The Armored Core Series: A Newcomer's Journey

this video is my longest project yet but if after this you still want more I do make videos that you can't get here available exclusively on patreon for as little as a dollar get more videos and support the work I do on massive projects like this by heading to patreon.com writing on games thanks for your support and now on with the show when announcing their upcoming project 2022's game awards from software knew exactly what they were doing not a year earlier the company had released Elden ring the game that took the souls formula they had been holding for over a decade and managed to catapult to even past the ravenous cult fandom the series had accrued up to that point this very game was about to win Miyazaki and code the top prize at this very event Elden ring wasn't just mainstream it was one of the biggest game releases in years it was all anyone could talk about and so despite the game's gargantuan size and density of Secrets 10 months from its release discussion was already rampant about what the studio had in store next for Alden ring or tell even that bloodborne PC Port everyone's been craving when the big reveal occurred with host Jeff Keeley clearly tingling with anticipatory reverence so began a cinematic in which fromsoft played directly into that anticipation mentions of feeding the fire and the last Cinders burning saw the developer Place established series language against footage that felt as if it could have been lifted directly from Dark Souls this is everyone Elden ring DLC in the Dark Souls Universe here we go and then a big robot appeared the fromsoft logo alone was probably enough to get people incredibly hyped a rather amusing tartening signifier of the developers completed transition from the mid-tier status it once had to its logo now being a marker of abundant quality but as the trailer went on and it presented dazzling image after dazzling image it became more and more obvious that this had nothing to do with Elden ring or bloodborne or Souls of any kind at the end of it all a role robot enters combat mode and the flare from its thrusters reveals the title fires of Rubicon a return to fromsoft's other major franchise armored Core the sixth numbered installment in the decades-long series you could see from the comments and the multiple think pieces at the time that this was something that made a portion of the audience unbelievably happy yet seemed to have far more people asking okay this looks cool but how much like Elden ring is it going to be see for as dedicated as its fan base is I'd say armored Core is a franchise currently occupying the kind of Niche that the souls games once did the wider audience now has a familiarity with what soulsborne games are all about after all this time and so speculation inevitably turned to how fromsoft might modernize armored Core to meet audience expectations I mean I have to admit I was one of those people my familiarity with the armored Core Series more or less extended to an old demo disc I got with the first game on it and while that was a long long time ago I remember number is seeming very odd and complicated and despite my love of giant mix it's not something I ever really thought to delve into critical reception which back in the day was something that could very much make or break a game's popularity generally saw the series framed as this weird curio that would put out all kinds of sequels to sequels and spin-offs with none of them really grabbing the attention of The Wider or more mainstream critical sphere as evidenced by a very funny video I stumbled across lightly poking fun Achilles aforementioned deferential gravitas as he talks about the groundbreaking new reveal from this venerated developer placing it alongside footage of his review of armored Core 4 whose number coincidentally matches up with the score he ended up giving that game completely trashing it in the process obviously it's totally fine none of this matters at all it's all in good humor it has the video States a lot has changed since 2006 but it does give something of a frame of reference for where the series was at the time the intro Splash screens of these games reveal a Cavalcade of different Publishers seemingly for each release appearing alongside framsov some big names a lot of odd names many that don't exist anymore all suggesting that this series was something of a hot potato with seemingly no one publisher wanting to commit to anything longer than a chance taken a punt making it all the more surprising then the armored Core managed to maintain as consistent a release schedule as it did for so long what I'm saying is that like a great many people the series never grabbed me back in the day I'd looked at this trailer for six and thought this looks amazing but it's a cinematic trailer you can't really take much concrete information from that that is until I decided to go back and play the older games to check them out for myself indeed after a slight adjustment period that I'll outline in a minute and subsequently rolling credits on almost every numbered AC entry it's complicated as well as a number of the spin-offs and sequels but not all of them again complicated and doubtless this piece will annoy certain people wondering why I didn't go in depth on their favorite AC game story in advance all over the span of a few weeks I found that yes of course it is a very different series to soulsborne in a lot of ways I imagine some people are going to feel a bit alienated blindly entering the fires of Rubicon and there's also now a significant part of me that doesn't want fromsoft to try and match the Elden ring experience in almost any way despite the significant differences between installments and the very real ways in which it is seemingly influenced the soulsborne formula harmword core is very much its own thing and I for one want that identity to be preserved as much as possible all this to say why don't more people talk about how incredible this series is why didn't someone tell me sooner where his armored Core being all my life obviously that's a joke it's been right there the whole time my ignorance is on me but I cannot remember the last time an entire series that had just been out there ready to play although it's not so simple a process if you want to do it by the official means we'll