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.

everyone: Nine Breaker sucks

absolutely everyone: It's just a really terrible minigame collection, don't play it

every single old-school Armored Core fan, everyone, in any context: Nine Breaker is the worst game in the series

me: I bet it's not that bad

me:

me: hey what the fuck

The only thing stopping me from calling this objectively the worst game in the series is that I can see what happens in it, a benchmark that not all of them clear. But like. Jesus Christ.

The gimmick of Nine Breaker is that instead of having story missions at all, you have a series of Training Exercises--I.E., minigames. You might think your expectations are appropriately tempered, you're not expecting more than a minigame collection, you're emulating this because it's 2024 and you didn't buy it for full price, it can't hurt you.

What you're not realizing is that the minigames are tuned to Armored Core difficulty. Most of them set you an extremely specific task, and many of them expect you to perform it to an absurd speedrunner-level standard of perfection. This makes the game feel both incredibly boring and infuriatingly unfair.

Of course, not all of them are at peak difficulty; some will be total facerolls, and you won't know which because the game clearly doesn't know either. The exercises are separated by category and each one has five ascending difficulty levels--except sometimes by far the hardest version of an exercise happens at level 2, level 5 is sometimes the hardest but more often literally can't be failed, many groups of exercises are totally redundant... it's an incredibly half-baked game.

There's also an arena, which ostensibly has equal billing with Training--they're trying to do Master of Arena again, kind of. But even the arena is one of the least fleshed-out in the series; you don't so much fight your way up through the rankings as fight whoever you want to gain points, then certain point totals unlock the next tier of opponents.

The high-ranking arena opponents are also super obviously using OP-INTENSIFY/Human Plus, which is a series tradition except that in most games it's also possible for you to acquire those without cheating. Hell, even in the games where I never did, it never really felt as.... In-Your-Face Bullshit as some of the arena matches in this one. We're talking tank legs that spend the entire fight in the air spamming heavy energy cannons.

So, this game is not just skippable; skipping it is recommended in the strongest possible terms. Why didn't *I* skip it? Or give up when it got to be total horseshit? Well, for one, I came to it so late in the process of Playing Every Game in the Series that I was too committed to the bit to add an "except that one." The cost has NEVER been more sunk. Make no mistake: I am a dumbass. Don't play Nine Breaker.

Not even for this reason.

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 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.

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.

Two things can be true: this game is better than Armored Core 2, and this game is more skippable than Armored Core 2 (which is fairly skippable.)

Actually, I'm not entirely sure if it's better or if I had a better experience with it because I played this one on easy mode. I had put it off for a while in my AC marathon because I wasn't sure I was going to bother at all, since I knew it was basically just a zero-story expansion for AC2, a game I didn't like very much. When I did decide to scratch it off the list I went ahead and unlocked Human Plus in 2 before transferring a save, meaning for Another Age I had essentially double energy and the ability to use powerful cannons while moving.

This definitely at least contributed to my having an easier, breezier time overall than I did in 2. And I'm glad I did blow through it fast, because by mission count, Another Age is ridiculously long for an Armored Core game. It clocks in at technically a hundred, although eight of those are VS Missions, which is to say, essentially just multiplayer modes. Still, I'm pretty sure 92 is more than any other game in the series--and this is all without the game having what you'd call any actual plot. Missions still have briefings so you could charitably call a lot of them little vignettes, but... yeah, no, it's a game with no story.

If it sounds like a glorified pre-DLC DLC pack having the largest number of missions in the series would mean the missions are extremely simple and boring... eh. They tend to be on the short and sweet(ish) side, but they're not the series at its most half-assed. If it sounds like they'd be repetitive and padded: holy shit, you have no idea. The only narrative elements the game has are that some missions are related to others, which is to say they get completely rehashed several times. Often the game will just send you back to the same area to do almost the same thing for the same reason back to back, with the unintentionally (I assume?) hilarious extra touch of the briefing trying to recap the last one as if you had played it hours ago.

