All Armored Core Games Ranked

[Music] foreign ERS see the letters ac they only think of one thing armored Core at least that is probably what fromsoft is hoping the case will be by the end of this year when the once prolific franchise is set to end a 10-year drought with armored Core 6 fires of Rubicon right now there isn't a ton of content online related to armored Core the series was at its peak in the pre-youtube era and so outside of game fat guides and old forums it can be tough to get an idea of how some of the games play I imagine the franchise is going to Boom this year leading to a Resurgence in popularity for the old titles but since content on the series is pretty sparse due to both its Niche status and how oppressively difficult it can actually be to get your hands on some of them I decided I would run through my ranking of all 15 armored Core games this includes all the console and handheld titles only excluding some of the mobile ones it is worth noting that a lot of these games came out in very quick succession and many of them share a lot of the same assets and mechanics as such individual opinion is often going to be down to the little things like balance changes and environmental design it is all very subjective so I'd love to hear some of your thoughts in the comments but with that out of the way please join me in my personal purple armored Core Baker on our ranking of all the armored Core games as of 2023 [Music] mechanically nine breaker is a solid armored Core title with most of the Telltale traits that made the third generation of armored Core great in practice however it is still a spin-off that is missing a lot of the central mechanics that keep armored Core players engaged instead of going on missions for money as a mercenary for hire a 9 breaker the player engages in a series of skill-based challenges based around traversal and combat you don't get money in the game instead having a wide variety of parts available to you from the get-go there is no story to keep you moving forward just the chase for more gold medals these challenges are sure to appeal to some but they lack the narrative flow and progression of traditional armored Core Mission structures there is a pretty solid arena in line breaker but this thing yeah this thing puts an end to any challenge right there so if you want to blast through it you can just use this as a spin-off that gives players access to more armored Core it does its job but in the grand scheme of the series it's arguably the easiest entry to skip foreign core game that started a new generation got at least one full release expansion to follow it up and for Gen 2 that was armored Core another age now I'll admit I had some problems with armored Core 2 that I'll talk about later on in this list but the technological jump from PSX to PS2 was enough to keep me engaged another age felt like it enhanced all the issues I had with Gen 2 while skimping on a lot of the stuff I really did enjoy the game has over 100 Missions which is a lot for an armored Core game and it doesn't have much at all in the way of a storyline all armored Core games play it close to the chest when it comes to their story as is from sauce standard but another age really doesn't bring anything to the table in that department a lot of the missions feel like ideas that they didn't get to put into armor Core 2 and playing through them makes it obvious as to why I found myself frustrated in another age more than any other armored Core game I regularly had to go back to the garage and reevaluate my Mech just because I couldn't make a single jump or didn't have the right damage type for a single Enemy at the end of a mission forcing me to go back and redo the whole thing it felt less like toying with my AC to maximize its efficiency and more like checking boxes so I can move on to the next mission to me it just felt more like a chore than any of the other armored Core games with an emphasis on quantity of missions over quality it is still a solid armored Core experience and any fan of armored Core 2 will probably have a great time but I think there are a lot of better ways to experience what this Series has to offer to formula front it is basically in the same boat as nine breaker existing as a spin-off that lacks the mission-based structure of the main games but I'd say it has a lot more stuff that it adds to the franchise in a unique way in the story of formula front you play as an architect someone who designs mechs for the hugely popular competitive armored Core scene as such you don't actually have to Pilot one yourself you can design your Mech send it to battle and analyze the results to plan your next iteration of the design it won't appeal to everyone but if you've played 14 other armored Core games then chances are you've had plenty of opportunities to put yourself in that pilot scene I found it refreshing and unique to play as the architect instead and I enjoyed the emphasis on building particular armored cores to match enemy units still doesn't have the addictive gameplay Loop of the mainline armored Core games but I think formula front is a solid addition to the series that is worth checking out for hardcore fans [Music] [Applause] fifth generation gets a lot of flack these days it's very different from the armor core games that came before with less emphasis on Airborne combat and an overhaul of the basic movement mechanics that said there's a lot to like about the games once you get over that change in Formula the narratives are still a bit all over the place but they have some really cool set pieces and combat encounters plus a ton of variety when it comes to overpowered