come on to that later has gone on to hook me quite like armored Core has I cannot stop thinking about this goddamn series what's more well the two franchises are very different I don't think a developer ends up making soulsborne quite the way it emerged and evolved without first having armored Core in their catalog people talk about kingsfield as the spiritual predecessor to souls but I genuinely feel that armored Core is getting pretty short shrift as far as that discussion goes sure the barrier to entry is high relative to other more accessible fare which combined with the amount of releases boasting changes that on the surface aren't immediately noticeable is probably why critical reception was so lukewarm towards the series over the years but if you can take the time to get past all that there really is a bounty of riches to discover here the individual games are so fun in their own distinct ways that have been really interesting to examine in such close proximity to one another each taking that core no pun intended of super satisfying Mech combat and altering to varying extents the level of weightiness between installments how forgiving getting to grips with said combat can be ranging from knit fairly to the complete polar opposite the ridiculously in-depth customization system that really allows you to play in your own way while constantly having to weigh up the many consequences of any choice made both in menus and In the Heat of battle and setting all of this against the backdrop of some of the thickest atmosphere the most well-realized World building I've seen in games since Dark Souls and this sci-fi Mech dystopia preceded Souls by over a decade let me put it this way that cinematic trailer that I thought you couldn't gauge any real info from it now has me more excited for armored Core 6 than any other video game I can't stop watching and re-watching it because not only does it look really really cool that's why with armored Core actually plays like there's a very high chance that this is what six will actually look like and further well indeed future installments would take great strides to increase things like flow and Mobility beyond the PS1 original everything I said about the upcoming fires of Rubicon I knew as soon as I started to seriously make my way into 1997's armored Core one so from this newbies limited perspective let's talk about my own subjective Journey towards loving armored Core as much as I now do starting with that original there's a real feeling when you boot up those super early armored cores now that this is a series remarkably disinterested in being liked 1997 was the time of manuals not in depth in-game tutorialization the sentimental value we now attribute to those little booklets lies their very real function back in the day if you didn't read them there was likely a fair bit of guesswork ahead of you when you booted up that new game you just rented from Blockbuster or whatever the armored Core goes further than mere mechanical guesswork there's a distance a coldness built directly into the game's systems its themes and tone that the game strives to make clear for you immediately there's no button layout for you to scroll through before your first encounter hell there's no menu at all you get told to sit your Raven exam whatever that is and in an instant you're under Fire from multiple hostiles jumping around that will get the better of you incredibly quickly only heightening the absurdity of trying to get to grips with the barrage of visual information on screen the weapons the ammo counts the numbers versus the big green bar the bizarre targeting reticle and crucially how any of this translates to a control setup that initially reads as similarly dense and impenetrable forget boosting or flying around the arena to match your opponent's comparative agility and elegantly take them out you are stuck trying to figure out how to look up and down the most basic of mechanical function and you're left scratching your head under intense pressure to get a grip on it it isn't just an issue of armored Core being a pre-dual shock game either existing before the standardization of right analog for camera controls as we'll see that feature didn't make it into these games for a long time to come no this control scheme has initially awkward and insane as it seems is at least on some level a key aesthetic choice in line with the game's General Vibe this tutorial is that still kind of what it is essentially is way more about getting you on board with the kind of experience you're in for than it is about getting you up to speed with basic controls because even when you know that stuff you have to realize that you're in for a bumpy ride here armored course world is one that flat out doesn't care about you or anything else for that matter outside of how much of a Stranglehold one Corporation has over this desolate post-apocalyptic Wasteland versus another Corporation you are about one of many similar cogs in that nihilistic machine roughly prepped to be shoved into that ongoing meat grinder for seemingly very little purpose other than temporarily dodging the inevitability of ever dwindling resources I suppose I know this because well I didn't get to engage with armored core's key selling point its array of customization options for a surprisingly long time the garage the shop is all accessible from the moment you complete that initial test but I was locked out of it this is because after barely making it out of the tutorial and proceeding to fail the first couple of missions thanks to me being no more competent at controlling this hulking Mech that felt as if it could barely turn around to meet the enemies and projectiles whizzing past and through me I was instead just desperately fighting to clear the debt I'd accrued incredibly early on an Endeavor that my first time round ultimately proved futile see outside of a few key missions armored Core doesn't end when you fail said sortee selected from a menu is but one event in this all-encompassing war between the corporation's Chrome and murakumo Millennium he got hired to do a job you failed and that job is likely gone now on the plus side you didn't die you can still go back to that job board but you now have to contend with the fact that your machine isn't going to pay for itself that job was an opportunity to make