I played FE5 almost as a joke so my friends could watch it kill me in real life. I don't even like FE4. I wasn't prepared for this game to own. I wasn't prepared for it to unironically be series Top 3 material. What the fuck.

With a lot of beloved hard games, the refrain is that they're Hard But Fair. (I think it started with God Hand commercials?) Thracia's difficulty probably lives up to the hype, and the game is amazing, but I cannot overstate how much it's not fair. One of the great things is that it's hard to sum up why it's so difficult, because it's not any one main reason; the game is inventively sadistic. Every other chapter it pulls some shit that warrants brand new amendments to the Fantasy Geneva Conventions. In one map you may have to outrun an entire squadron of wyvern riders with Killer Lances who spawn closer to what you're trying to protect than you do and you're on slow ass mountain terrain. In another, you want to turn a bunch of powerful enemies into friendly green units by allowing them to talk to specific other green units, with no ability to steer either party toward each other, and also the enemies who are still red will immediately start butchering the turncoats. The game is an endless bag of absurd, dirty tricks being played on you personally, and it's honestly both hilarious to fail and immensely satisfying to finally solve the puzzle.

There are also a ton of little mechanical quirks, some of them infamous and none of which would be back-breaking on their own, but the cumulative effect requires your entire strategic mentality to be completely different from in any other game in the series. For example, most stats cap at 20 for every class, and a lot of your units honestly have pretty great growth rates, so that drastically changes the value of something as basic as EXP. The game actually has a Konami Code-style cheat you can use on the main menu to literally double everyone's EXP gains, but there's debate over whether it actually makes the game any easier. You gain items over the course of the game that increase a unit's growths, so everyone ballooning two thirds of the way to level cap before you get most of them can actually kind of fuck you. Love it or hate it, I think it takes an incredibly interesting game to make a unilateral gigantic level boost potentially disadvantageous to the player. Also, you've probably heard that healing can miss; that's not actually one of your bigger problems (though it can really come in clutch to ruin an entire plan sometimes), but it is an extremely funny indicator of the game's overall attitude towards the player. There are a lot of other innovations you don't hear about as oddities because they simply stuck around; weird and brutal as it is, the game feels shockingly modern (or I suppose I should say "like a 2000s-era Fire Emblem") compared to the other Shouzou Kaga games.

But the most important feature, and another one you've probably heard of, is the capture mechanic--you can actually nonlethally disable enemies (and steal all their shit)! But something you might not pick up on until you're playing the game is that it's basically your only source of income. You get a pretty typical number of items from treasure chests and villages, sure, but enemies never drop anything when killed, shop prices are fucking exorbitant and you NEVER, at any point in the game, get any money in any way other than selling items. There aren't even gems or anything that exist only to sell for a lot, everything you can sell is potentially useful in its own right and you get peanuts compared to how much it would cost to buy the same thing. It's not a minor or optional mechanic; if you like it when your army has weapons, you need to be capturing on an extremely regular basis. It makes for a really crunchy, interesting in-game economy where you're basically always tense about your equipment.

Luckily, the other really important thing about capturing is that it's really fucking hard and dangerous. You have to defeat the enemy anyway to capture them; you can't do it on enemy phase so it often requires some tricky baiting; some units can almost never do it at all because you need higher constitution than the enemy; doing it with other enemies around will definitely get someone killed because you have severe stat penalties while holding a captive; and worst of all, using the Capture command instead of Attack also gives you stat penalties. It turns out fighting with edged weapons is harder when you're trying not to kill the fucker, what's up with that?

This also means the better the loot, the harder it is to get, since rare and valuable items tend to be carried by stronger enemies who are deeper behind enemy lines. You're basically running a cost-benefit analysis every time you see something you really want; you may have to stick your entire head in a blender to get it, but can you afford to pass it up? The game is hard right now, but it's not gonna get any easier later on, especially if you're not building a stockpile of exactly this kind of resource. That extra Warp staff will be a huge lifeline. Did I mention that the guy is using it every turn, so by the time you get to him and take it, having run fucking pell-mell through an obstacle course of siege weaponry and cavalry that overextended you for the rest of the map, it has one cast left? The game is littered with honey pots like this, where it dangles something you DESPERATELY want in front of you, then makes it so difficult and costly to get that you don't realize it's not worth it until you're already hard committed. I hear you laughing at me, Kaga, you weird chauvinist fuck! This still doesn't make you cool!

So obviously I'm an idiot masochist, but there is more than pain here. Counterintuitively, for how much you're suffering, you get to fuck around with some of the strongest units in the series. (Relative to the game around them. Their stats cap at 20 they should not fight FE10 units--) You form the kind of attachment to characters like Mareeta and Asbel, to name just a couple of the more extreme examples, that you can normally only get with people you've ACTUALLY been to war with. They're your fucking rock. A fixed point you can rely on when you need them most.

It also helps that, in moderation, you get to be just as sadistic as the game. I know I just spent a small novel hyping up the scarcity of resources, but the thing about the game making you fight like hell to get anything is that it can make a lot more crazy stuff technically available. You won't get out of this map with a Brave Sword, a Sleep staff, a promotion item and two Silver weapons--but with some elbow grease you can probably get a couple of them, and that actually gives you a lot of freedom. Your toolkit is both limited and potentially really potent, and sometimes you realize you have the right combination of staves or something to completely ratfuck a challenge that looked impossible at first glance, as a reward for having worked hard earlier in the game. That's a rare, amazing feeling.