builds the problem with verdict Day specifically is that it responded to some of the criticisms of armored Core 5 in a way that watered down the new mechanics Without Really appeasing old fans the map and level design of verdict Day feels like it was built for the older games with fewer opportunities for the fast-paced wall jumping traversal that we got in its predecessor missions were made to be shorter and easier to process but also felt a lot less unique than what came before it's worth noting that as far as I have seen a lot of people online prefer verdict Day to armored Core 5. and I understand why a lot of people would find the middle ground that verdict Day tries to reach more appealing there were a lot of things I did like such as the new parts and the Unix system that allowed you to go into missions with a customized AI companion but as someone who appreciated the mechanics of armored Core 5 verdict days attempts to make the fifth generation mechanics more in line with traditional armored Core felt like a half measure it is however important to note that official multiplayer armored Core is only available on verdict Day as of 2023 so if you're looking for a multiplayer fix then you might want to pick it up it's also one of the few games in the series that you can actually buy for a fair price given that it is on the PS3 store for only 20 dollars we had a lot of very similar armored Core games in a row during the PS2 era and I think everyone was ready to see what the next step in the franchise's evolution was going to be unfortunately while armored Core 4 was able to bring the graphical quality of the series up to the Next Generation from a gameplay perspective things felt very stagnant coming after last Raven armored Core 4 felt very sparse when it came to parts and the missions fell back on some of the duller tropes the series had started to rely on in fact as far as Mission design goes armored Core 4 has a lot of Duds you'll have a lot of missions like this one where you wait around and shoot submarines or this one where you literally just destroy some support wires and call it a day on top of that armored Core 4 may have the worst menu UI in the series it can be very frustrating to use especially coming after the PS2 games It Is by no means a bad game it was undoubtedly exciting to see armored Core in full HD but it remains a very traditional armored Core experience that came at a time when we needed a game that would show off the new levels of power and creativity that we could get on the new consoles luckily we would only have to wait a little bit to get a game that would do more to make good on that foreign I fully expected to hate armored Core 5 because there are not a lot of nice things said about it online in spite of the hate I personally had a great time with the game it was a very different experience and you really have to want the unique type of gameplay it offers in order to enjoy it instead of ramming through buildings at Mock speed you are using them as cover and boosting between them to get an edge on your enemy it felt tactical and fast in its own way and I think it was a lot of fun it didn't provide the traditional armor core experience but there's a lot to like a lot of people also say that there's no point in playing Five because it's 90 multiplayer but there are over a hundred missions in the game that can be played solo with a plot that I believe is more engrossing than verdict days totally nonsensical but still effective when it wanted to be you don't have many games where a robot grabs a flaming pillar and starts charging you while you're at 10 Health the mission design did leave a lot to be desired with a limited number of maps and a lot of retreading your old ground plus while there were a lot of build options the actual look of your Mech couldn't vary as much as it could in other games and you were going to have one of these Clunkers no matter what you did this was by Design and it fits the lore but the customization is a huge part of this series and so more variety would have helped plus the rock paper scissors style of damage dealing definitely didn't mesh with what everybody wanted and some people found it restrictive when choosing loadouts I wouldn't say this is the direction I want future armored Core games to go but I do think you do yourself with the service if you wrote it off entirely back in 1997 armored Core hit shelves with a gameplay Loop and concept enticing enough that it became fromsoft's Flagship franchise for years today armored Core may have aged a bit but it's still 100 percent worth a playthrough a lot of the best aspects of armored Core were already established with this first entry from varied customization options all the way up to the tried and true Kurosawa honestly aside from d-pad controls the game still feels really fluid and it holds up great with a gameplay style that wouldn't be changed too much for a solid decade it does fall into a very common Retro Gaming trap which is that it asks you to do way too much platforming the final level of this game is a nightmare trying to manage the controls and a bunch of moving platforms with a final encounter that causes the difficulty curve to Skyrocket in the game's final minutes but overall armored Core worked in 97 and it works today and if you can get your hands on it you should definitely give it a look to see where the franchise got its start the original armor core got two expansions and after that trilogy people were itching to see what the franchise could bring to the PS2 armored Core 2 was a launch title and I believe it still stands as the biggest graphical jump in the franchise Maps