money and instead it sent you into the red in armored Core failure doesn't come cheap the game allows you to sell parts to make money but of course missions still require a full functioning Mech to enter SRT with so until you can crawl back out of the red you're stuck with what you've got the mission difficulty grows battles feel decidedly harder thoughts and yet your reward at the end of a mission that required such Herculean effort is offset by The increased costs of repairs and extra ammunition that you needed to expend to get just past that Finishing Line and so there you are breathlessly awaiting your winnings and through the medium of a cold Silent start screen you find that successfully completing the mission actually cost you money by playing the game you are worsening your own debt spiral and while you're so focused on just trying to get your head above water for even a second you may be gloss over the fact that every job you take on every sortee through pitch black Grotti sewers and cities seemingly devoid of humanity often directly at Cross purposes for competing corporate interests with each party telling you we're not the bad guy it's the other guy doing the exact same thing as us that's the bad guy you know your job seem to exclusively involve eliminating laborers expressing disdain for their abhorrent conditions at the hands of European Masters said overlords stating pretty starkly that this could harm their Public Image and so people need to die but you don't care a job's a job what else is there to do here what life is there but one enveloped by Violence by dead by the need to just get by to get through one more job to Stave off debt for one moment longer despite the fact you know you'll never shake it only tightening the corporation's grip over you over everyone see being broke as it turns out is pretty taxing fiscally physically spiritually it often feels like there's no way out and as we can see through real-life governments capitalizing on things like petrol and food shortages using a Crackdown on strike action as a means of reducing everyone's human rights and increasing their control over populations you know times are tough and confusing and we're the only ones that can steer you through it while somehow coincidentally companies are able to make record profits off of human misery and despite its heightened sci-fi setting there's something that feels if not completely true to life per se I think we're at least a few weeks off of Mech mercenary becoming a viable career path remarkably comprehensive dare I say relatable about the dystopia at the core of our core then look I realize we haven't even gotten into what is so legitimately great about armored core's gameplay yet but even on my first attempt where I failed miserably that atmosphere was so compelling so carefully built and oppressively Grim that it was hard not to be enthralled by it especially when such a cohesive thematic structure was coming from this clunky old PS1 game that released before Metal Gear Solid seriously while the plot itself here isn't super fleshed out a trait that will continue throughout the series to varying extents if Souls like World building and disentangling lore from things like item descriptions is your thing there seems to be as Rich a tapestry being spun here as the company's future works but on that note it's easy to say that well this is the company that would go on to create the souls series what did you expect and I feel it's important to mention that the director of that series he'd attack a Miyazaki the one that usually gets all the credit for cultivating the similarly oppressive soulsborne atmosphere sphere didn't join from software until they were halfway through development on last Raven a PS2 installment that didn't release until 2005 and he didn't direct any of the games until armored Core 4 no one knows the inner workings of this studio that's remained even more shrouded in mystery than most but if there was any influence to be had it would have been armored Core that shaped miyazaki's approach to World building not the other way around and of course fromsoft has been pretty liberal over the years in transferring items characters nomenclature between different game series but even Beyond The Mention Of the Dark Soul organization or the appearance of the Moonlight blade perhaps the most prominent similarity I found between the two games was the way the armored Core handles failure see while armored Core might seem completely brutal and uncaring it does want you to get through it it's still seeking to be an enjoyable game and so when you reach a certain level of debt the game resets automatically only no you get a boost to your combat capabilities like constantly equipped radar freeing up a space on your Mech to equip more Weaponry or enhance booster performance so your Mobility increases and every time you reach that level of debt and do the whole game over these benefits stack until you basically become what I imagine would be an Unstoppable killing machine readily able to mow down Whatever Gets In Your Way it's like the opposite of a new game plus mode it's giving struggling players a boost so they can play more effectively the thing is though this whole system is framed in game as the human plus project a means by which the corporations render you unfit for purpose in this world and so take you in regardless of your will augmenting you with equipment that more effectively suits their purposes they've taken a world already so devoid of humanity and managed to find a way to bleed that stone even drier sound familiar it's hollowing from The Souls games it's becoming tarnished it's the gradual Erasure of your Humanity the thing that if you just beaten off bosses and get enough currency you'll be able to claw back right that is until you inevitably fail again and it slips Out Of Reach once more there's arguably a great deal more nihilism inherent to the first armored Core as you just fight and fight and fight through this awful world with the only end in sight being that you will likely lose your Humanity at some point compared to the relative absurdism of the Soul series which to me more prominently asks questions of how one might find the beauty the value of existing in a world as seemingly dead as the ones found in Souls games but similar to those titles all of these