Armored Core series overview (Nexus)

now before I start this ran I just want to say I've given this game a good try it seems like the community rather loves or hates this game and I'm a part of the second group not from lack of trying mind you I'd say I've beaten this game at least four times that being a very generous number and I've tried getting into it way more times than that the game has two discs the first disc is Nexus with its own story and missions and disc 2 sees to remaster a few missions from the PS1 games I really like disc 2 but I'm not gonna get around to it until much further in the video but before anything else the intro all right [Music] foreign foreign armored Core Nexus looking at Nexus it's a step down in almost every way compared to the previous game armored Core silent line the almost being the new controls that take advantage of the right stick finally I'm not really sure where to start so let's just start from the beginning after creating a new save file we get another cut scene it shows a bunch of MTS tearing up a bridge then the rank 1 pilot ginobi showing up for being a rank One Pilot his Mech is questionable he uses a rifle and not just one but two grenade launcher strapped to his bag I'm sorry but if you can't get the job done with one grenade launcher then you're probably doing something wrong he clearly uses human plus something the player no longer has access to from this game onward I think the discussion a human plus is worth its own video so I'm just gonna hold my piece for now all I gotta say is I'm gonna miss using back mounted weapons without being the slowest moving object in the universe on the topic of cinematics this game tries to throw one at you at the start of every Mission and that would be cool if a lot of them didn't ruin my sense of immersion tell me if you find anything wrong with this cutscene foreign yeah so we just watched our enemy get transported in and take up position all while we're doing what taking a dump the funny part is our job is to guard this base and now because of my incompetence in the cut scene the mission starts with enemies automatically shooting the base and this isn't even the first time the second mission in the game does the same thing you watch your allies die while you stand there and do nothing but anyways moving on to the hub menu oh what's wrong with this menu no this game wasn't released on PC I really have no clue why they would make you move around this little arrow to navigate the menus Mel is all the way on the left side of the screen and all other important things like the garage and system settings are on the opposite side oh and also the shop is once again literally changed back to waste your time also if you go on a mission with a part it's considered used so selling it back will get you less money this obviously makes it harder for players looking to experiment with all the parts the game has to offer the game has some new parts but it's not like the amount we got going from three to silent line the reskin modified weapons are gone now so that's something even though there's lots of parts I found my actual options to be quite limited due to how the game did its rebalancing so let's go over that no energy sources detected area secured laser blades no longer have assisted travel to hit your target if you're in the air making them far less useful machine guns and rifles no longer fire continuously instead they fire in Long bursts which is most likely supposed to emulate some sort of reloading just without an animation the karasawa went from being one of the best guns in the series to being nothing more than an overweight underpowered weapon with only 30 shots and its only real purpose for me was just dropping it on the ground to save weight ECM has taken a huge focus in this game there's tons of missions where if you don't have enough ECM resistance you're just going to be losing lock constantly also have fun listening to this sound throughout all these missions main system engaging combat mode the biggest change is overheating when you overheat your energy will rapidly drain until your AC is at a working temperature it's possible to lose all your energy having to go through the reboot process which is usually a death sentence you can overheat just from boosting around and half the boosters add lots of heat to your AC but in trade these boosters usually require less energy to boost high energy output generators also contribute to overheating with their calorific value the higher the stat the more you'll find yourself overheating I did some testing to see if I could use the second highest heat booster and the only way I could get it to work was using the heaviest Radiator in the game paired with parts that had the highest Cooling and a heavy generator that had a low calorific value this obviously means there's little weight left for weapons and with every part being high cooling performance you aren't going to be playing fashion core in fact I'd say Nexus has some of the worst customization in any armored Core game not due to lack of Parts but instead lack of options there's also a lot of bad weapons in this game that just don't have enough ammo or Firepower also you want to have a radar bolted on almost every AC to resist DCM attacks so there goes one of your back slots and with the removal of human plus and op intensify your only options are missile launchers that are still expensive to fire look I get it if you want to spend three times the amount of time playing the game just because you use tank legs I understand but me and my storage device I used to record just really don't have the patience for it there's lots of core Parts but not a lot that have good cooling performance I experimented around a bit to find a combination that works and this is pretty much what I came up with I used the best head that has high ECM resistance and all the head functions I need I equipped an orbital core to help with damage also since the game slowed down it's a lot easier to hit with I originally used dual rifles but after having ammo concerns I used a machine gun in my main hand that had all the ammo I needed I used a radar for its ECM resist capabilities and an average pair of boosters that wouldn't have me