Armored core series overview (PS1)

on january 10 2022 a member of a consumer survey released these images these are thought to be armored core 6. so what is armored core [Music] [Music] [Music] armored core is from soft's big title before dark souls took over the spotlight in most games you're a mercenary that accepts missions from big corporations that are usually at war with each other and there's usually some sort of plot twist from having to stop an elite pilot from gaining control of alien technology to trying to destroy an out of control ai that rules the world most of the games have an apocalyptic feel to them and they set a good depressing tone the gameplay consists of taking your fully customized met god on various missions and arena fights where ac's square off for the title of nine breaker which is a fancy way of saying arena champion so let's talk about this game's bread and butter what makes it special the customization you can customize your mech in a variety of different ways from head to core to arms to legs to lock on system to generator to booster to weapons all at the same time giving it a nice paint job down to the very last detail maybe you want to get close up and shred with a machine gun and shotgun [Music] or maybe you want to keep your distance and watch some missiles fly or possibly do some drive-bys with large missiles with a ridiculous paint job [Music] i'm your host aag and we'll be taking a look through almost all the armored core games from first to last armored core 1 released as a launch title for the ps1 it released with 138 parts in total that you can mix and match to your heart's content the game has definitely been aging for a long time as you can see in this intro cut scene and the first thing we should probably go over is the controls if you're observant you can see that the ps1 controller doesn't have any sticks which might have a negative effect on a third person action game the controls were pretty much made tank controls and it's very uncomfortable to learn at first system so your first mission in this game is to go ahead and take out two training mt's it's fairly simple and afterwards you're officially classed as a raider the test is over from this moment on you are a raven so the first thing you want to do as a raven is go ahead start a mission and kill yourself as fast as possible and you want to do this for about the next 30 minutes at the end of the day go kill yourself go kill yourself go kill yourself go kill yourself you want to get to negative fifty thousand dollars into it six times so you can take an experimental injection that's totally safe and totally effective okay maybe ninety percent safe and effective [Music] all right eighty percent safe and effective but you know what i'm totally happy with those odds is this the subject for our next experiment yes his papers say he was a raven ah so he took the usual route here seems to have piled up quite a dent must have dashed his dreams but he will be reborn in this experiment that is if he lives hmm you have a point there let's get started so aside from the pretty sick cut scene that you get what else do we get after wasting 30 minutes of our time we get a free radar function without having to use a radar on our back we can shoot energy beams while swinging our laser blade we can effectively use back weapons without having to kneel down and our booster only consumes 50 percent of the energy that it would usually now human plus has always been a controversial topic in the community especially when it disappeared in the later games but you know for as broken as it is it adds a lot of fun into the game i mean if this wasn't in the game you wouldn't have access to a bunch of the awesome back weapons without having to use very slow tank legs so let's cover the customization originally i was going to take 10 minutes to describe everything but that's just going to take way too long so to sum it all up first you have core parts which include head arms the core itself and legs that vary from light to medium to heavy legs also include reverse joint legs quad legs and tank legs that all have their differences then you have your generator that supplies energy to your mech boosters that accelerate your mech and allow it to take flight and lock-on systems used to target enemies there are tons of weapons in this game pretty much any weapon type you can think of in real life from machine guns to missile launchers there's also some sci-fi weapons like laser rifles energy cannons and laser blades so now let's get into the missions before every mission it gives you a briefing that will inform you on what your objectives are and what enemies you'll be facing this gives you the ability to prepare your mech based on the situation before actually going into the mission so starting the very first mission we can turn around boost over the vehicles revealing a hidden part this is the first of many so let's take a minute to talk about hidden parts some of the best parts in the game are hidden throughout different missions some of the parts include the best in slot boosters you can get the famous moonlight blade that has appeared in most of from software games since kingsfield and the karasawa that's a legendary energy rifle that shows up throughout the series the weapon was actually named after a developer with the name karasawa who was involved in the development of kingsfield and the first three armored core games unfortunately sometime during the development of master of arena he