themes are tied directly to your gameplay every mechanic every system shares a narrative or thematic purpose while also just being really goddamn fun at the same time I myself ended up not going down the human classrooms manually restarting my save before the corpose got a hold of me and on that second go around now equipped with some limited knowledge of my way around this robot as well as a couple of pointers from some beginner guides and a fantastic video by Josh strifease proved to be far more Illuminating as to the game's very real mechanical charms yeah it's clunky to begin with the claw-like grip with which you sometimes find yourself holding the controller might seem mental but it is something that's possible to get used to feeling like the perfect representation of a corporation only interested in producing more cannon fodder plonking you in a Mech cockpit and saying learn this or die at the start you're focused on finding any means of staying alive possible you might not be able to run or turn very fast and so it helps when your mission which almost all consists of addictively bite-sized chunks of combat lasting from one to five minutes takes place on a narrow bridge giving you time to figure out at what distances enemies become a real threat to you the points at which you can snipe them from afar the dangers of being out in the open as opposed to hunkering down behind cover positioning enemies in such a way that you can take advantage of Friendly Fire using their armor to conserve yours which given that there's no health or ammo refills during missions can make all the difference between a successful sortie and a failure it's all knowledge that you can then take into the more open environments of certain sorties using whatever tactics and cover you can muster it's panicked but it's delightfully tense and then one Mission instead of awarding money gifts me a new set of legs now that I'm not so catastrophically in debt I decide to finally engage with the customization options and this is where I fully fall in love with armored Core the lightweight legs I'm provided to suddenly open the game up in a way I could never have envisioned previously an enemy flying behind me could leave me in a super precarious spot because turning was a whole event in itself taking several seconds for me to translate what it was I wanted to achieve to this control scheme I wasn't used to as well as the molasses-like speed at which the physical maneuver takes place now I'm jetting around the battlefield not literally that comes later I'm not cowering from enemies I'm seeking them out I've gotten the strafing controls down and can finally outrun some of these hostiles yeah my gun is slightly weak though probably would be wise to invest in something slightly more powerful and hey these missiles I'm using are costing me a whole lot of money to actually use so why don't I sell the launcher and use that to pick up not only a nicer weapon with more ammunition but a more effective generator the things I really need to be looking out for here are keeping my max energy levels high enough to power all these new parts I want so going with the top of the line generator suddenly makes a whole lot of sense but also that the legs can physically support them all too I upgrade to quad legs as a result which comes with the added benefit of being able to fire shoulder weapons without needing to stop in my tracks and aim enemy fire is constant and so I'm still interested in staying Nimble here and because I can now sell every part on my Mech to gain extra funds for new models and there's no loss of value if I decide to sell something back there's no real risk to trying out builds and weapons that I might have otherwise avoided hopefully you get my point here every single decision made in the shop and garage screen not only comes with its own series of considerations and consequences that need to be offset that can fundamentally change how you play the game but give you a more thorough understanding of your own Mech what you want out of it the path you want to take so the mech can help you fight more effectively each upgrade moving you gradually away from the hunk of junk you started with and into that mindset where Above All Else armored Core is just a really video gamey video game give it enough time and you're eventually hammering on buttons with a frequency and intensity that makes it look as if you were a character playing a fake game in a movie the action of armored Core is as weighty as it is delightfully frenetic eventually seeing you meet even other ACS units that have heightened abilities compared to their grunt counterparts in glorious anime style combat steering each other in the face as you boost strafe along endless desert planes desperately trying to hold on to that lock more powerful weapons shrinking the trademark Square aiming reticle and more agile enemies requiring you to keep an eye on the Boost meter used to keep up with them ensuring you don't spend it all and have to endure that agonizing weight for it to fill all the way back up the charm of armored Core lies in all these micro decisions you're having to make at every turn under intense pressure pressure that sometimes can get the best of you even when you think you've got a specific technique nailed down there's just so much to keep an eye on at any given time and training yourself to become more efficient in that process becoming more familiar with the workings of your Mech is downright through and just like the worry of becoming destitute hastens your willingness to dehumanize the conflicts you wade into with squatters and unions and the like so too does your ever-growing combat ability armored Core is so fun it makes upgrading your Mech such a well-earned and personal Endeavor that for me I couldn't wait to get back into the action once more the morality and ethics of fighting for all of these different factions be damned in playing this game you become a killing machine everything is connected here and it Bears repeating this is a PS1 game released in 1997. You know despite it being my first console with some immensely Cherished Memories attached to it as a result I rarely find myself going back to that platform instead opting mainly for the height infidelity and fluidity of PS2 games armored Core is proving to be the exception to that