Okay, this is a stupid sentence but it's my review and it can be stupid if I want: I haven't played Pathologic, but FE5 kind of makes me feel the way people describe Pathologic. I mean, I wouldn't call them similar games, the narrative here is not exactly high art, but it's a story about being a scrappy underdog rebel faction fighting a huge empire and the gameplay genuinely commits to that feeling. It is impossible to forget while playing this game that everything is working against you, you have nothing but what you can desperately claw out of somebody else's hands, and you cannot win by fighting fair. Thracia really is a harrowing game, but inside the infamous struggle is something that sticks with you; something bold, fascinating, and incredibly rewarding.

although Saias being arbitrarily immune to Sleep and Silence in chapter 22 is fucking--

holy shit, holy shit, holy shit, why are video games so GOOD

I haven't played any of the other games in the King's Field metaseries (yet). I got here mostly because a lot of people were going around recommending it to everyone who liked Lunacid, last year's really good indie tribute to them. The influence is impossible to miss, but Lunacid is still going for quite a different mood from the source material; Shadow Tower: Abyss is a lot less friendly and nostalgic, and it's even more atmospheric and mysterious--perhaps the most so of any game I've ever played.

It's kind of amazing just how strong of a case it makes for art direction over graphical fidelity, and that's coming from someone who's been playing that tune faithfully for decades. Fromsoft was still dealing in the low budget range in the PS2 era, but even by their standards... let's just say you could show me quite a few screenshots of this game telling me it was on the PS1 before I got suspicious. It's not even like it's a really early PS2 game, 2003 was around the middle of the console's lifespan.

And yet, however angular the models and crispy the textures, and despite its world and inhabitants often being deliberately grotesque, Abyss's overall effect manages to be hauntingly beautiful. The environments are highly varied, but I don't think I'll ever get the sort of main hub area out of my mind. You walk around on earthy platforms suspended high in a vast, pitch-dark cavern, lit neon green by sources clearly neither natural nor manmade, populated by bizarre creatures that just stare at you with obvious distrust and speak to you either in cryptic, just-short-of-hostile sentence fragments or not at all, and all the time you'll periodically hear strange, loud noises that seem to come from everywhere and nowhere. Like Jesus CHRIST, guys, leave some cool spooky vibes for literally every other game in the world! There are poor Metroidvanias starving in the Epic Store!

But the enigma of this game goes beyond the aching need to see more of its fucked up world. I finished it, and there are very few questions I could possibly answer about its core RPG mechanics. The controls and UI are, affectionately, riddled with retrojank and nothing in the game explains itself even a little beyond item descriptions that spare maybe five words for the purpose. There's no map aside from the occasional crude one scrawled on a wall, and the level design gets labrynthine. You can full heal by sacrificing a piece of equipment at certain spots, and you repair equipment by sacrificing some of your health at others. There are items I picked up that I never figured out any use for at all. What the hell kind of stat is Solvent? What's the difference between Mind and Mentality? What do these status effects actually do? Okay, you have a carrying weight capacity and if you go over it it slows you down, that's perfectly basic, but I can't seem to drop items so I guess I'm just in slow-mo until I get back to the little shop node and pawn some things off, might as well keep picking up looh my god I'm moving even slower now and TAKING A SHITLOAD OF DAMAGE OVER TIME WHAT--

I'm not usually a "don't use a guide" kind of girl, but seriously, don't try to use a guide. I'm not convinced you'll find one that answers a lot of these questions, anyway. The game is honestly, and surprisingly, not super hard as long as you stock up on healing potions and watch the extremely fragile durability of your gear. You don't need to optimize, and it's more unnerving and intriguing than frustrating to get lost in these levels. Combat is extremely basic aside from a cool dismemberment mechanic (most enemies will not necessarily die if you cut off their heads, fun detail!), but that's because it's not the main draw. The game is also pretty short, maybe a ten hour joint or so.

Play Shadow Tower: Abyss. I can be cagey about actually universally recommending games since my tastes can run to the esoteric and janky, and that's extremely the case here, but I don't think that does anything but enhance the experience. If you have literally any interest in dungeon crawlers or surreal, dark fantasy as a genre or aesthetic, play it. You deserve to give this game a serious try as much as the game deserves to be a household name.

I really like Lunacid, but it's a game that's strangely difficult to try to hype up.

You rotate it in your head, dissect it in the manner of a typical review, and analyze the components, and you can't really point to any individual aspect of it that's much better than Decent. The combat and RPG mechanics work well enough, but they're pretty basic and not exactly finely balanced. The level design is maze-y in a way that I'd usually hate, but I don't here. The characters are immediately endearing, but dialogue and interactions with them are very sparse. The story is a cliffnotes version of an actual Fromsoft game, and yes, I know that's saying a lot. The atmosphere is probably the most consistently on point thing, but even then, there's a lot of competition on that front in the Spooky Indie Game space.

None of these aspects are bad, either, mind, especially for a game made by a team of one. It's objectively very impressive on that merit, but I didn't really have that in the forefront of my mind while playing. It's not why I like it. So why do I like it?

I don't know if I've ever played a game that (successfully) coasted more on Vibes. I'm not the first person to say it, but Lunacid really does evoke a sense of nostalgia, and not because it's a tribute to an older series. I've never played King's Field (though considering other holes I've fallen into recently it's probably only a matter of time).

The game is tapping into something more primal and less specific than that. It makes you feel the way it felt, as a child, to play a weird exploration-heavy game you didn't really understand. Occasionally I've seen people attribute this quality to Souls games, but as much as I love them, I don't really get this feeling from them, or certainly not this extent.