passed away so rest in peace but thankfully his name lives on through one of the most overpowered weapons in this game series now back on the topic of hidden parts they actually did a pretty good job of hiding these one of them's inside a box in some storage area another one is on a piece of scaffolding on the side of a building there's even a mission where you're tasked to defend a part inside a warehouse and you can just destroy the door and pick up the part for yourself failing the mission another part is hidden at the bottom of a big drop that you have to trigger an explosive trap to reveal and this game really does just blow my mind with all the features that they added in from customizing your mech with the parts you want to put on it to painting it to hiding parts all over the place to having missions with interesting objectives it's really just crazy it's certainly a lot of content to fit onto a ps1 disc and i really want to go back and give the first mission a compliment for creativity construction workers modifying their heavy equipment with weapons in fear of their protests being retaliated against by their big corporate overlords is a really awesome idea for a starting mission but this mission also showcases the faults that are in this game too from this bad translation error to being able to just jump off the bridge and go into the water without sinking like why exactly is there this bridge if the water is just like knee-high i don't get it so the other possible first mission you could have gotten is to eliminate squatters this game does a pretty good job predicting a 1984 george orwellian type future and it also shows you that you are not really the good guy you're gonna take whatever mission you can you're a mercenary there's no hero complex in this game this is further added to with the mission where your main priority is to just wreak havoc in a city you want to run over cars destroy light poles and kill police enforcement as soon as possible eventually being chased out by a mech or if you're good like me you could just kill it and this is what drives me nuts in the game i went out of my way to kill this ac and they won't even acknowledge that i killed him even going so far as to say that i should be happy that i escaped with my life what do you mean i should be happy i escaped with my life this dude was literally blown to ashes i killed him but thankfully this only really occurs in the early games in the series now would be a good time to explain the mail half of the time when you finish a mission you'll get mail it serves to fill in the story and show you what's going on in the world some mail is to tell you that new parts have been added to the shop or inform you that you have been rewarded with a part i really like this system because information isn't shoved in your face but at the same time the only way to accept these reward parts is to check the mail and to check the message i remember when i was younger i didn't check my mail and armored core 2 and by the end of the game i checked my mail and i was like missing out on seven free parts so let's jump into the story i want to go out of my way to say i am not looking at the wiki for this information this is just information that was given to me through the course of playing the game so i'm sure it goes into a lot more depth but this is just my personal summary in armored core one the world is ran by corporations the big two being chrome and murakumo there are other small companies and terrorist organizations but for the most part the big players are chrome and murakumo that are in constant conflict with each other and i'm not even going to pretend like i can give you the lead up to these different endings so i'm just gonna show you you have the chrome ending so i have failed this means the end of miraculo after all pawns are mere pawns [Music] [Music] [Music] is becoming more and more intense future developments look interesting so nothing has changed after and an ending where you take down the controller that has secretly been pulling strings in the background are you satisfied do you want to destroy order destroy the world if that's what you want we were needed that's why we were born people cannot live without order even if it is a lie [Music] the one living raven which one of us was ultimately right you have the right the duty to find that out [Applause] i'm not big on stories in games so maybe some lore enforcer in the description can fill in some blanks but having three different endings in a ps1 game is definitely impressive when you finish your first playthrough you're free to play any mission in the game for anything you may have missed which is a part of the reason i haven't been able to plot out the endings but this is for the best because you get to see every mission this game has to offer such as this one that i missed that has you defending a giant airship against jet fighters it's a really cool mission but these stupid jets stress the out of me even though my weapon has a smart lock on these things are hard as to kill it's probably one of the enemies that pisses me off the most in this game one of the franchise's biggest missions has you taking out four gun emplacements on some base that's in the middle of shallow water it's visually a really cool level and it's a good example of how you only need to complete the objective you don't have to kill any of the small troops along the way just complete the objective another famous mission in the series has you taking out these