preference in every regard from gameplay to storytelling I have been shocked at how well this holds up is isn't perfect of course the fact that you're maneuvering the camera as if by crank isn't helped by the many many times it'll get stuck on Geometry and the lock-on often sees you awkwardly fidget around as you look directly at the thing you're trying to destroy because the game has decided some other thing vaguely in the reticule takes priority there are some moments where that awkwardness becomes harder to justify as being part of the experience of navigating this complex piece of industrial Machinery but even with all that detritus compared to so many of its PS1 contemporaries it still feels so modern look despite a final level that really puts a damper on what preceded it going from uniquely intense action game to an utterly excruciating platformer its control setup was not built for taking the camera from the occasionally awkward territory it previously inhabited to an absolutely unbearable nightmare after beating the game I've been going back to that cinematic trailer for fires of Rubicon pretty constantly it's a thrilling trailer on its own for sure but where I initially viewed it as hard to gleam any real information from given its cinematic nature I now look at it and become even more excited thinking this is what the game will play like even from that first title released over 25 years ago its action is so surprisingly flexible and intense that I can already perform some of the moves seen in the trailer for a game that hasn't been released yet seriously I can't overstate this enough armored Core might have its quirks its awkwardness at times but it's good enough on its own that you can just play it as a big fun Mech game as far as that type of game goes this is still cream of the crop stuff but it's the way all of this is contextualized against this wider World built by from software that elevates armored Core to the level of a title that transcends its place as a historical Touchstone this isn't the kind of game where you appreciate its cultural value to get to the next more more polished installment if you're thinking about getting into the series I would say play the original armored Core especially as we're about to see that this isn't a game that necessarily gets better with just a new coat of paint and that it represents such a delicate balance of systems and mechanics that taking this formula to a new generation becomes a lot more complicated than you might think when you envision generational jumps within the same franchise I think it's safe to assume that there's going to be some kind of cleanup both Technical and mechanical you know the first game got them out the gate and now they have the chance to really refine the ideas they must have been going for in the last title but were possibly held back by I don't know platform or technological limitations it's interesting then when you boot up armored Core 2 released three years later as part of the ps2's launch lineup and find that it's basically just armored Core one with a slightly new coat of paint and when I say new coat of paints I mean the environments are still drab deliver maybe some are slightly bigger more Labyrinthian in nature but the menus no longer look as if you've just opened up a rudimentary PowerPoint filled with war Dart it's got that kind of metal gear solid 2-esque hexagonal future grind to it everything is bold bright glowing exciting right up until the point you're back in that action and you find that well war is still hell this expansion of the themes I outlined in armored Core 1 is definitely one of the more impressive points of the sequel bear in mind it's at this stage I realized that actually trying to connect all the Dots here to get the complete picture of the actual plot is neither something I'm going to be able to effectively do nor would I particularly want to you know I think Elden ring marked my limits as far as fromsoft's lore based storytelling goes but in this instance especially I think that confusion as to what's going on that fatigue might be kind of the point bear with me here your actions at the end of one didn't change change anything for the better if anything the problems only intensified even trying to escape a Barren Earth to find a future elsewhere namely Mars The Wrath of corporate greed cannot be escaped mercenaries are still required to kill people in exactly the same way they did on Earth for pointless furthering of monied interests just with more competing factions to take into account or not your purpose is still just to get paid taking out antagonist Leos Klein the head honcho of The Frighteners The Mercenaries being hired by corporations Zeal Matrix to overthrow what government still remains in this hellscape it's just another job maybe with a slightly higher degree of urgency there's a lot more talk of your piloting ability this time around and in a world so otherwise desolate and cold it can be quite nice to hear something like that especially when you've trained yourself to become better working with this rather unique controlski which makes it all the more gut-wrenching when the fellow PC Pilots you're receiving compliments from suddenly turn on you your ability your humanity is a threat in this world you are not a friend you're not a person you're a competition it all represents a really admirable dedication to maintaining and meaningfully expanding on that atmosphere that so elevated its predecessor Beyond its already amazing make combat but other than a slightly more ambitious narrative scope I suppose armored Core 2's design is still remarkably similar to the first game tilt some missions are straight uplifted wholesale you still start with a Raven test who scored or crawl this time around is slightly more forgiving than its predecessor's wide open arena but is equally as dispassionate in its delivery of objectives and Justice Keen to avoid explaining absolutely anything to you about how this thing is meant to control graphically things look like the developers probably envisioned them looking first time around but control wise I remapped the same buttons I did previously to play more or less the same game I played previously and you might think isn't that enough you'd love the first game so isn't this just more of a good thing well yes and no don't get