There's a cryptic but more importantly inviting surrealism to Lunacid. The world is dark and desolate, but the core NPCs are upbeat and adorable. The music is spooky, but often oddly soothing. Several minor mechanics are tied to the real-world phase of the moon. The story gives you enough information to understand it pretty easily on reflection, but withholds just enough to create some delightfully baffling sequences in the moment.

The game is also shockingly reactive to experimentation--not in the Baldur's Gate way, but specifically to the type of strange, kind-of-logical-kind-of-not shit you might throw at a wall to unlock secrets in a retro game. You find spells with strange effects but no clear practical application, consumables that exist just to trick you, tiny interactions unique to specific starting classes. Considering the game's humble scope, there's an impressively strong sense that anything can happen.

It must be said that surprisingly, given its cited inspirations, Lunacid is not a hard game. I suppose it depends on your build, but the combat mechanics are simple enough that it doesn't take a genius to see what works. I'm not complaining, as a lifelong fan of being overpowered in games, but there's a reason most action RPGs don't tie your actual movement speed to a stat you can increase as much as you want. Level up Speed and get a decent way of dealing ranged damage, and there are very few enemies in the game that can do basically anything to you unless they catch you by surprise.

But to be fair, the game is pretty good at surprises; some enemies have massive resistance or even immunity to certain damage types, status effects can be brutal, and if you took my advice and specced into magic or ranged weapons you might be pretty fragile when you do take a hit. Add to that the game sometimes being very stingy with save points, and exploring a new area can still be decently tense.

Lunacid is a game that's more than the sum of its parts, and, I think, a game that really needs to be met on its own terms. Approached skeptically, it'd be very easy to write the whole thing off very quickly. If you're like me and you're charmed right from the character creation screen, it's just as easy to ride that feeling all the way to the end.

A solid kiddie pool version of Devil May Cry stapled to maybe 10% of a just-about-average RPG. I didn't have much of a horse in the "should Final Fantasy pivot to action" race before it came out, and I guess even after playing it it's like, Okay, the results are Okay, this was maybe the Okayest game I played in 2023. It's just that you might hope a huge, deliberate change in a long-running series' identity would be, for better or for worse, more interesting than Okay.

Honestly, the RPG elements are so vestigial that I don't know who or what they're for. Surely nobody who was mad about Yoshi-P's comments about turn-based JRPGs was appeased by this incredibly perfunctory crafting system? Why do you level up in a game where leveling up has no non-numerical effects and there's not enough exploration to ever encounter enemies that aren't close to your level? Why do you have party members if you can't affect their behavior or equipment or skills or stats in any way and also the main one is Jill, a Dedicated Young Woman with No Characteristics? It feels like a game full of insincere half-apologies for being what it is.

The combat is quite good, if very simple and easy by the standards of the genre it's aping. It feels good to hit dudes with your sword, and Square-Enix has definitely struggled with that type of gamefeel before. It was a good idea to bring in Ryota Suzuki. I wouldn't want to throw around strong words like "depth," but I feel like the eikon powers give you just enough variety to be able to make relevant choices about your playstyle.

Sometimes people gas up the story and I feel, like, just a little secondhand embarrassment? I mean, I've seen. Worse stories about sci-fi/fantasy racism. That bar is not high. Clive as a character has his moments, I guess, but they're brief and don't amount to much. I wanna say the story gets dumber the more the big main plot (which has almost nothing to do with the racism plotline that dominates at least two thirds of the game and never gets a climax or resolution) unveils itself, but really it's a pretty uniform background level of dumb, the endgame is just more boring because you're not waiting to see if certain things pay off.

It was just kind of really funny seeing this get nominated for Best RPG when 1.) that's stretching the definition of RPG and 2.) it is not even fucking close to being the best RPG released by specifically Square-Enix in 2023.

Compellingly bizarre game. Unsurprisingly, it kind of sucks. Also, it owns.

Ahem, one thing: the consensus on this site seems to be to use the default Formula Front but this one is listed too and it's the one I played. Honestly, the situation regarding this game's releases alone is incredibly confusing, and sources on the internet do not seem to agree about the basic facts. Like, did the original Formula Front even come out in the west? Did Formula Front: Extreme Battle come out in the west before Japan and that's why Formula Front International exists? Does the PS2 version that never got localized contain exclusive content, or is that stuff in International? (Backloggd's own blurb about this version is incorrect, I'm almost certain, this is a totally different thing from International.) I genuinely don't know what the fuck.

This confusion is part of why I had initially decided to skip Formula Front, the other reason being... basically the whole elevator pitch. This is the most Spinoffy Armored Core game, probably even including Nine Breaker (which I haven't played yet but I'm going by what I've read). It has the least content, story or otherwise, of any game in the series; this game consists entirely of the arena, and it's not even as big an arena as a lot of games. There are a few mandatory rematches that don't advance your rank--I didn't think to count how many--but all told I think you need to win about 40 1-on-1 fights to beat the game, and that's it.

There's also no real sense of character progression, because you have everything unlocked and freely available from the start; there isn't even a money mechanic in the game at all. The difficulty balance is goofy; I got stuck for a while on a good few fights, then beat the final boss (who the game spent its entire story, such as it is, hyping up) in one try. Hell, even the music kind of sucks, which is very strange for Armored Core.

More importantly, and strangely, in the initial release you couldn't actually play the game. Okay, that's an exaggeration; what you don't play is the combat, which is carried out by a "trainable" AI (this aspect is underbaked, I could get my AI to have some pretty impressive maneuvering skills but it always seemed to be dumb as a rock beyond that). Instead, this game is entirely about the process of building an effective AC, which in all fairness is definitely a huge part of the series' gameplay and appeal. I can see the logic, too; they wanted to put out a PSP game, but even old-school Armored Core controls need more shoulder buttons than the PSP has.