rogue drones that are defending a facility you have to destroy them without causing any damage to the generators inside and as you can see i had to restart this mission but really cool concept another mission sends you to a train depot where your objective is to defend the train that's coming in for refilling and you get attacked by another ac pilot this is one of the ac pilots that went in debt like me so he went mentally insane and i really like this encounter so i'll just let this one play out [Music] yeah the plasma cannon i'm using is pretty broken and i gotta show off the most laughable cut scene of this game [Applause] so yeah mama maybe they should have came up with a better line but the mission itself is pretty cool you get to face this like giant robot just another really awesome mission in this game's list of 47 missions now we should definitely shout out a few of the bad missions this mission for example wants me to come in and destroy the space station but the plan changes soon after and i'm put on the clock to make my escape now if i turn back around and try to go out the door that i came from it's locked so heading back is just a total waste of time and proceeding onwards is just a huge maze like unless you understand the layout of the ship there's absolutely no way you'd be able to do this mission first try there's a whole other upstairs level to this place and to make matters worse the objective that they originally give you isn't even accomplishable like there's nothing i can see to destroy the space station i've come back three separate times to try and figure out if there's anything i can actually do here and there's just not which is really lame in my opinion but this mission is a perfect example of the trial and error that i just hate it's not like it's any difficult the second that you know the layout of the space station you're able to complete the mission 100 of the time it's just frustrating but the biggest sin in this whole franchise i have to say is when they throw indoor missions at you how much sense does it make that there's a bunch of these structures that specifically have walkways for mechs the size of four-story buildings and this first game in particular has so many of these indoor missions you know it could be because of the ps1's limitations possibly how much can fit on a disk or just laziness or crunch on the developers part but none of these indoor missions are really fun to look at and they're certainly not fun to play in so that's all i really have to say about armored core one and with that let's jump into project phantasma [Music] so yeah i'm not gonna lie this is kind of a weird intro it's probably the weakest intro in the series [Music] okay so getting slightly more serious how do you start this game you can import your save data from armored core 1 or start fresh if you start anew you didn't miss out on having some parts carry over from armored core 1 and you lose your human plus status with no way to get it back this is obviously and sadly this isn't the only game in the series that does this to you so what's new in project phantasma well other than 22 new parts there's an arena now armored core 1 did have a ranking system that showed us where we stood as a pilot but it left a lot to be desired project phantasma meets this desire there's 50 arena opponents and they all come with their own emblems and description those who know me i'm a nobody you understand and you can't kill a person with no body yeah it didn't really turn out so well for this guy there's a bunch of different battlegrounds you can choose to fight in like this underground city this military base that's covered in snow you can actually destroy the buildings here too there's a dried-up marina that has you battling at night time a generic arena level an outdoor flat plains type area a city that's lit up in the night a very small but wide underground cavern a more spacious underground cavern a dried-up plains area that has a ravine running through it they got whatever the this area is that looks like it's straight out of dragon ball z this is probably my favorite arena map out of all of armored core just looks sick they got this map from armored core 1 which should look familiar to you a military base that's from armored core one and then finally ending it off with another area that's from armored core one this is probably my least favorite area and boy oh boy do these ps1 games have a lot more arena locations way more than the ps2s the arena took me about two hours to speed run through and after about two-thirds of the way i had to switch up my strategy to make up for the high speed and expert tracking of some of these pilots i ended up switching out high-powered weapons for the machine gun and the rifle for a bigger lock-on box something weird i discovered going through the arena is these groups of pilots that are in some sort of clan one of these groups exclusively use quad legs like some type of elitist and the other group seems like a cult type followers of the rank 1ac it's a really strange idea and let's talk about some of the problems i have with the arena first off it seems like any challenging opponent at the top just uses the karasawa or any energy weapons and they'll just spam the out of it till they're out of energy and won't even bother switching their weapons let's see that in an instant replay let's see that super slow mo and it's gone so they fire every shot miss and then slowly just try to boost towards you while not being able to