me wrong here I still enjoyed my time with two a great deal but if you were to ask me which game in the series I'd want to return to the second would probably be at the bottom of my list honestly the problem isn't with the control scheme to be clear that initial clunkiness and finding your own ways of overcoming that is a key aspect of armored core's identity the problem is that with the few updates 2 does bring to the table it illustrates that even small changes to this framework can completely alter the balance of things introducing an awkwardness all its own the introduction of extra sections of your AC to consider upgrading the inside weapon the radiator Etc combined with the sheer volume of new parts relative to the first game there are just immediately available to you should in theory heighten the flexibility afforded in just How Deeply you can customize your make but in reality in my case anyway only serve to increase the systemic fires you need to be putting out at any given time during a mission with seemingly little in the way of actual benefits this kind of messing with the dial so to speak increasing or reducing the importance of certain aspects of customization is a design consideration that will be honed and evolve as the series progresses but as far as two goals what resulted for me was a kind of crippling frustration that left the play experience feeling more Hollow forgettable than the first game those missions lifted from one offering a direct comparison of just how much more I enjoyed playing that original than this identity crisis of a sequel The increased Fidelity arguably leaving things like switches and destructible objectives less distinguishable in world making me wonder if this was actually the button or switch I needed to interact with sometimes wasting precious bullets in the process weirdly it's much harder to precisely aim your blade at something on the wall here but on top of that the second or third mission saw minion level foes stun lock me in a way that I don't ever recall happening in the first game armored Core was clunky but this felt like a whole other level and now you're telling me that I'm overheating as well reducing my output and health God I just need to find something any combination of parts that work quick and so with that mindset in amongst all these options I upgraded my legs to something more Nimble then to a quad I bought a new rifle all near the start of the game and that more or less carried me through about three quarters of armored Core 2's runtime it worked and I simply didn't have the energy to mess with that to laboriously search this complicated store looking for the most marginal of upgrades that remember I still had to consider in the grander context of how much more costly increased ammo capacity would be in the long run for example no this build Got Me by so I just went with it that was up until one Mission introduced multiple flying ACS that required slightly more Mobility than my build was able to accommodate which sure required a bit more time spent in the shop menu but at that point I had so much money built up from Mission upon Mission with very little upgrades that picking out a new build that got me over that finish line was a rather trivial Endeavor less my own machine whose gradual upgrades felt truly earned heightening my attachment to my own creation and more a disparate set of parts I had to be ready to ditch in an instant should a mission-specific obstacle require it such vast increases in the gear available and the resultant uncertainty of just how noticeable an upgrade said gear would actually be to my current build created a sense of option paralysis that just wasn't there in the first game that led me to engage far less with the this crucial aspect of the series like I say there is an extent to which more armored Core is inherently a good thing I enjoyed my time with two but while side-by-side visual comparison might make it seem like an obvious choice in terms of a starting point for newcomers you know do you want the cumbersome PS1 original or basically that same game with enhanced visuals and more customization options but what that first game lacked in visual Fidelity it more than makes up for in focus and consistency rendering to an interesting but clumsy first step to fleshing out the bones of this mechanical framework rather than the generational Leap Forward that would render its predecessor obsolete I mean I have to say though at the very least two's last mission wasn't quite as nightmarish as what came before although it did require me to basically stay stuck in a corner camera issues be damned because it was the only way for me to effectively lock onto the big alien enemy that greets you once Klein goes down and know armored Core is odd if only there could be some meaningful refinement to the core action here that could significantly reduce situations like this that could actually give us that Leap Forward enter armored Core 3. it was legitimately difficult to tell at first whether my proficiency with three's early stages relative to the first two games was merely a result of suddenly having all this experience with those prior titles or if it was actually representative of a more fluid set of mechanics because visually things are very similar to two you're near identical looking Mech cruising through futuristic but empty Grim cities Barren deserts endless industrial corridors and the like with seemingly no humans in sight regardless of what it was however all I know is that Man Armored Core 3 feels good to play right out of the gate it really doesn't seem like there's the same kind of adjustment period as players have to endure in the previous titles zooming around the battlefield using my boosters to handily dodge missiles while hitting enemies with a barrage of rifle fire of my own rifle fire I should add that seems to take these enemies down in slightly less hits than before my boosters seem to be able to keep me going for slightly longer before getting in close enough that I can finish off whatever stragglers remain with a single elegant swipe of my laser blade just like in the trailer for six and I guess that's the word for it immediately there's an Elegance to the way that armored Core 3 controls it all just feels so natural every action a flowing extension of the last rather than the