(It must be noted that for all releases past the original Formula Front, including Extreme Battle, the option to control your ACs manually was added, but on top of the controls being weird and uncomfortable even by Armored Core standards... well, I'll get to that in a second.)

So, why did I end up playing this game? Simple: I've been taking a break from games I need to play with a controller due to a minor hand injury, but navigating the menus to play Formula Front as originally intended was easy to map to kb/m. I mean, uh... something something legitimate copy--

The manual vs. AI decision is a fascinating paradox; watching the computer fight itself like you've set up an all-CPUs match in Super Smash Bros. feels kind of deeply sad at first, and is definitely a less enjoyable experience than just being able to play a Normal Armored Core Game. But the thing is... manual controls just makes this a significantly worse version of a Normal Armored Core Game. I firmly believe the best way to experience this game is to stick with the AI and get into the intended mindset:

This is a game about managing a sports team. Like, textually. That's (what passes for) the plot. But the main enjoyment to be had from it comes from treating it like you're watching a sport, while having a tangible vested interest in your team winning. It gives you five slots for ACs despite all the fights being one-on-one, which seems odd until you gradually, but automatically, start thinking of them as actual characters. It's the kind of emergent storytelling you might get out of a roguelike or a Nuzlocke in Pokemon; you find yourself cheering or criticizing your ACs while you watch them fight, feeling genuine tension during close matches, picking favorites, calling them your children.

Or maybe you have to be the same kind of weirdo as me for that.

But if you are, it's a lot of fun despite the, like, Everything about this game. And it's a really unique kind of fun, which I think the attempts to bring it more in line with a mainline game mostly just undermine. It's also extremely short, so the admittedly silly and gimmicky appeal doesn't really risk overstaying its welcome. It's probably for the best that it's one of a kind, but that just makes it well worth a shot if you're in the mood for something quirky and obscure.

I'm glad you were here with me. Here at the end of all things, Zinaida.

When it became official that I had gone insane and was going to Play Every Armored Core, I knew Last Raven had to be the last one. On top of being thematically the end of an era, it is by reputation the hardest game in the series, or depending on who you ask, the hardest FromSoftware game ever. I made the right choice, because this was an incredible note on which to end my idiotic nerd ass journey.

First things first: I think the difficulty is somewhat overhyped. I could be wrong; they say Nine Breaker, piece of shit that it is, is supposed to legitimately teach you how to play Armored Core properly. Maybe it actually worked. Maybe I'm good at video games now. Either way, Last Raven is definitely hard, but for my money, if you know how to counterbuild there are only a few really extreme spikes. It's not a grueling game. For my money.

More importantly, it's just, fuck. FUCK, this game is good. It further refines Nexus's big mechanical changes and then gives you drastically better material to engage with them. The mission design here is just about peak; there are a limited number of maps and it pulls that Another Age trick of having multiple missions where you're on different sides of what is clearly the same incident, but the map design is great (mostly), the scenarios are rich and varied and keep you guessing, and the pacing is airtight.

Combat itself is also incredible. This is my favorite arena in the series; I beat most fights in one or two tries but they were brutal, exciting tries. The AI behaves differently in Last Raven than in most games, but I don't know if I should say it's smarter or slightly dumber. Enemy Ravens have preferred strategies, are aggressive yet reactive to what you're doing, and generally seem to behave more logically--which can make them more predictable, in a good way. They're not pushovers (infamously, every single one of them has Human Plus/OP-INTENSIFY effects even though the player can't get those in this game), but beating one really feels like you're outsmarting a rival.

In general, the level of polish and depth on display here is as much what makes it natural Grand Finale material as anything. There's such a sense of completeness to Last Raven; every game that came before it was study material, and this is the exam. It's oldgen Armored Core in its most evolved form. There's a sense that something has been perfected, not in the sense that it's totally without flaws but in that it's realized its full potential at being what it is. It gives you kind of an insight into why AC4 was such a huge shift in direction; where the hell else would you go from here?

The story is kind of gonzo (affectionate), if only because of the structure. This is the first game in the series with multiple endings, and the one with the largest number at six (or seven, depending on what you count). The way this works is: a single playthrough is only between ten and fifteen missions long, you're choosing between several mission options at almost every stage, and there's an absurdly intricate and totally invisible pathing system in which previous mission choices dictate future options, eventually locking you into an ending.

Use a guide. You can get your first ending blind if you want (I did), but if your goal is to find everything yourself I do not know how long it's gonna take you. This is all paired with the ridiculous (affectionate) premise that the game, representing about a dozen discrete fully organized combat missions carried out by a single person, takes place over the course of 24 hours--you know, like that TV show. What was it called again?

This wacky progression structure is a double-edged sword, though; I consider it both one of the many good things about the game and probably the worst thing. It's a type of ambitious jank I tend to love and respect, but it must be said that on top of playing through six times for the six endings, according to the guide I'm using it takes at least another four to complete all missions, which is the requirement for unlocking a sort of EX Boss that I very much intend to get to. It's a short game, but ten runs is pushing it, especially considering how many times you have to repeat certain missions to get to the new ones.

In a lot of ways I was surprised by how forgiving Last Raven is, considering the reputation. As in Nexus before it, it's honestly quite difficult to lose money on a mission; even if you barely survive, most payouts are going to be larger than expenses on the order of a full digit or even two. Nexus's tuning mechanic no longer costs you anything, either. The upshot is that if you're importing a save and getting a head start on collecting parts, you will have more money than you could possibly spend at pretty much all times.