shoot you now thankfully the rank 1 pilot does not have this issue but he has a different sort of issue this dude equipped like the worst boosters in the game he's slower than a turtle [Music] despite how slow he is i still managed to barely beat him i think if he didn't swing that laser blade at the end it would have been game over and let's listen to that banger [Music] [Music] i'm not a big fan of sasuke but i'd bump that with two 15s in the trunk so defeating the top ranked pilot we get this weapon called the finger hey doofy smell my fingers hey terry smell my fingers and i know there's a lot of overpowered weapons in this game but this weapon has to take the cake just look at this tank's health disappear and i only used about a quarter of my ammo on him but the downside is using this thing melts my eardrums it's the loudest firing sound i've ever heard and thankfully i'm gonna save your ears from the same fate so now that we've worked our way through the entire arena we can move on to the missions it's a lot shorter with only 17 missions and a cool thing is the loading screen has gotten an upgrade instead of it just saying loading we get some mission information to look at the first mission starts out with a nice little intro cut scene this mission was given to us by a mystery client with the requester's name only being three question marks and the game pretty much just gives this one to you you gotta destroy a few tanks in like three minutes and even if we didn't make it to number one in the arena and buy out the entire shop this still would have been a pretty easy task so we finished the mission check the mail and we're told we're gonna get some more difficult missions moving forward and honestly i think it'd be pretty impossible not to get a more difficult mission than that first one so this second mission is pretty cool it has you destroying four generators around this base and inside the base you have to track down some hidden computers and these 17 missions sure do feel a lot longer in length so i guess a higher number isn't everything so back to the mailbox to check out the cool translation errors we're told that they'll keep in touch and it's off to the next mission this mission has us rescuing the transport the one in the middle we have to take out the one in the front and the one in the bag and more sick ass ps1 cutscenes yay so we take out some enemies then blow up the leading in the following vehicles and we're graced with another cutscene all the traps we have said have been destroyed useless [Music] this is a warning leave the premises immediately you cannot hope to defeat stinger listen i don't like annoyances so once again back to the mailbox so we're told that the mission that we were sent on was a fake mission does that mean it was requested by the enemy it's weird because the transport we were requested to rescue got destroyed by stinger so does that mean stinger's on her side i guess my warning did not deter you you are becoming a nuisance well i guess that's a pretty big note and i hope you've done a lot of arena matches to purchase some better parts because this mission is a tough one this fight isn't even the beginning or the end of this mission i guess now i should also tell you guys why we're here in the first place our mission is to rescue a prisoner and then escape in a lightweight plane that they stashed away so who the are these people if they're able to stash away a lightweight plane in a laboratory that most likely belongs to the enemy like i'm down for a creative story if that's what you want to do if you want to get away from the whole mercenary big corporation type story but at least make it believable i will go now remember that we are not yet finished and when you finally defeat stinger he's still alive and you can't kill him no matter how hard you try he's just left alive so you go through thousands of enemies and you finally make your way to the prisoner you're supposed to save and what the does the prisoner have a transport so you gotta save her and continue on through the mission and sadly this door is not the end of it the mission goes on even further so another five minutes goes by and we finally make it to that lightweight plane that they said we needed to escape on and it doesn't look very lightweight if it's carrying mechs the size of four-story buildings i don't think you can call that lightweight thank you for your assistance i am sumika i am the one who requested the rescue mission i am a raven in amber crown i was captured during my mission i've heard they are developing an advanced weapon system but not what type we do know they're called the doomsday organization but have very little on their project fantasma they are researching how to combine computer technology with the human brain of course they have no idea what the end result will be i was almost their first test subject we cannot leave things as they are i will stop them even though it's not really my job i want you to assist me i need a strong partner so you're it this will be your next mission so where the did she get all this need to know information from does this game have one of those villains that won't shut their mouth when it comes to prisoners that are doomed to death she says she'll stop them even though it's not her job so it's not like she was sent to spy on them in her four-story mech suit she does call herself a raven so she wouldn't be doing these sort of spy jobs anyways and how exactly was she able to pass on a mission request was