rigid stop start Affair of having to cease firing because the enemy flew behind you so you can slowly turn around then once you're in position aim your reticle all while hoping the enemy hasn't cut you to Ribbons in the process here you might as well be ruler of the battlefield there are points where it really does feel like you're orchestrating your own anime style Jewels it's also responsive and flexible while still retaining that weight and scale that lets you know how hard you're hitting on every level the action out of the box feels like the perfect refinement and balancing of systems the true jump forward that two should have been further the Strategic options available to you have increased as well it's not explained to you and it requires a frankly odd combination of button presses that's difficult to remember and execute In the Heat of battle but should you run out of ammunition you now have the option to shake off that dead weight launching the weapon in question off of your Mech for increased Mobility I suppose personally I barely used the feature but it was nice to know that it was there one more trick in my Arsenal increasing the depth of Mech Mastery for those seeking it out what's more three is the first numbered entry in the series where consorts are introduced where for certain missions you get given the opportunity to take an AI controlled partner into SRT for a portion of the mission payout ranging from grunts rate up to full-blown ACS it's not a game changer by any means the AI in question seems to be pretty lackluster in some cases only managing to swoop in a minute after the nick of time after I've gone in and cleared it out myself it seems that enemies and allies alike have a real problem dealing with doors generally in these games in other cases though they can sometimes actively get in the way remember Friendly Fire is a thing in these games and on some occasions saw a mere accidental shot turn my Ally into an enemy I subsequently had to manage to deal with on top of my actual objective but hey at the very least if you anticipate that things are going to get hairy in a mission you can nominate a person to come in with you and draw fire from the enemies as beat hmm I wonder if the game has been conditioning me to view other human beings piloting these things with the same kind of disposability the in-game corporations view me who could possibly see but beyond that this heightened flexibility afforded to how I approach the in-game action extends to the customization when I know things can be this responsive can feel this good suddenly I'm a whole lot more incentivized to take my time experimenting with different loadouts rather than just being irritated to the point of simply finding what works and sticking with it and it's a good thing as well because while three starts out comparatively Breezy the difficulty Spike seen in its last third or so is one of the more intense across the entire series using the same kinds of shock twists where an ally will turn on you Mid Mission except they'll Chuck in an extra AC to manage simultaneously after your resources and health have been drained by grunt enemies swarming the arena there was a while there where I wondered if I was going to be able to beat three as a result it was a game I had to put down and come back to Once I'd beaten the rest but that's just it it's a game I kept thinking about I wanted to come back and exist some more in this mechanical playground figure out my own way through these challenges because while as I see the plots of these games don't do a whole lot for me three represent such a sweet spot between the heft and Agility of its action and the manageability of its customization systems that it seems like the game is finally providing the tools of self-expression necessary that I get to craft my own narratives during gameplay the atmosphere is still very much grounds it as a grim post-apocalyptic Affair as I say it still seems as if the game is asking questions about the morality of this action feeling this good of using tactics that might put others at risk Etc but three separates itself from its predecessors as the kind of experience you could excitedly chat about with your pals about the various hijinks that got you and you alone through any given Mission it still has the patented armored Core clunk there's still issues with camera and lock on it's not suddenly running at Ninja Gaiden speed or anything like that you are still required to really feel out and learn your preferred style of Mech piloting but it feels like the shifting of certain sliders relating to how responsive the controls are finally lets you look as cool as Mech combat probably should it's not all perfect however there are some systemic changes made to three namely to do with currency and sailing stuff that aren't quite as successful as the changes made to combat and this here we'll talk about some of the expansions that have released for armored Core 3 which again this is the experience of a relative newcomer is totally subjective but while I still had a pretty great time with them generally and the expansions to these games can often be fan favorites in three's case specifically I can't say I'd pick them over the original game if I had the choice for one with three included you can no longer sell everything even in the garage you must have a core equipped at all times which seems a bit arbitrary if I'm honest you still can't enter a mission without saying arms legs or a radiator but at least in the main game you can still sell those off to boost your credits before heading back into the store taking you just over the edge to be able to buy that new upgrade that you were just short of affording through Mission rewards alone it was a great system and especially seeing as the core is often one of the more expensive parts of your Mech the part that can have such a massive impact on different aspects of your mix performance its weight its defense the irritation of thinking God why can't I just swap out my current part for this upgraded core I'm going to be selling the old one back anyway I don't need both as an irritation that builds up quickly 2003 silent line and 2004's Nexus the two expansions I played and once again sorry if your particular favorite isn't featured here take things even further the former silent line in its