To be fair, progression is somewhat nonlinear, with different Areas offering missions that you can theoretically bounce around between, and never be in the same area twice in a row. To be more fair, there's no incentive at all to do that, especially considering you unlock new parts when you finish all the missions in a single area.

Still, I feel like the median quality of these missions is, like, decent. Nothing memorable, except for the three sort of "postgame" missions that unlock after the credits roll (these are all just remade boss battles against bosses from the PS1 games, but they're easily, easily the best argument for spending any time on Another Age), but the rapidfire nature of them can feel kind of punchy and very digestible. Despite the frankly embarrassing level of padding and busy work, it felt less tedious to me than AC2... but again, I was not a Cyber Newtype in AC2.

(Did you know that Human Plus and Cyber Newtype are both bonkers localizations of "kyouka ningen," which literally just means Enhanced Human? Augmented Human from AC6 is also a more direct localization of the same. It's a fairly obvious callback to Human Plus in any case but it was explicitly clear in Japanese. Come to think of it, Witch From Mercury also just brought it back but didn't give it a silly name in English. Weird, right? Anyway, this has had almost nothing to do with Armored Core 2: Another Age. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.)

Mechanically, of course, unless you count the fairly small number of new parts added Another Age is completely identical to AC2. It's probably the most any AC game has just been The Last One, But More, which is, honestly, saying something. It's just a little wild how much More. And a shame the game they brought this much More for was AC2. I would not call Another Age worth your time, despite the cool postgame bosses, but it does present a good argument for how to approach its predecessor: just wrack up some debt and get your ass Robocopped. Gen 2 is more fun that way.

Now here's a (somewhat) black sheep Armored Core game I can get behind.

Nexus is an interesting sort of transitional game; the fundamentals are still what you'd call oldgen--it's even still part of the third generation, built on AC3's engine and mostly its assets--but it was easily the biggest mechanical departure from its direct predecessor the series had seen up to that point, especially for a non-numbered sequel. It was a game with New Ideas. Some of those ideas were. Questionable. But others are huge, and have stuck around for longer than Armored Core had existed when this came out. If you're playing through the older games vaguely in order, Nexus is a huge demarcation point for the series starting to feel more modernized.

The biggest, most noteworthy positive change, the thing you have to be truly deep in the AC sauce (I say this with a nonzero amount of respect) to complain about, is that in the year of our lord two thousand and four, in the fifth Armored Core game developed for the Playstation 2, Fromsoftware noticed that the console's controllers came with two analog sticks, obviating the need to manipulate the camera and targeting box with a combination of shoulder buttons and exactly half of the D-Pad. Standing ovation.

In seriousness, if you're playing these on an emulator in this day and age you can easily patch Nexus's exact control scheme into every earlier game, so its biggest contribution to the evolution of the series is kind of becoming more of a historical fun fact than an actual difference in how a present day player is likely to experience it. But I'm giving it credit, all the same.

But at any rate, that's not the only big shakeup; while they were at it, Fromsoft decided to experiment with how progression is structured. This isn't the first time they've done that--see Master of Arena--but it's arguably a bigger change. And... probably a worse one. I'm ambivalent, really. Missions work mostly the same, but briefings as a long-time fan knows them are gone (asterisk), replaced with a single non-voiced screen listing the employer, location, enemies, objective, and occasionally warnings about tactical conditions like radar interference or impaired visibility. The briefings are traditionally where a lot of Armored Core's storytelling happens, but Nexus doesn't really have less of a narrative than average. It's just been... rearranged. You've always gotten mail between missions, but in Nexus the messages tend to be longer and more frequent, and also include news bulletins summarizing the general world state.