it after she escaped and made it into that transport unit how long do you think it would take to send out a request then have us accept it and make it to her location and this has to be in a short time frame because they realize she escaped and then you have them sneaking a lightweight plane into the facility like this story is really wonky and i can see why they never came back to this concept and why they've always just stuck with big corporations and computers running the show and not really straying anywhere away from that from this game forward so pretty much the rest of the game has you tracking down leads on the doomsday organization trying to figure out info on their project codenamed phantasma i'm just gonna cut the crap and go over some cool things and then wrap this game up so this mission says the start time is at 5 37 in the morning so i was wondering is it going to be light out or is it going to be dark but i was really impressed the moment i figured out the mission starts out dark and then transitions into the morning light i also just love the level design of this mission as well all the trees everywhere and there's a village it's just beautiful to look at even for a ps1 game and something about seeing a human walking around is just really weird and i just love all the short little cutscenes that this game gives you it's not like metal gear where you're gonna be watching a movie they're usually just like 15 seconds long and they're nice to have in and this is my first time playing project phantasma and yeah it's just something about seeing that small little dude just blows my mind you don't really see that in the armored core universe unless it's in a cut scene so then there's a mission where you have to escort a transport and for some reason it takes two acs to do this but good thing because stinger shows up again really wish i could have just killed him last time instead of having to deal with him now but you and your wife who managed to defeat him again and then just watch him fly away yeah don't worry just stay with the target it's not like we should split up and one of us should go after him to finish the job or anything and we should probably talk about this lady in the pink mech that's been accompanying us on almost every mission this is the prisoner that we rescued my notes tell me that her ai is a bit wonky but i just can't find any footage to actually show that so yeah for half the mission she'll actually help us out and it's nice to have some jolly cooperation and she's obviously a pretty big part of the story and speaking about pretty big part of the story guess who we get to fight again at least this time he's in something different still not a hard fight though and coming out of this cutscene scared me shitless like this dude was right there and i have nightmares of fighting this guy in one of the later games so guess what happens after we win this fight i'll give you a few seconds to think about it [Applause] [Music] [Applause] if you said run away like every other time we fought him you would be wrong he actually flies away here's a pretty cool mission locale this mission has you defending a castle and there's even a moat out front with the bridge going over it just a cool level design this mission's got you running from above ground to underground to try and open these gates so that way you can progress through the level you activate the terminals to open the gate and then you go through the intended path and guess who we're greeted with at the very end of the level it's our best friend stinger we literally just got done fighting this guy two missions ago and i don't want to even think how many times we fought him up to here but yeah we fight him again beat him again and then he runs away again ah here we go again the funny thing is he runs away into the next room which is enough time for him to get out of his mag and into something else and escape our character must have been picking his nose or something like i know i'm tired of fighting this guy and then samika comes in and pretends like she's actually been in this mission pretty much she got separated at the start went to explore somewhere else but at least she's here for the final cut scene of the level why does it always have to be this guy like he got 50 ac's just sitting around in the arena so after he escapes he sends us a dm saying that he's become phantasma and that we should meet up in the abyss and i just was not able to find him down here so final fight with stinger i'll just let this play out it's a pretty cool fight i like his rainbow laser beams that he fires with all the overpowered weapons that are in this game i wouldn't really call it a hard fight fantasma i'm dying so yeah not really a hard fight and by the end of it we get to see our character clip through the wall flying out of this place and how cool would it have been if after this fight you could unlock this area for the arena so we make it above ground and tamika has some words to say we did it we destroyed phantasma maybe we could have adapted the technology but i guess it's better this way and after a long awkward silence we just decided to dip out ignoring her nope i would like to ask for your help again later you are quite a strong ally to have just give me a discount next time huh no so we beat the game watch some credits and reload our save there's no new arena entries and this time there's only a few missions that we missed so project phantasma it added in the arena so it gets its spot in the