overheating to death paired with of course a heavy radiator to work with my high energy output generator this Mech was good enough to easily get me through every mission in the game for some reason people think this game is hard but in reality it's just the fact that the game gives you far fewer options than the previous games I also forgot to mention you can tune Parts in this game but it'll cost you a bit of money just from what we've been talking about I'm sure it's pretty easy to see where you want to tune them ECM and cooling oh yeah some heads have night vision now too and you can paint your weapon simple colors instead of just having the factory color that's most of the fundamental changes before I go any further I just want to talk about the general feel of the game there's this lingering sort of fog for most of the missions and the graphics are just bad I'm playing this on an emulator but my friend beat it up as PS2 and he did confirm that there's some sort of permanent Haze it honestly looks way worse than any of the other armored Core games on the PS2 gameplay still feels responsive which is awesome but I can't help failing the game is much slower than where it was in the previous two games taking a look at the arena well there isn't really an arena there's missions that have you fighting opponents in an arena format but maps are extremely limited and you don't get to choose them I actually like the idea of not choosing the maps let's say you have to beat a sniper that uses a huge map to his Advantage but this isn't the case you do unlock an arena whenever you beat the game but it's quite a big downgrade there's 30 opponents you can fight in any order but you don't get any real backstory on the pilots there's also no rewards at least to my knowledge and combined with only four maps The Arena feels like something that was hastily put together I really don't want to even call it an arena it's funny in the last two games we're unlocking 2v2 Arenas and in this game we get the worst arena in the series for finishing the story and looking at missions They Don't Really hold up either for some reason they removed voice lines from the briefings to me this comes off as complete laziness on the developers part they also took out the consort function from armored Core 3 in silent line I understand the AI was bad but that's something they should have fixed instead of just flat out removing the game has 61 missions and all the ones that I played were boring and repetitive I hope you like this railroad Canyon level because you're going to be seeing it four or five different times same goes for this Mirage base you see even more times or this desert stage the way you get these missions too is just weird for an example you get a mission where you have to test out these engineered explosive organisms then the next few missions you get also revolve around these same enemies only to not really see them again after that these two missions I got back to back first take out some tanks in a desert okay that's done the next mission is take out these tanks in a desert fruit but this time it's night time same desert though neither of these two examples I gave you would have been an issue if they were spread out throughout the game I mean even if they were the two tank missions are way too similar I would have scrapped one of them it just feels like they reused their content without a care the missions themselves aren't really well thought out either it's usually destroy these MTS or defend this thing take a look at this mission where we have to destroy a helicopter I'll leave it uncut for you but don't worry it's short main system engaging combat mode they are using electronic countermeasures don't lose sight of the helicopter objective achieved system switch to normal mode so if that's not the shortest mission in any armored Core game I don't know what is it's just really sad there's no new Mission ideas in this game whatsoever and the missions they took from previous games don't really add anything the game shoves a lot of testing missions in your face too test these missiles then test these missiles again then test them again now test these lame MTS multiple times funny enough they have you fighting the rank one pilot in one of these tests probably a quarter of the way through the game talk about anti-climactic even more disappointing as the second AC pilot that has any sort of story behind her she ambushes you while defending a military base halfway through the game and not more than two missions later you're given a mission to take her out there could have been some sort of build up to these two pilots but there's just not towards the end of the game you fight the rank 1 pilot again but you already beat them the only thing that's new is the scenery and not really you've already done multiple missions in this city so the arena and missions were a total dud so what about the story well it's similar to armored Core 3 and silent line or should I say armored Core 1 and master of Arena 55 years has passed since the events of the silent line and humanity is doing just fine at least compared to the standards of the armored Core Universe corporations are still running the show mirage at the top Crest in second and Ki saragi in distant third a new Corporation Called navis is found and monopolized a new resource and of course the other corporations aren't too happy about it there's this controlling power called oae short for Organization for administrating Enterprise and they exist to make sure all the corporations get along but just like today's politics three-letter agencies never really do what they were made for and instead take payouts and get pushed around by the bigger company Mirage qoe tells navis to cough up the good stuff enough and in true free market capitalism fashion navis tells them to fall off this being the event that Sparks the new corporate War just like all previous games we're a pilot that gets to profit off the war and take missions from a mediator called Raven's Arc accepting missions directly from companies is forbidden and I can only imagine how much money Raven's art gets just for organizing these missions throughout the game we learned that navis is in control of ancient technology