At the same time, actual cutscenes have also been snazzied up considerably (presumably with the budget they saved on all the long, fully voiced briefings); in games older than this, you might get an extremely small number of short FMVs for major, major plot events, but the in-engine cutscenes that conveyed a lot of other plot beats rarely depicted more than an enemy either walking into the room, flying/boosting into the general outdoors area, or in a lot of cases just standing there while the camera pans over them. Bespoke animations were strictly off the table. In Nexus, they're willing to have things move around slightly more than the bare minimum in general, but in a few missions you get full-blown (short, but full-blown) cinematic action sequences, and for cheapo niche franchise PS2 graphics they're honestly pretty kickass. And then there's the ending, which I will not spoil, but... I don't want to overhype it, it's not, like, something that Changed Gaming Forever, but it's very surprising in more ways than you'd think Armored Core can surprise you. It's great.

While I'm talking about the story I feel like I should note that there's a definite tone shift here. It's subtle, at least at first, but Nexus feels like it wants to be more serious than the games that came before it, in a way that I think presaged the tone of future entries like 4 and 6. (And definitely Last Raven, I'm given to understand, but I haven't played it yet.) Don't get me wrong, Armored Core has always been dark--it's dystopian sci-fi with a big emphasis on the dystopia--but the earlier games are also a bit camp, a bit satirical. Nexus deals with exactly the same kind of subject matter, but the atmosphere is a little more somber, a little more subdued. Even the menus, which are very stylized (and thus not great in terms of usability, though not as bad as in most of the PS3 games), kind of build up that vibe; the general theme color of the UI is a very chilly bluish gray, where you might see retro-futuristic-computer black or harsh oranges in the older games.

Like in 4, there's a sense of fatigue around the fighting in Nexus, bolstered here by explicitly taking place in the same world as AC3 and Silent Line. It's the distant future of those games, some of the worldbuilding seems to suggest, but the same big three corporations from that era are still on their bullshit. It's a sense that nothing ever changes, that capitalism has trapped the whole world in a rut. It's the same assholes fighting the same pointless war over short-term control over and over again. Even the protagonist comes across as more of a passive corporate pawn than usual; in a lot of the classic games your big "rival" is a defender of the status quo, but in Nexus he's a would-be rebel. You're the one who never slips the leash; you're a cog in the machine from beginning to end (god the ending is good though trust me on this).

Anyway. Mechanics changes. These really are a Good Idea, Bad Idea segment.

Good Idea: All around balance changes! That sounds like it could go either way, but I honestly love where a lot of weapons are at in Nexus. I played around with several entire build types for the first time in this game; dual sniper rifles, bazooka and sidearm, I got the hang of rockets for god's sake. It was a lot of fun.

Bad Idea: Heat! Technically every PS2 Armored Core has a heat mechanic, but up until this point overheating was just a status effect that could be inflicted while taking damage. Nexus extended the frankly much more logical idea that, you know, your machine would generate a lot of heat depending on how you built it, and now if you don't work out a good balance with your generator and booster's heat generation stats and your radiator and armor's heat dissipation stats you'll very quickly give yourself that overheated status just by boosting. The formula is both not explained in-game and comedically overcomplicated, so trial-and-erroring your way to a state where you are not on fire can take forever if you want both your generator and booster to be remotely decent. I didn't get as mad about this as a lot of people (the game is pretty infamous for this mechanic), but it was definitely a pain in the ass sometimes.

Good Idea: Reloading! Prior to Nexus, guns in Armored Core could just shoot continuously at their rate of fire until you ran completely out of ammo (or ran out of energy, for energy weapons), which made balancing things like machine guns very difficult; they were sometimes kind of garbage and more often the best weapons in the game. Nexus just gave most guns limited magazine sizes, requiring you to take more pauses in the bullet spam and finally making machine guns a nice, reasonable Pretty Good. It's also just another little dose of (relative) realism, if you're into that kind of thing.

Bad Idea: There is no animation for reloading. There is no button to manually reload. The HUD does not tell you how many rounds you have left in a magazine. I am honestly not sure, having beaten the game, how the mechanic works exactly--I think you'll automatically reload after yea amount of time without firing regardless of current magazine status, so that at least you're always topped off between fights, but I'm not sure. Maybe I was just lucky.