history book the story was really focused but not built very well and i'm not big on stories but when a game forces a story on you you should really make sure that it makes sense it had some new parts so that was pretty cool so without me having much more to discuss in project phantasma we can finally jump into the last of the ps1 armored core trio master of arena [Music] now this is how you do an intro it's got a banging music track on it shows you a mech being equipped for combat then making it to the arena's elevator while cut into some ac action along the way ending with the now equipped mech boosting into a fight with nine ball this is how you do a mecha cut scene this blows the past two games intro cut scenes out of the water and brings an impressive strong start to this game so what's new with master of arena there's 27 new parts in the game and a stricter focus on the arena in fact such a larger focus that they had to put this game on two dis but other than that not much is new this is after all the third installment of the same game sadly this game is going to get the least amount of coverage out of the ps1 games so with all that said let's jump into it so just like the previous title we can import our save from the last game over if we go and try and start up an arena match it won't let us we're not important enough so we need to do a few missions the reason being is we don't have a sponsor so we need to go get one this first mission has us going after a chronic corporate hacker hacker man he's the most powerful hacker of all time and they sure do make it a chore finding this guy and i'm sure you all can guess that i'm not a big fan of these underground levels but we find them and man this is some top grade voice acting right here oh no a raven i'm no match for one of them don't shoot me i'm leaving now what another one paul what's a top ranked arena ac doing here i heard you been looking for me i don't care who you are no one can defeat me he's the one you've been looking for huh [Laughter] okay if you're confused then all i have to say is so am i the only piece of mail we got when starting the game is our mission organizer who only introduces herself why is it so hard to make an understandable story in these early games i know it's my fault in armored core one for only getting one ending and doing the rest of the missions out of order and free play but in master of arena i'm just all the sudden thrown into this backstory that it doesn't even explain to me so i wish i could have more detail but i just really can't so we do a few more uneventful missions and a company reaches out to us with a deal if we can destroy the targeted ac they'll be our sponsor and we'll gain access to the arena now i want to just go ahead and say here that i got a new mic so hopefully there shouldn't be any audio issues there shouldn't be too much artifacting this was the best i could do there's a lot of background noise so this is just personally the best i was able to achieve so with that being said we can destroy the ac and jump into the arena there's four new stages as if project phantasma didn't have enough there's a collapse bridge going over a dried-up river a claustrophobic parking garage we have this stage that i would call a walled off preservation but something tells me it's not if acs are able to trample all over it we have one of the cooler stages that straight up has us fighting on the moon and we have a stereotypical old western town [Music] they even faced us off in opposite directions of each other this obviously doesn't really have much of a place in an armored core game but it's a pretty cool stage and they went and remade the arena so it looks like it's underwater instead of in space another new change is now there's tears to the arena you start off at the low tier and work your way towards the high this only really serves to make you wonder where you are in terms of progression and i don't really like it because you can't even look at the number one in the arena all you can see is whichever tier you're stuck in i can tell they put in a lot of extra effort when it comes to varying ai difficulties at least compared to project phantasma but some of the lower tier fights just come off as brain dead just take a look at this meme of a fight against frogman i don't think this guy even fired off one single shot he's more interested in just jumping around and looking like a fool straight up meme fight though they did a much better job coming up with some short backstories for these arena contestants it adds a bit of immersion to the game the biggest change is that we can't just stay in the arena until we're rank one we're going to be interrupted by requests by our sponsor to save their ass and i would say that's a positive it has to be easier with the storytelling if the starter missions aren't calling you useless when in reality you're the rank one pilot but it really doesn't make sense in this game our character is popular enough for nine ball to take notice of us straight from the first mission and if nine ball knows about us i wonder why we even need a sponsor in the first place so let's hop into the story from where we left off after we complete a few arena fights our sponsor gives us a direct request to save an important member of the company they already sent another ac pilot but he was about as useless as they come we defeat the enemy and save our damsel in distress and it's all good until we get back home where our mission organizer is a complete breakdown