had a fantastic sense of scale and the better attention to detail meant you could get a better sense of just how big this machine you were piloting was however it did feel like something was lost a bit when it came to Mission quality I found myself hitting game over screens due to going out of bounds in armored Core 2 way more than I had in previous games which was very frustrating a lot of missions didn't have clear markers like they do in other Generations meaning you really needed to pay attention during the briefings to know exactly what you had to do usually this was fine but sometimes I'd space out only to spend 10 minutes not realizing that these tiny boxes that look like parts of the environment were actually the primary subject of the mission I do have to say though the voice acting in this game is phenomenal not good but it is very funny ah damn it they found out overall the game does have a bit more narrative weight than some of the others with a clear villain and a cool setting in the form of Mars extra content like the arena and a very special final fight in the end game were really cool to experience and provide some of the best combat Encounters in the series I may have pointed out a lot of negatives but armored Core 2 is great I think a lot of its best ideas wouldn't be fully fleshed out until gen 3 but on its own it is a very solid armored Core game project fantasma is not disliked among the community but it's not particularly popular either it was the sequel slash expansion to the original armored Core and it was a much smaller game than its predecessor with less than half the missions that the previous game had project fantasma felt a little bit too short for some people however it also has much more narrative focus with a partner character and a villain whose names I actually remember it wasn't a narrative Powerhouse by any means but after playing through armored Core 1 I liked going through a new story with all the tools that I had built up from that first game plus project fantasma introduced the arena and while it wouldn't fully reach its potential yet it was great to get more play time out of the game project fantasma is a brief experience but I think there is a lot of quality in the game that we do get [Music] gen 3 armored Core is a bit weird in that it's really two generations that were stuffed between armored cores 3 and 4. Nexus despite being a gen 3 game changed up a lot of the stuff from armored Core 3 and silent line you couldn't transfer a character over due to these change mechanics with a lot of balance differences famously the overheat mechanic was revamped in a way that many fans found frustrating and a lot of weapons felt less powerful than they had at previous games as well dulling that power fantasy a bit however the biggest change was in my opinion a positive analog stick controls armored Core had stuck stubbornly to its d-pad control scheme and while it works once you get used to it this was now 2004 one year before the release of the Xbox 360. change had to come eventually as a result Nexus controls a lot more fluidly than the previous games and it's a lot easier to track the enemies on your screen the game is also much more cinematic than previous entries with some really cool cutscenes and set pieces to drive the game forward in fact the ending may still be the coolest finale to an armored Core game to this day it does have other problems however the menu and UI were a downgrade from the older gen 3 games and the weapon balance as I said feels really off which is a big problem in a game like armored Core a lot of people dislike Nexus due to its changes from three in silent line but I think it was an Innovative entry that pushed the series forward in more ways than it held it back on top of that a second disc that remakes classic armored Core missions with modern systems makes it a must play for armored Core fans while project phantasma felt like an expansion master of Arena felt much more like a fully fledged sequel it once again beefed up the number of missions in the game but this time the arena that project fantasma created was part of the central plot this was the game that established the formula that armored Core would follow for the next decade a mission-based main story bolstered by an in-depth Arena that would test your skills against a variety of different AC builds the story went back to being more obtuse than project fantasma but what may be the franchise's most Infamous final encounter more than made up for that in my book on top of all that there was an entire second disc dedicated to more arena battles to play through and so as the culmination of a generation master of Arena had the best customization options in the trilogy and it learned a lot of great lessons from the last two games to the point that some aspects of the mission design and balance wouldn't be surpassed for quite a while but surpassed they were in time armored Core 3 was everything I wanted armored Core 2 to be it utilized the power of the PS2 well while providing much more engaging level design and quality of life improvements the game has a fantastic Arena that tests the player's skills in every possible way and it contains some of the most iconic Arena Maps in the series history the story was once again kind of a rehash of armored Core 1 but with better hardware and more Focus the part options and balance were massively expanded from what we got in armored Core 2. the player had more ways to engage with each level than ever before and it was intuitive while remaining challenging the UI may have also been at its best in early gen 3. everything flowed well from the garage