This is important context for the parts damage mechanic you may have heard of, in which it's actually possible for parts of your AC to be permanently destroyed so that you have to buy replacements; with how rich you are, this is not a major concern. And frankly it's very rare anyway; you have to be VERY near death, and even then it's far from a guarantee that a particular body part will have taken enough hits. The mechanic is more of a funny curiosity; it's kind of hilarious to get out of a really clutch fight and see the default legs on your AC in the garage.

That said, when the game decides to get really hard it does get really hard. A lot of people wholeheartedly advise you to give yourself an approximation of Human Plus with cheat codes; if every enemy is using it, why not level the playing field, right? I definitely don't blame or judge anyone who decides to do that, but I was having a good enough time that I didn't want to. The final boss of the sixth route, the most notorious fight in the game, almost broke me. Part of what stopped me is that it seemed so impossible at first that I wasn't sure how much H+ would even help.

But it was, unironically, a skill issue; I wasted a lot of time overthinking what build would be best, but I ended up literally just doing it with double rifles. All you need for Zinaida is patient, defensive play, good movement fundamentals, and Execution. Can't relate to people who get tilted at her. I for one love to see a girlboss win.

Armored Core: Last Raven is absolutely one of the best games in the series. I can't recommend it enough, but it's definitely worth playing at least through the rest of gen 3 first. The whole experience is designed to be an Ending, so make it a satisfying one.

Good work, Ravens. Let's head back.

Before following up Demon's Souls with Dark Souls, Hidetaka Miyazaki followed up Armored Core 4 with Armored Core: For Answer. The man has many talents, but one quirk, at least early in his career, was being a master of the Second Draft.

AC4 was a fairly bold game, mechanically--for all its faults, it innovated heavily on the Armored Core formula with drastically higher speed gameplay, revised lockon/aiming mechanics to better suit that speed, looser build restrictions, and more. Nonetheless, as a complete experience it was janky and threadbare, and the new mechanics just didn't quite coalesce into truly great action.

For Answer fixed it. Not only is the core combat enhanced with even more freedom of movement, new techniques, heavy balance changes, and, of course, More Parts; not only that, but the content of the game is now actually designed to take advantage of it.

Apart from having more interesting objectives and conditions than 4's, most missions take place in huge, huge environments, vast playgrounds to over(ed)boost across in seconds. Normal enemies are barely roadbumps, but the story prominently features Arms Forts, gigantic setpiece bosses that make even your ten meter tall flying robot look like a mouse, or in some cases perhaps an ant. But even Arms Forts are seldom as threatening as other NEXTs.

Sorry--a NEXT is a player model AC in gen 4, contrasted with Normals, which are literally just generic enemies. This is why you're so much faster and more powerful than in the rest of the series; think of NEXTs as being to Armored Cores what Gundams are to Mobile Suits. Pretty much every game in the series has you fighting other ACs built with the same parts the player has access to and obeying the same mechanics (unless they cheat. they do frequently cheat), but perhaps moreso than ever, these duels are the heart and soul of For Answer. The action is both lightning fast and prone to becoming a tense, protracted struggle; after all, anything you can do, enemy NEXTs can do, too.

There are some rough edges, of course ; it didn't delete all of 4's jank. For one thing, you may want to change the regulations to something earlier than the default, up-to-date 1.4 (there is a simple menu setting to do this). At least in the PS3 version, the later regulations cause severe slowdown in some fights, particularly if you're fighting over water or there are a lot of explosions happening. That's right: they actually patched framerate issues in to a game that was fine on release. And then, judging by 1.4 being the final version, they never fixed it. I've literally never heard of such a thing.

But hey, at least it's fun to experiment with the different regs, because the balance swings all over the place between them to an insane degree. Want extremely generous energy requirements on boosting, meaning you can basically be flying around at top speed at all times? Try 1.20. Want infinite energy, as like a joke god mode? 1.15. Want seemingly generic missile launchers to be the most absurdly overpowered weapon you've ever seen in a game? 1.0, baby. Just be aware that these are changes to how NEXTs and their parts work, not specifically the player; the game's main enemies will also benefit from whatever gonzo shit you're giving yourself.

The story... is it one of the better Armored Core stories? Honestly, that can be a tricky question with this series. For better or for worse, it's more in line with the earlier games than 4's, with more of a focus on politics and worldbuilding than character drama. But it does feature the protagonist of 4 returning as a badass (and still silent) heroic rival character, piloting one of the coolest robots in the series, and honestly that kind of thing makes it easy to get swept up in the hype. For Answer's story is vague but very big, almost feeling like a mythology more than anything. It's also one of the few Armored Core games with multiple endings, which helps it feel like there's more meat on the bone than in 4 even if a single playthrough is still very short.

For Answer is one of the Armored Core games that you most often see people cite as the best one, and it's easy to see why. Are there areas in which it's handily outdone? Certainly. But above all, for a game built mostly off of another one's bones, it's absolutely one of a kind. You can't get robot fights paced like this anywhere else. Accept no substitutes.

"The characters only have a few conversations with each other!" pop quiz, in no fewer than 200 words describe the fleshed out and engaging relationships between Garrus and Liara or Astarion and Wyll

"It's so grindy!" unironically skill issue, sorry the combat system expects you to learn it instead of brute forcing the entire game with Big Number

"The stories and characters are boring!" you are not worthy to be a worm in the dirt upon which Primrose Azelhart walks

Okay, so I've been militant about this game as like... 5-10% a joke for years. In seriousness, I can acknowledge it's a flawed gem, especially now that it has a sequel that absolutely transcends it.