and if this was real life i'd be telling this individual to go kick rocks i pretty much do all the hard dangerous work while all she really has to do is get missions for me and then she just gets all upset when i don't need her to do her job i would get rid of this chick right on the spot we also get a message from the guy that we save he is the head of development at praguetec and remember this guy's name because we're definitely going to see it a lot more his name will be on the test so we clear out the rest of the low rank arena and now all we have left is missions this mission has us taking out this huge like armored fort thing that you would just swear would be from armored corps for answer this was a really sick fight this next mission we get is a request from our sponsor but don't worry this time our wife knows about it we have to reclaim a package that was stolen by a high-ranking arena opponent and man it was a pretty big maze getting here and it's a pretty clever fight too because the dude just guards the door with like explosive weaponry so if you go down that hallway you're just screwed so after this i guess they trust us to participate in the actual arena i guess the prior arena that we played in wasn't really the arena arena so now we get to play with the big boys [Music] with all the op crap that's in these games it's really hard to have a challenging fight but you know i'd rather feel powerful than feel weak and once again our license has a hold on it our sponsor needs help defending a laboratory from mts so just like that we're off and there's like four different points we have to defend and we kill all the mts and a familiar face appears so nine ball attacks and we have to put him down all yeller style you are too powerful modification is necessary target of operation cleared so we save the most important person in the company once again and he says he's gonna try and dig up some information on nine ball for us and he makes sure to remind us of the bad blood that apparently we have and this mission was a direct request from the company so our mission organizer is just not having it once again like she straight up wishes that we die just because we accepted a mission from our sponsor who gives us access to the arena like bro i wish i could take this chick out back ol yeller style nine ball my beef is with this chick so it's back to the arena to take out our anger on some other pilots and this is another meme fight this guy is rank seven i'm gonna let this play out and you have to tell me if this is acceptable for a rank 7 fight like this just blew my mind at least he gives us a good view of the sea floor [Music] [Applause] like come on dude this guy is so bad he shouldn't even exist like putting him at the very bottom of the arena in the low pool arena like is way too much for this guy i wonder who looked at this and thought it was a good idea like oh yeah that's that's a good rank seven pilot right there you know six spots under nine ball yeah sure throw them right there dude this just has me laughing my ass off all the things i said about them improving the ai just please throw that out the window as soon as possible so we beat our friend that should most likely have a position under frogman and they revoke our license like how can you revoke someone's license on that pathetic fight but once again we're forced into a mission so pretty standard procedure type stuff we gotta help our company frogtech with defending frogtech prog tech he's now i'm thinking about frogs and i want to take this mission to showcase an example of the hidden parts that are in this game we straight up destroy the mayor's house and underneath his house is a cave tunnel big enough for a four-story mech to fit through and another hidden wall concealing the part i give it 10 out of 10 for creativity but 0 out of 10 for believability so we go above ground and finish helping our friends out pretty simple mission and after project phantasma i'm kind of amazed that nine ball didn't show up to try and take us out so back to the mailbox and the arena some information came out about nine ball no one's actually met him in real life and a bunch of information on him was deleted so the dude's a complete mystery we spent a good long time in the arena and our buddy at prague tech reaches out to us again pretty much any corporation that's been in cahoots with this guy has either reached massive success or instant failure and the leading mind over at prague tech seems to think that the company is in nine balls sites so we have some fun in the arena and our license gets revoked again we gotta go save our good friend elin for the fifth time i guess this is sort of the best way for them to bait us out is right in front of my current location it seems as though i am not his target i think he's waiting for you be careful so we blast through some useless enemies and make our way to nine ball people who have too much power will destroy everything you are one of those people so arena and mailbox it looks like nine ball still has his number one position in the arena and elon tells us it's the ravens nest that was responsible for flushing nine balls papers down the toilet it's important to know that raven's nest is in charge of organizing missions for mercenaries so if raven's nest had some sort of bias they could shape the world any way they desire which is pretty much what's going on so we finished decimating our way up to rank two in the arena and elon is under the impression that nine