbuilding or something. I mean, even the first game in this series, despite not having an arena, had a Raven ranking. It served no gameplay function, but it enhanced the world and encouraged the player. Players see themselves going up on this ranking and want to hit #1 by completing more missions. The only thing encouraging you here is your own intrinsic motivation (Which for me wasn’t particularly high), and the mission completion %. That’s it. What we have here is pretty much nothing. Nothing feels important or intriguing. Very few characters even have names.
What about the second element though? It’s always exciting in any game when you go in expecting something simple and end up on a greater quest. The most basic and common application of this in this series is ending a few missions with an unexpected AC boss. It happens a lot because it keeps the player on edge and makes missions a little more interesting. The biggest issue in Another Age is how often there’s no dynamism with missions. They’re too straightforward. Very rarely does your mission objective stray from the briefing. I honestly think that a better approach would’ve been fewer, longer missions that have a lot of variety and are dynamic. The developers would’ve had to make some changes to how the game handles resource management probably, but I think it could’ve been done, and it would’ve been much better in my opinion. At the very least, they should’ve prioritized quality over quantity, as I can’t take playing 100 of these generally middling missions.
That brings us to the final nail in the coffin: This game makes you complete every mission to beat the game. As if this game wasn’t repetitive enough. You can’t choose missions that you don’t like, only the order in which you play them. This did honestly mean all of the final missions were really tense, as they were the ones I skipped over before, but it doesn’t make the ending any less disappointing. Upon beating the final mission (Which has no real plot significance, of course), the game immediately goes to credits. No cutscene or anything.
Also, the game still doesn’t use analog sticks for movement and camera. Come on, you couldn’t just add that in? Ok, I guess this is an expansion game. They better add it in Armored core 3 though.
To be honest, while I have been critical of this series, it’s just very easy for me to keep playing them in a way that I don’t with other games. I finish them very fast. It was a little harder for this one though, taking me much more time to complete. Maybe that’s partially because it’s simply longer and I’ve returned to school, but I still beat Armored Core 2 very quickly. Overall, I’d say it’s the worst in the series I played so far. Well, aside from Armored Core V maybe, but that’s a story for another time…
In my Master of Arena review, I said that Armored Core was very similar to Pokemon. It’s clear that my comparison was far more apt than I initially thought. Both series have a very good basis with a lot of customization, but it seems that just like Pokemon, this series is pumping out releases in a way that isn’t good for these games. One-year development cycles weren’t uncommon in the 90s. The thing is, as technology has grown, so has the timeframe needed to take advantage of that tech. I’m afraid that as this series goes on, FromSoft won’t compensate for this. Hopefully I’m wrong. 4/10, very close to a 5.