But I love the anthology-style story, as uneven as the characters are some of them (see above) are great, the artstyle and especially the music should be the stuff of legends, and the Octopath combat system is simply my favorite for a pure RPG, all time. It has a ton of depth but it's also so punchy and bombastic, the sound design alone on the break and boost mechanics is satisfying on an almost indecent level. There's no dopamine rush quite like fighting a group of enemies, systematically wearing down their shields so that they all break on the same turn, and vaporizing them with a fully-boosted AoE spell. It's a system that's tense and challenging and asks a lot of you strategically, and at the same time routinely makes you feel like a wrathful god if you use all the tools at your disposal and meet those demands. Absolutely peak.

The worst thing you can say about Octopath Traveler is that it's not Octopath Traveler II, but that's a devastatingly cruel comparison to make for most games.

A gigantic, triumphant improvement over Armored Core V, Verdict Day beats the odds to merely be very bad.

I already went on an unhinged rant about my problems with ACV, most of which were just barely less severe this time around, but I do want to say that Verdict Day has plenty of content laid over this totally irredeemable framework that I would love to have experienced in pretty much any other game. Like... there's some pretty decent writing, in an old-school AC way; you get character profiles of AC pilots after killing them in missions, which is a small thing that does (relatively) a lot to make the campaign feel less like an afterthought. Missions are also no longer atrociously long and samey (though the difficulty has been ramped up considerably), there are better and more varied maps, some of the new frame parts they added aren't as ugly. Strides have certainly been made.

The final boss gets hyped up a lot and: genuinely yes, it's an absolute standout as the best thing in the game visually, conceptually, and even mechanically. It's a pretty fun fight! I liked the actual gameplay of it! But like... I don't know if it's "play all of Armored Core Verdict Day for this" good. You can watch it on Youtube, frankly, it's not like the context of the rest of the game adds much. (The context of having played For Answer, however...)

If it wasn't obvious, I didn't fuck with multiplayer at all. There are a variety of reasons for this, but there's only a couple of months left that the multiplayer will even exist, so if the idea isn't as repellent to you as it is to me, you should probably hurry.

I'm not sure I can adequately explain how a game that is mechanically almost identical to several much better games can feel this bad to play. I mean, it's not a complicated problem. That almost is the problem. AC2 does not do much to stand out, nor does it excel at any of the safe, series-standard beats. It radiates "skip me" energy, so of course I didn't.

I think it ails from being a launch title, albeit not in the usual launch title ways. It's built too closely on the gen 1 Armored Core games to really have problems with bugs or untested core mechanics, and the graphics are pretty decent for 2000. (Granted, it's easier to make robots look good than humans, which Armored Core famously never shows.) Rather, the rushed feeling comes from how, just... dull it can be.

Mission design is basic and repetitive; I'm hard pressed to cite examples because I honestly don't remember more than a very small handful of the missions. At time of writing, I started my playthrough of this game about a month ago. I do recall quite a few of of them consisting of "there's a huge number of annoying airplanes flying in circles around the area, shoot them all" or "there's a huge number of annoying bug aliens crawling around the area, shoot them all."

I cannot overstate "huge number" or "annoying" here. Look. Armored Core, for the most part, is hard. Famous for it. I've played a lot of games in this series so far, and I've had a great time with some really hard ones. I've liked games harder than AC2 a lot better than AC2. So please understand me when I say that AC2 is too fucking hard. It's not like it's the hardest game in the series, the problem is it's just not interestingly hard; there are too many goddamn enemies in every goddamn mission and they do too much damage and have too much HP. These are not cool, exciting fights; the average mission in this game is just an overstuffed, overlong battle of attrition against moderately overtuned versions of enemies that would be one-shottable trash mobs in a normal game. The major refrain of this game is me going "there's no way that wasn't the last wavegod DAMMIT that's SO MANY MORE." I feel like the high-ranking arena opponents also cheat more than usual, but I wouldn't swear to that; the arena being ridiculous in old gen is almost a feature.

It's not all bad; the story has a pretty solid hook, at least if you have the context of having played Master of Arena (I hadn't when I first played this). It's also one of the funnier games in the series, partly because of the arena opponent blurbs but mostly because of the voice acting (we should revoke every Oscar ever awarded and give them to Emeraude Briefings Guy, who invented acting, accents, and the concept of rolling one's R's. thank you, Emeraude Briefings Guy). The last mission is also quite a decent finale, although that ties in to the story again.

All in all, AC2 isn't the worst game ever or anything, but the odds I revisit it are remote. The admittedly formulaic nature of the first, like... seven games in the series really hurts it here; it's simply outdone in every possible way by several other games.

Easily the second-best RPG of 2023.

I don't think it's really worth doing a deep dive into my opinions on BG3 because even though I didn't play it until December, I can kind of already feel it not really making much of a lasting impression on me. Like, it's good. I think it actually says a lot that BG3 is one of the very few big choice-driven/immersive simmy WRPGs I've been able to enjoy at all, which is why I'm not making this review a weird, intense rant about the genre as a whole.

But like... I dunno. That's just kind of all. It's Good. A well-above-average execution of a pretty old set of ideas about game structure and progression that I've always thought were radically overhyped. I guess it's kind of like Breath of the Wild in that respect, where a game comes across as revolutionary mostly just because it combines the basic appeal of its genre with, like, actual decent game des--oh I'm doing my WRPG rant AND my open world rant, I'm terribly sorry. Anyway.