ball isn't even a real human he hacked his way into raven's nest data bank and found out nine ball's name is more of a name for a part than a name for a human our loudmouth liaison seems to have some sort of connection with nineball too only if chronic hackerman was still with us we might have a shot at piecing it all [Music] in together and what do you know right after we're told of our previous mission organizers connection with nineball she reaches out to us with congratulations and just like project phantasma we're called out to n9ball once and for all and it's a pretty cinematic mission with its own story to tell so i'll just let it speak for itself why are all of you here why do you insist on interfering the corporation the acs the ravens nest all of these were formed by me for the sole purpose of recreating the world and humankind with it that's the duty to which i've been entrusted those who wield too much power those who only bring chaos they are simply not part of the program i was created to protect mankind and this world i intend to fulfill this task our system checks are complete combat mode is now engaged [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] oh [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so oddly enough the ending to this game has a striking resemblance to the first game i didn't really show any footage of it earlier on but it looks like 9 ball is pretty much an exact replica of the 9 ball in that game and also the final missions are very similar in armored core 1 there were also multiple 9 balls defending the computer i'm not sure what had inspired them to just copy armored core one the armored core series will pretty often reuse its own content from the older games but both of these games are on the ps1 and it's not like master of arena is that much of an upgrade from armored core one so it doesn't really make sense here so once again after beating the game we can reload or save and play all the missions that we missed now this game has a whole other disc that specifically caters to adding in more arena content and i think that's great but personally not something i need to cover for this series and i'll just roll some footage from some of the missions that i missed while i give my outro so the final ps1 game in the series master of arena i think it did a great job perfecting what you would want out of an armored core game i wish they would have taken like 15 seconds to give you some of the backstory of your character and i mean the voice acting is armored core grade voice acting that's something i feel like they've struggled with every game in the series and when it comes to the ps1 armored core games they're just really hard to go back to and play i didn't grow up with the ps1 so playing these old 3d games just really isn't my style one thing i can safely complain about is the piss-poor frame rate and how it always seemed like the enemies i were fighting were off my screen like you just have to have a general understanding of how the enemy ai works so you can predict exactly how much you should turn and i mean you can see from most of the footage if you go back through the video that over half the time the enemies were off screen while i was firing at them but you know for working with what they had it turned out pretty well i played armored core 1 in the past but i never played project phantasma or master of the arena so this was my first experience with them and yeah i'm really glad to be heading into the ps2 games i mean i can complain about the controls but honestly the controls carry over halfway into the ps2 lifespan so i'm not even gonna cover that that much here the weapon balancing in these first few games definitely are a problem too but these ps1 games aren't even the only ones with that problem but it's just a lot more noticeable in this one like the finger just being able to wipe out a tank in like 15 20 seconds and yeah that does it for the ps1 armored core games if you stuck around to the very end thank you so much for watching if you learned anything new or got any enjoyment out of this please like and comment i was originally gonna throw all these games into just this one episode but it has been a lot of work just doing this one i've had a lot of audio drama i've pretty much been learning how to edit on the fly trying to cut down as much time as i can and honestly it's really time consuming so any constructive criticism that i can use in the next episodes please tell me down in the comments and yeah i'll see you guys soon in armored core 2.

Channel: above average gaming

Views: 69,015

Keywords: Armored Core, Playstation, Game Review, FromSoftware, Armored Core (series), mechs, 3rd person game, Action, Mech games, retro games, retro gaming, classic gaming, giant robots, PS1 games, Youtube Game Reviews, Youtube Gaming, video games, Youtube Retro Gaming Channels, Youtube Retro Gaming, Youtube Gaming Channels, armored core project phantasma, armored core phantasma, armored core master of arena, armored core moa, armored core ps1

Id: qUM9ttsSJow

Length: 56min 22sec (3382 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 03 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Makabajones]

very informative video, narrator needs to practice the script a few times and work on his cadence.

[u/goodbyekitty83]

Could he be any more boring? it's not enough that you have good info, but you have to be able to express that in a way that doesn't bore your audience or doesn't sound monotone the entire time