Good Idea: The game comes on two discs. Disc 1 is Nexus's main story in its entirety; Disc 2 contains fifteen remakes of select missions from the PS1 games, plus one or two expanded or alternate scenario missions related to each of them. This is a pretty fun way to put a lot of bonus content in a game, especially because it let them cast a wider net with the difficulty curve--most of Disc 2 is a lot harder than most of 1, so a lot of hardcore fans who value the challenge consider it the main draw of the game.

(asterisk): Disc 2 missions also have traditional-style briefings, I guess because the general idea of the two discs is to have some Old to go with the main game's New.

Bad Idea?: That's because Disc 1 is like. Really easy. Really easy. There are a small number of jarring spikes but otherwise Nexus is a HUGE departure in difficulty from every previous game, with both very short and basic missions and an in-game economy that, for the first time, makes it extremely rare to actually lose money. I put the question mark there because I don't always mind a game being a little easy, and especially in the context of my Armored Core marathon I found the break very pleasant. But like, I do acknowledge also that there's a mission where you shoot down one small helicopter that is not shooting back and that's the whole thing. Honestly I kind of love that mission too because I got to it minutes after telling some friends that I was enjoying the game and it wasn't that easy, and laughed my ass off. But I can certainly see why it would rankle if you're here for more Silent Line-level action.

I talked for a while, huh. That's because the question of whether Nexus is good or bad is a pretty complicated one; it's the definition of a mixed bag. But in this case I'm pretty firmly in the You Guys Are Just Mean camp. I don't love everything about it, but I had a ton of fun with it. Its charm points are very different from those of the other oldgen games, so if you're putting together an Armored Core Sample Platter, I definitely think Nexus deserves a spot.

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.

fromsoft you put that subtitle back in the right order or SO HELP ME

I think my score for this one is a sort of average between how much I enjoyed it and how much I feel like I should have enjoyed it. It's easy to see that in a lot of ways, Silent Line is even better than the excellent Armored Core 3. These are some of the tightest missions in the series, absolutely no filler. The parts list exploded to offer by far the most customization the series had seen up to this point (admittedly a lot of the new stuff is asset clones). And god, Christ, you finally have some proper dual-wielding options with a selection of Actual Left Hand Guns. I was looking forward to getting to the game where that became normalized, although it's still a bit restrictive--they tend to have less ammo than their right hand counterparts, and there are still a lot fewer of them, but I'll take it.

Silent Line is also harder than any of the preceding games. In my AC2 review I talked about that game's above-average difficulty not doing it any favors, but Silent Line's approach is a lot more engaging. The late game was still brutal enough to make me miserable at points, mind, but at least I wasn't simultaneously bored. I should also point out that somewhat independent from the in-combat difficulty, the economic side of the game feels a lot more strict than usual. I took a net loss on a lot of missions in SL, more than any of the other games.

The writing is a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, the story is built around some genuinely cool mysteries about the setting, and the series' trademark dark sense of humor is at some of its best here--there's what I almost want to call a running joke of Ravens, including the protagonist, being given vague, relatively innocuous-sounding instructions and interpreting them in the most scumbag mercenary way possible. Friendly target-shooting competition for a cash prize? Can't lose if you turn sideways and kill the opposition first. (Every participant has this thought simultaneously.) The client wants you to distract the cops for two minutes while they steal something? Just go to the highway and start stepping on moving cars. It's always done without any dialogue or explanation, which is most of what makes it funny; it's like yeah, Fucking Ravens are involved, we don't know what you expected.

On the other hand, the payoff to the big mystery is... kind of a letdown. Are you ever going through something with unanswered questions and you're like "well the answer could be X, but that's so obvious and boring and cliched it can't possibly be what all this really good buildup is pointing to," and then it is? Yeah I'm just saying SL hit me with like. A little of that feeling. Just a skosh. Another cool as hell final boss design, though.

The bigger problem I had with the game, and this was definitely a Me Problem, was hidden parts. I'm not a huge fan of this mechanic in most Armored Core games, to be honest; usually, a few missions, you have no idea which ones without a guide, will have a new AC part lying on the ground in some hidden location to be picked up and added to your collection. They are not rendered at full size and can sometimes be quite hard to see, and also, Exploration is not exactly the games' strong suit, especially considering you won't find anything in like 80% of missions.