Yeah, I had a lot of fun with BG3. Got messier in the third act, as everyone says. The combat can hit great highs, the game does make it feel really rewarding sometimes to solve a problem in an unorthodox way, and there's some decent character writing elevated by phenomenal performances. The plot is... certainly the events of the work devised and presented by writers as an interrelated sequence. (I couldn't, like, tear it apart as something fundamentally broken in construction, but the more they revealed about what was actually happening the more I kind of checked out in terms of personal investment.)

I'm almost inclined to call a shot that a few Larian games from now, a lot of people are going to turn on them and form oddly angry opinions about how overrated they've always been, with BG3 as a major sticking point. I'm not wishing for that or anything, I just feel like it's usually the fate of AAA games that become huge, huge critical darlings for high art value despite... kind of clearly being more of a really solid popcorn movie affair. That's kind of where I'm at with Baldur's Gate 3: it's the best MCU movie.

play Octopath Traveler 2

Remember Ocarina of Time: Master Quest? Where they just kind of did a big random remix of the content in a normal game that was designed with purpose, and it was a kind of amusing novelty but clearly, objectively worse than the original?

Remember how Master Quest was like a bonus disc thing and not billed as a remaster and sold for full price? And how they didn't just treat it as the definitive version in collections and stuff going forward?

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Armored Core 5 is one of those very divisive entries in a franchise that feature some major shakeup that leads a sort of generalization that fans who didn't like it are in one way or another unfairly biased, or resistant to change.

Well, despite the insane marathon of the series I've been doing I've been an AC fan for all of three months. I have no deep-seated ideas about what the series is allowed to be. I've liked every other generation, which means I've liked some very different visions of the series. I knew this game's reputation going in. I did my research. I really, actively, wholeheartedly wanted to like it. I am not afraid of change, I like games with slow-paced tactical action, I think walljumps are cool. Not one of the stereotypical Bad Reasons not to like Armored Core 5 apply to me.

Mothers and fuckers of the jury, I assure you: there are plenty of good reasons not to like Armored Core 5. (You... you might want to settle in. I'm the kind of asshole who can talk for a lot longer about a game I hate than one I like.)

Well, mainly there's one or two really inescapably massive ones, but there are plenty of more basic areas where the game is just straightforwardly not good even at what it specifically wants to do. Let's start with one of the big problems, because it's extremely obvious and ties in to a lot of the smaller ones:

This is a heavily, heavily (online, no split-screen) multiplayer-focused game with long dead servers. I'm given to understand it's still possible to arrange a basic versus match with a P2P connection, but most game modes are no longer possible to play in any capacity.

And to be honest, I would absolutely categorically not be here for a mainly multiplayer experience even if that experience still existed, but that's not, like, a Bad thing about the game, that would be a matter of taste. There is a story campaign, which you used to be able to play co-op, and I'm not the type to begrudge a game for being a little short. I was fine with just blowing through the story and moving on. In theory.

It's not a good campaign. The plot is maybe the thinnest in the series outside of the games that literally don't have one, and I know that's saying a lot. It does have some decent banter with a persistent main cast of characters, but bantering between giving you orders is about all they're there to do.

More importantly, the mission design is mediocre at its very best. They're a small number of very long missions with a lot of updates to your objectives as you go, which sounds like the kind of thing that would make them really involved and memorable, but the thing is the objectives are almost always "go here and fight stuff on the way" and they take place on what are clearly multiplayer maps. The game doesn't have a ton of those; even in its grand total of ten missions, there are several outright repeats. And frankly I can't really tell how many maps there are because most of them are just different segments of the same big city area, which are just about distinct enough to be able to tell that they're not the same map but still basically mean the terrain is There's Some Buildings.

That's purposeful; the core gameplay requires a lot of cover and you can only gain any real altitude by jumping off walls, so there's a big focus on urban combat. That doesn't actually make it fun level design; everything looks the fucking same. It would be the absolute worst kind of level to try to navigate, but navigation is not a major concern because the game gives you a Detective Scan Mode. Scan Mode displays not just an objective marker but an entire routed path towards it... which just means the huge areas are functionally decoration on a set of Shooter Corridors. Admittedly the whole series can be big on corridors, but at least in other games you sometimes have to actually search them, or get aesthetics on them beside City Streets and Sewer Tunnels Under City Streets.

Technically there are also a huge number of Order Missions, which are sort of non-story mini-missions you can also play solo, but I did about 30 of these and they're pretty firmly Nothing. Like, "destroy all enemies (there are four of them and they're just completely normal enemies)" material. These also just take place on the same small handful of maps, but the enemies tend to be concentrated in a pretty small area. A few of the Order Missions are AC duels and take the place of the game having an Arena; you can hunt down which ones those are and cherry pick them if you really want, but otherwise, the Order Missions are about as egregiously Filler as any content in an Armored Core game. Don't bother.

The Tactical Combat might have been a less empty promise when the game had multiplayer, but in the campaign it's a joke. What Tactics means is that aside from a smattering of big bosses and AC minibosses, there are four or five types of enemies in the game, and they each have one extremely specific behavior and one or two equally specific hard counters. Snipers? The laser sights are visible at all times, trace them back to the source and shoot them. They will not move unless you stand fully on their perch with them for like ten seconds. Big slow shield guys? Go around them or switch to your sword to smash the shield. The little flying fuckers? Groan in annoyed misery and shoot them when they decide to come near you. The other little flying fuckers, who try to suicide bomb you? This is strictly easier than the first kind because they always come near you. Good tactical combat feels kind of like solving a puzzle, but the puzzle in AC5's story missions is designed to teach basic shapes to toddlers. It's technically more methodical than the more action-based combat of other Armored Core games, but just enough so to call attention to how mindless and repetitive it is. I wouldn't say most of the game is super easy, but only because.... god. Not yet. Put a pin in that.