they found in their mind and throughout the game they've been getting backed into a corner this forces them to press the big red button activating this ancient technology navis hires us the Raven to stop their own monster they created and this Mission really is the first of its kind in this game I know it's a rip-off of a mission from armored Core 2 but this is honestly the first time we're fighting something special other than ACS after finishing the mission we're informed of the following mirages finally put an end to Nevis but at a heavy cost native this is pretty much done for pressed has been dealing with its own internal power struggle there's a bit of story in there like how ginobi the rank One Pilot was exclusively working with Crest and wasn't so happy with crest's liking towards ancient technology that's pretty much the power struggle the message refers to and Ki saragi is also dealing with an internal Uprising the final mission begins after Kisaragi sends us a request they sent some researchers down into nevis's mind and of course they started activating some sort of ancient weapon we need to destroy the activation controls I'd play out the final mission but it sounds like this we destroy all the controls and get attacked by some identified weapon once the weapon is defeated we're left to defend ourselves against these suicide swarms the player character is killed in action leading to the start of the next game last Raven loading your save is a bit different from previous games you can replay any missions you've already completed but to do missions you missed you're gonna have to start from the beginning going down the right Mission tree your money and parts all carry over but I'm good to leave any missions I missed behind this too is actually where I got some enjoyment out of the game what it tried to do was remaster the more popular missions from the three PS1 games and I gotta say they did a good job there's 15 mini chapters that touches on different parts of the games seeing some of the stages on the next gen console was truly a joy to behold oh and guess what they added in voice acting for the briefings even though disc 1 and the PS1 games didn't have voice acting workers in the Avalon Valley Development Area demonstrating for better working conditions have taken control of Dewayne Bridge they've erected barricades and brought traffic to a halt now it is time to resolve this matter once and for all another cool thing is they took some Liberties making some non-canon missions rather reversing the scenario struggle operatives have incited workers in Avalon Valley to rise up against Chrome Our intention is to stem Chrome's Relentless drive to secure power over the region head to the bridge and help the workers accomplish this task take care not to injure any workers as this would reflect poorly on our movement or even changing things they see fit of course they also have the unedited missions to play to the Unlockables on disc 2 are awesome not only do you unlock the nerfed karasawa and Moonlight blade but now you finally get access to Stinger's AC parts Stinger came from project fantasma and he's also made an appearance in armored chord to another age and in neither of those games could you get any of his Parts he's got some of the coolest looking parts and his Mech will later be redesigned in the 4th gen games as the Elia Parts which is also one of the coolest Mech designs in that generation in my opinion some other unlockables include intro cut scenes and soundtracks from previous games they even remade some tracks foreign [Music] and that's something that I should just mention now before I forget the game has hands down the best soundtrack out of all the PS2 games but the coolest unlockables by far are the concept art I wish I could read Japanese to see what some of these texts say if this too came out alone I'd probably have a lot more respect for the game I can't even say it's due to Nostalgia towards the PS1 games either because I played the original armored Core much later on in my life this too was so good in my opinion that I'm able to overlook all the balancing flaws this game had and that alone is saying something anyways I think that checked off armored Core Nexus one more new feature that just really didn't fit anywhere else in the video was Network play at least on the western side of the world this is the first armored Core game to have online play which is cool but I'm obviously not going to get much use out of it today neck Texas might not be the worst armored Core game but for me it's certainly the most disappointing the last game in the series silent line in my opinion was the best it got and Nexus didn't really do anything to stay on top of the mountain I think all Nexus really needed to be with silent line with updated controls some new parts maybe some small balancing changes and possibly working on the AI for allies and enemy ACS they could have done a lot more with the AI system they implemented in silent line too but instead this is what we got I should also mention that I'm pretty salty about them removing op intensify people probably just tell me to get good but I haven't really had any issues with this or the next game in the series so anyways if you could do all the things YouTubers usually ask you to do I'd greatly appreciate it I hope you enjoyed the first genuine Nexus review on YouTube and I'll see you guys in last Raven also shout out to Gamespot for giving this game a 7.7 compared to silent pathetic score of six

Channel: above average gaming

Views: 51,673

Keywords: Review, Critique, Retrospective, Commentary, Gameplay, Longplay, PS2, Retro, From Software, Fromsoft, Armored Core, overview, armored core series, what was armored core, what is armored core, armored core, armored core nexus, ac nexus, armored core nexus overview, armored core nexus gameplay, armored core nexus review, nexus, mech, robot, mecha

Id: 5yiAUxNxlP4

Length: 20min 21sec (1221 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 14 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/FromCheng]

Neat little video series going through each of the AC games. Highly recommend watches.

[u/FarFr0mSmart]

Having control of the right single-handedly makes this game great.