To its credit, Silent Line doesn't have very many of that kind of hidden part. There's also less guesswork about which missions will have one, because it's every mission now! And instead of being on a shitty scavenger hunt, you just have to fulfill certain requirements during missions to be awarded your new part afterwards. You are not in any way told most of those requirements, of course. And also, even if you're using a guide to know what the fuck they are, most of them take the already high difficulty of the game and teach it to smoke crystal meth. Complete the mission insanely fast. Don't take too much damage, as you fight two ACs at once. Don't lose any of your extremely fragile NPC allies that are taking damage the entire time in multiple completely separate rooms. These side objectives are awful. Trying to do them all makes the game a fucking slog.

Unfortunately for me, while I'm quite good at not giving a shit about most kinds of collectibles in a game, something like "more parts and weapons in a game where you change your equipment constantly" is exactly the kind of thing that activates my Gotta Catch 'Em All cortex. I've collected all hidden parts in most of the other games, but I eventually convinced myself to give up on it for SL, after way too much time spent trying to no-hit speedrun a notoriously hard game I was playing for the first time. Eugh. But again... that's psychological. I'd feel bad blaming the game for it when the game is so far from encouraging you to do this that you could go through the entire thing not realizing there are any hidden parts unless you were studying it online in advance like me.

Silent Line: not as smooth and, sort of, holistic an experience as AC3, but it would not be unreasonable to call it Peak Armored Core: the most Armored per Core you can get in one game, for good and ill. Unambiguous recommendation, But Watch Out! This exquisite joyride hates you and will eat your kidneys.

So, Armored Core and Project Phantasma were good. To be clear. Nonetheless:

This is where Armored Core gets good.

Much like Project Phantasma before it, Master of Arena is much shorter than the first game, at least going by the number of missions. Also much like PP, this is not really a bad thing. MoA does not particularly have time for tedious or repetitive missions. They're not exactly the standout best in the series, but they're solid.

But the more interesting thing about progression in MoA is that it doesn't all happen in missions. The title is a bit of a giveaway, but unlike in most Armored Core games, the 1v1 duels of the Arena mode are, here, a mandatory part of the story. Mission progress and arena progress gate each other by turns; there will often simply be no missions available until you've spent some time in the arena, and you need separate authorizations, earned after certain missions, to be allowed to challenge different ranks of arena opponents. This could feel restrictive, I suppose, but to me it was a fun way of pacing and structuring the game. You're never doing One Thing for too long, and the fact that you never really know when you're going to get more story can do a surprising amount of work to keep you on your toes.

Said story is probably the thing that makes the game stand out most, at least in relation to very early-series Armored Core. The reason the arena plays such a large role in the game is that you're playing as one of the few AC protagonists to start the game with a specific, stated goal all his own. To wit: a Raven killed your family, and you became one to hunt him down. Complication: the guy you're looking for is called Hustler One, pilot of the AC Nineball, who also happens to be world's top-ranked Raven and the reigning Arena champion. Unlike most Ravens, for the MoA protagonist, mercenary work is the side hustle, a means to an end; he's here to climb the Arena ladder until he gets Nineball in the ring, and murder him.

(Well. Hustler One is who he wants to murder, but it's generally fandom convention that it's fine to just call the character Nineball, for several reasons including the fact that the early games themselves tend to use pilot and AC names pretty interchangeably. But also crucially for the reason that Nineball is fun to say.)

You're still a silent protagonist, but right out of the gate this is a lot of agency and personal investment for an Armored Core protag. There's also an interesting bit of continuity into AC2, or at least a popular and pretty well-supported fan theory about that. The downside is you have to play AC2.