to the actual missions and I rarely found myself getting frustrated at how the game controlled armored Core 3 is a traditional armored Core through and through taking the best of gen 1 and 2 and putting it into a fantastic gaming experience [Music] as I said earlier armored Core 4 played it too safe armored Core 4 answer responded to this by totally changing the feel of battle four answer is famous for its high-speed gameplay and air-based combat you can spend a ton of time airborne and for answer and technically with the right build you can't have infinite energy through a fight the build crafting and Min maxing and four answers probably some of the most in-depth I've seen in this series instead of contrived Mission design and Corridor based gameplay like its predecessor four answer sees you engaging in bombastic battles against giant mechanized fortresses called armsforts spectacle was the name of the game and four answer and it does deliver in that department I do have to say with complete honesty that there is so much that the game asks of your fingers that I had sore forearms after picking this game up again sometimes you'll have multiple weapons firing at the same time while dodging and weaving enemy fire and I've never had to assign so many different tasks to individual fingers before as far as actual complaints go the high-speed gameplay isn't without its cons it meant that the world design had to be simplified to accommodate that speed and while one-on-one battles are awesome it feels a little less intimate since you can't get a feel for your enemies look and weight due to how fast they're going I loved fighting white glint but to this day I haven't actually seen white glint I've seen a lock-on box and that's all I really needed four answer is a very unique game in the series but for many people it is the gold standard for the Pinnacle of what the mech genre can achieve last Raven is Infamous for its difficulty and sometimes that aspect of it distracts from how good of a game it really is last Raven is a follow-up to Nexus that retains the updated control scheme but Smooths out the balance and UI problems has a unique structure in which multiple Mission paths are available to the player Each of which allows for different endings to the overall narrative for people who enjoy the obfuscated yet engrossing stories of modern fromsoft last Raven will deliver a solidly similar experience it brings back the arena in full force after it was sidelined to Nexus and it has a lot of cool inspired combat encounters that set it apart from the other traditional armored Core games being the final game of the third generation it has an absolute ton of parts and customization options and you really need to toy with them if you want to make it through some of the hardest missions last Raven is brutal to the point of being unfair sometimes it is a real challenge that tests the player and expects them to have played an armored Core game before it is 100 worth it to get to the ending and Conquer this game but I would not recommend making it your first armored Core title if you plan on getting into the series [Music] all of the greatness of armored Core 3 is Amplified in silent line which adds even more parts and Mission variety it retains the basic mechanics of the previous games with the benefit of telling its own story and being its own experience in slight contrast to three which mostly retold the story of the first game silent line is chock full of Parts defined to the point that it is a completionist's nightmare you get rewards for completing each Mission within a certain amount of time or with a certain amount of Health left making it an experience that can easily take you over a hundred hours if you really want to get every single thing but in terms of just being an armored Core game there is no entry that more purely presents the premise of the franchise than silent line deep Mech customization a vague story about warring corporations and a really really solid third person lock-on style Mech combat system all of these are in top form in silent line it has some of the most memorable missions the widest part variety and the most fleshed out Arenas in the whole series while the franchise would continue to evolve in different ways after this game silent line is arguably the Pinnacle of the series and perhaps even the mech genre [Music] so as I said earlier all of the mainline armored Core games are worth playing if you're a fan of the genre if you are trying to get into the series I believe there is no better place to start than the first entry but if you're really turned off by the graphics then armored Core 3 and silent line might be more your speed and if you want a more modern experience with better controls you could try for answer any one of the mainline games in this series could get a solid argument for being the best in the franchise given how personal every player's experience is going to be in terms of customization and play style while interest in the franchise is increasing it remains part of a niche genre that doesn't have much footing in the current gaming landscape I'm excited to see how armored Core 6 sets itself apart from the other games in the series and time will tell if it reinvigorates the mecca genre to mainstream popularity that's my list thank you for watching and please let me know what your favorite armored Core titles are in the comments otherwise have a great day and take care of yourself

Channel: So Says Jay

Views: 28,203

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Id: G6REnpymC_8

Length: 22min 25sec (1345 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 01 2023