Even AC building was kind of the least fun it's ever been, to me. The maps are another example of this, but builds are where I really think the single-player content suffers from the multiplayer focus. In any other Armored Core game, you're building for playstyles. You'll want to change up your build a lot depending on the mission, but it still feels like you have kind of a personal connection to how you choose to tackle a problem. (Which now that I mention it is much more satisfying Tactical Gameplay than anything you'll get out of 5's campaign.)

In AC5 the build process is geared towards building for Team Composition. What this mostly means, and cannot be neglected even in single player, is that you have to consider Type Matchups. There are three damage types in this game, and corresponding defense stats for each, with both weapons and armor divided by type. (Honestly almost every type of part is subdivided into categories like this, in a way that I feel kind of dumbs down the process of comparing and contrasting them; you don't have to find a generator with your preferred balance between capacity and output, for example, because the game just labels all the generators as High Output, High Capacity or Balanced.) As far as I can tell there's no consistent set of rules for how resistances and weaknesses interplay with each other, so you just kind of have to find out for every individual enemy/enemy type. But the upshot is that damage output drops off precipitously if the target has a high defense for the same damage type that your weapon deals, to the point of the wrong weapon being essentially useless.

This was intended to make you coordinate type balance with your teammates, but for a solo player it means you have to have a reliable source of DPS, and decent defense, for all three types on every build, for every mission, which is both a very uninteresting restriction and means there's very little reason to experiment once you've found a loadout that strikes a good balance. I struggled with the latter part for the first few missions, but once I worked out I wanted a kinetic damage rifle, a chemical damage rifle, a plasma gun for thermal damage and a shotgun for doing more burst damage than my piddly kinetic rifle, it carried me to the final boss (which is cool, but also a huge fuckoff difficulty spike that made me eventually look up a recommended max DPS build) with no more variations.

This was not, like... fun. Normally when you find a reliable build in Armored Core it's something you take a sort of pride in, because the reason it's reliable is that it excels at an approach to combat that you like. This was just the most Neutral build possible, because if you specialize too much you'll inevitably get stuck doing chip damage to something annoying.

Let's see, what else is there... I hate the mechanical design aesthetic, but that's subjective, I guess. Oh, the menu UI sucks ass, there's that. But aside from that... I think we have to come back to the pin. The big problem. This is the longest, most negative review I've written and I have not even gotten to my biggest complaint. The one that absolutely pervades every second of gameplay. The thing I've seen a few other people complain about but not many, which makes me feel insane, because it's so glaringly gigantic to me:

This game has the worst visual clarity I've ever seen in my fucking life.

If I am sitting more than about six feet away from my 46 inch TV, I cannot tell what the fuck is happening in Armored Core 5. If I am up close, I can keep track, but I won't be happy about it. I mentioned the game (up until the final boss) not being absolutely faceroll easy, but that is only because of the effort needed to keep even basic track of what's happening.

We're talking an absolutely garbage HUD, one that's both way too obstructive and makes the information plastered all over the center of the screen extremely hard to read. What is that fucking font? I'm not dyslexic but I feel like I suddenly understand what it's like to be dyslexic. And your ammo count being bars while your energy is a displayed number??? The ammo bars being built seamlessly into the target box so you have to squint to see where they begin and end??? I'd like that it makes information like current health pop up for enemies you're locked on to but they can't just be a fucking health bar over their heads, it's a giant window that, again, displays as a number so you have to read the horrible text, but you better read it fast because it flickers off every time you lose your lockon, and the whole entire screen glitches into nonsense when you take damage, like it's not a subtle effect, you lose all track of everything for a second, and that's not getting into all the extra bullshit when you switch to scan mode, fucking JESUS what an awful HUD.

We're talking motion blur dialed up to eleven. Thousand. Honestly I'd swear everything is subtly hazy even when standing still, like there's a Smog Filter or something? That would make sense narratively, the setting is a super-polluted wasteland, but the game does not need to be blurrier. We're talking absolutely dogshit 2006-style washed out color grading, where somehow every color blends into the standard gray environments, and yes Armored Core usually has a lot of gray for mood reasons but there's supposed to be some fucking contrast. We're talking some kind of weird shakey camera tracking that makes every movement as chaotic and disorienting as possible. (Combined with how ugly the robots are this looks like a playable Michael Bay movie.) We're talking, just, like, it's raining in a lot of missions? And rain effects shouldn't be that big of a problem in most games but on top of everything else it's just Even More Visual Noise and I hate it.

If you're thinking something snide about how I should get new glasses, I don't know what to say except that every other game in the series Looks fine to me, including the much faster ones that I'm playing on the same PS3 and TV (so, you know, it's not emulation problems either). If your eyeballs are configured to the settings that make this game anything but a hideous jerky blurry headache more power to you, but I am really, truly not exaggerating. To me it borders on Fucking Unplayable under even slightly suboptimal viewing conditions, and it's massively unpleasant under any.

I want to reiterate that I don't like feeling this way. I really liked what it sounded like this game was like. I was in its corner. I made a serious effort to engage with it on its own terms. But Christ, I did not enjoy my time one iota. Verdict Day is by all accounts vastly superior... I'll find out, I guess.






Oh, but! You have two operator ladies and they're slightly fruity, so it's actually impossible to say whether the game is good or bad.