The Nineball stuff is all particularly intriguing if you've played AC1, which also features Nineball as the top ranker and as a major antagonist. I won't spoil what his Whole Deal is, but suffice to say it's both a huge cliche and a pretty fun twist in terms of execution. The "sports anime with a revenge plot" setup goes off the rails very excitingly, culminating in a final boss that is one of my favorite fights (and robot designs, play the game quick, they're reissuing the model kit and preorders are still open--) in the series.

I'll be honest, I did legitimately like the game overall better than the other PS1 entries, but that boss by itself accounts for quite a lot of why I rank it so high in the series as a whole. It feels like something out of a bigger-budget series; it's got more cinematic oomph than anything in even most of the later AC games.

The music also bears mentioning. Honestly it's borne mentioning in most of the games and I've been neglecting it in my reviews (I think both the gen 4 games sound even better), but it must be said that Master of Arena's soundtrack is a big standout for gen 1. Old-school AC music is always catchy, and has a distinctly eclectic style, but more than one song in MoA steps up into Banger territory.

Master of Arena is great, but it does not, exactly, stand on its own. The story is closely related to that of the first game, to the extent that this one's ending might not make sense without having played it; most of its content is bonus arena modes (the main arena is integrated into the story, but there's enough other shit to do that the game had a second disc); you'll even have a hard time grinding money to put together a good AC if you didn't transfer a save file. It's got "gaiden" written all over it, a side game between main entries. But goddammit, it's a really good gaiden. I'd go so far as to say that playing Master of Arena is a really good argument in favor of playing Armored Core 1.

And also, again, god the fucking robot is cool.

Just beating out Verdict Day in the vote for Armored Core With Most Awkward to Abbreviate Subtitle, Project Phantasma is the second game in the series and it is... middle of the road. It's not the AC game that most could have been an email, but it probably could have been an email. In fact it would absolutely be DLC today, with only a handful of new parts added and a story clocking in at maybe three hours (not that most other games in the series get far past the 8-12 range, counting just the main story).

Said story is considered sort of... an oddity. It has more... it's more of an... it has A Character. Like a persistent supporting one who's relevant to the plot. That's more than the other very early games, or at least the others never really show up on screen. Sumika is another Raven, though, and you occasionally co-op with her. That said, the main impression the story gave me was of something more... Saturday Morning than the usual Armored Core fare. It's a very straightforward, self-contained conflict against a single antagonist, who is also probably the most Generic Cartoon Supervillain character in the series. He even has kind of a catchphrase, which is pretty annoying. (Ha ha, get it? It's like the thing!) But hey, the voice actor is having fun with it. It's just not exactly the darkly camp political commentary or high-melodrama real robot anime tropes the rest of the series might get you used to: a bad man wants to build a scary robot to take over the world, so you shoot at him until he dies, and also, a lady is there. (I'm not marking this as spoilers.)

It must be said that by far Project Phantasma's biggest contribution to the series, if not exactly a unique draw, was the Arena. Basically just a series of standalone, optional AC duels in which you climb a rankings ladder one opponent at a time, it's an instant-staple game mode that didn't exist in AC1; the concept of Ravens being officially ranked was just there for narrative flavor, despite the rankings getting an entire main menu option. It honestly feels a little wrong that the Arena started here. Not, like, morally wrong, it just sounds Incorrect. I mean, the very next game is the one that's actually about the Arena. PP doesn't mention it in the story at all, as far as I can remember; it's kind of such a random Thing Off to the Side you could be forgiven for assuming it's nondiegetic, up until you play Master of Arena.

I will also point out that the reward for beating the final arena opponent is one of the funniest weapons in the series--the FINGER, a hand-shaped five-barreled machine gun with absolutely obscene DPS that also burns through ammo faster than any weapon in the game. That might almost balance itself out if not for the ammo capacity being 3000. Yeah, Fromsoft wasn't really big on constant balance tweaks yet at this point, but this thing got nerfed into fucking oblivion for the next game.

Mission design is... fairly solid, for the early series. I'd call it more even than AC1, if not necessarily better; it's possibly debatable which game has higher peaks, although I'm leaning 1, but 1 for sure has lower valleys. PP is a very Safe kind of game compared to the two it's sandwiched between. I don't recommend skipping it, but neither do I really recommend not skipping it; it's just, Some More. Take it or leave it.

Anyway, the next game pops the fuck off.

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.

Okay, first things first: you CAN get used to the default controls. More or Less. It is humanly possible. That said, before you begin your journey into the true old school of Armored Core, be it with this game or anything prior to Nexus, I want you to look up ""Armored Core dual analog patch." Go ahead, I'll wait.

Right! All things considered, this is one of those games that holds up better than you might expect. To be fair, it's also one of those games you might expect to crumble into dust when you check how it holds up, but making some allowances for PS1 jank, I had a pretty decent time with it. And that was shortly before aforementioned patch existed.

It's honestly hard to think of anything interesting to say about AC1 in relation to the series, because the rest of the series is relating to it. Despite the unintuitive controls, on a mechanical and design level it's the simplest game in the series, which is part of the appeal. Bear in mind that simple doesn't necessarily mean accessible, but I'd rate it a lot easier than most of the PS2 games (with a handful of missions, which also just objectively suck ass, as stark exceptions).

The early-game missions throw almost nothing at you by the standards of a game you're comfortable playing, seemingly because the game is aware of how steep the learning curve for even the basics can be, but you will be expected to get over the hump before long. Mistakes are costly unless you save scum (although you can and probably should save scum); people will warn you that in classic Armored Core it's easy to lose money on a mission due to ammo and repair costs, but less commented on is the fact that the game will often progress even when you fail a mission, locking you out of retrying it and giving you no reward money but still charging you for the expenses. Considering how hard some of the missions can be, that's fucking brutal.

This comparison might sound a little Guy Who's Only Seen Boss Baby, but the vibes are honestly kind of similar to old-school (like, all the way old-school. Kaga era) Fire Emblem. They both have a sort of economy-based difficulty; they're games that punish you long term if you play recklessly, if you're not frugal, or if you're too willing to accept a really scuffed win. In AC's case it helps to use energy weapons, which don't cost you anything for the ammo--especially because hands down the best weapon in the game is one. (Karasawa, my beloved.)

Other than the need to plan ahead, there are big difficulty spikes in this game, as alluded to earlier. Periodically it just gives you an absolutely heinous gimmick mission with extended high-precision platforming sequences, or where you have to navigate a fucking maze while your health constantly drains, or where you're fighting in a tight space full of explosives and also the enemies explode when they die so you not only have to avoid a stray shot hitting the wrong thing but you have to wait for the enemies not to be standing too fucking close to said thing and you have no way of controlling where they--ahem. Yeah, it'll tilt you now and then.

Still, if you're struggling with AC1, there's always Human Plus, which you've probably already heard of if you care enough to be looking into playing it. If not: it's an Easy Mode with some of the most insulting unlock requirements of all time! You have to get 50,000 dollars in debt, which requires failing at least two or three missions if you want to do it in the early game, at which point you reset to the beginning of the game but have a special, permanent powerup now. ...And then you do this like five more times because there are different effects of Human Plus that have to be unlocked one at a time, with the best ones coming last.

Oof. I didn't play (the first game) on Human Plus, but it must be said that benefits like "double your energy" and "use cannons without having to stand perfectly still" are genuinely enticing just in terms of having fun. You may be able to just turn it on directly via cheat codes, if you'd prefer. Heads up also that the non-numbered sequels can only access Human Plus by importing a save file that has it from 1 (or 2 in the case of 2's sequel), and that you can't unlock it after beating the game. So if you want to tough out a normal playthrough of AC1 but think you might want the extra edge in, say, Master of Arena... well, there's still the cheat option.

Despite everything, most of the content of AC1 feels pretty well balanced. It's a rock solid foundation, even if the rock is jagged and uneven. There is a reason this series has been so niche for so long; Armored Core is a very specific and uncompromising vision. But in the first game in particular, there's a real purity to said vision that paints it shades of evergreen.

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.