assumption that you've already played through the original game expects you to import your save from that game with all the parts and credits you've earned from that initial playthrough rendering the already pretty poultry Mission rewards relative to three as pretty restrictive if you're just starting out here and kind of useless if you're not Nexus on the other hand strips away the ability to sell cores arms legs your head any part deemed essential to enter a mission unless you've already bought a replacement and are ready to equip it here it's countered by the comparatively massive Mission rewards even early on representing up to five or six times what you'd get paid in one of the other games for the same job but in doing so Nexus scraps one of the most user-friendly features of the entire customization system the ability to truly experiment by chucking your old Parts away and taking a punt on something you've never tried before knowing you could sell it back for its original value should it not work for you further Nexus Alters the balance the importance of managing energy output and the subsequent heat generated in a way that I imagine is supposed to reintroduce some more of that decision-making tension back into proceedings that 3's mechanical and systemic upgrades might have smoothed out but in reality the constant drawbacks introduced to what were meant to be part upgrades left me feeling as powerless as I did early on in two where here I really struggled to find a satisfying balance of mobility and controlled booster output that didn't absolutely cook my AC rapidly draining its Health to the point of being basically unusable now none of this is to say that these games aren't fun in their own right that there isn't any value to them far from it I mean Nexus is the first game in the series to feature dual stick controls which we'll come on to more in a bit but for now is an absolutely wild transition that does result in a greater immediacy of control where there's not such a mental process of translating thought to the controller to the resulting action it's so much more intuitive and Speedy the kind of sensation I imagined The increased emphasis on temperature was introduced to counteract when it works it's in arguably the best the combat has felt up to this point it's just that to me it appears as if romsoft overcorrected someone it goes to show that Nexus and its accompanying games serve as an interesting example of how when it comes to the armored Core formula even the slightest of alterations to the way that one or two features work pushing one slider just slightly to the left or right will have a knock-on effect on every single other aspect of the game's design despite the intimidatingly massive range of options available to players it's all such a careful balancing act on from soft's part I mean there are many examples on a sortie to sortie basis of these mechanical changes working in from Source favor across the three games creating some of the most varied Mission design in the series up to this point changes as simple as reducing the level of light in a map messing with your ability to lock onto enemies from the distance you normally do completely shift the atmosphere of say a regular Forest attack to something all together together more tense and Sinister forcing you to Intuit your surroundings engage in an instant amongst the dense foliage and fog not only where an enemy is right now but where they're heading it becomes Predator by way of oath famous team it's brilliant so you see there's a whole lot of reasons then why if you ask someone their favorite AC game they're probably going to point to three it just represents the point at which everything finally clicked into place for the series where things were still Hefty required some time and energy from the player to really learn and get the most out of it but where the rough edges were sanded down just slightly to more readily reward players for that investment the armored Core identity remains intact but more people get to experience it it's a win-win while I do genuinely think that one is a fantastic game in its own right it's well worth checking out if you want to see this version of the series at its absolute best sand some of its harsher elements three is the place to start notice though how I say this version of the series that's because after honing the formula down fromsoft is about to take more than a slight detour with the franchise and armored Core is about to change pretty substantially the move between three and four marks a transition for the series in many ways for one it's the point at which suddenly the process of emulating these games goes from simple Plug and Play exercises to requiring a fair bit more fiddling to ensure you can make it past the intro screen let alone try to get the mix to render properly although thanks to updates in recent months and following said tweaking the armored Core 4 era games now run pretty much perfectly with sufficient Hardware the 5 or V games well they're a different story we'll get on to in a bit moreover though where the jump between one and two felt more like a paint job rather than anything truly substantial the move to the PS3 and Xbox 360. is more than just a true technological step forward it's a philosophical one for the series as well and it's interesting how you can kind of track where the series is at in this regard by looking at each entry's opening mission one was an unforgiving introduction to the desolate brutality of this universe two was similarly cold but had someone watching over your back albeit in a judgmental capacity three teamed you up with a fellow bright-eyed bushy-tailed initiate for your exam but four marks the first numbered entry in which the game does away with the exam format entirely instead you're in cyberspace with the game getting you to repeat basic functions in a segmented regimented way separate from any kind of dialysis of ensuring that you pass the exam to make the team it's still not a perfect tutorial it doesn't explain everything what it does explain it does so textually and given the armored Core is at its Center a kind of puzzle of trying to pull various things off at once as efficiently as possible breaking everything down so rigidly might not be as comprehensive in teaching players what to expect as it might seem that said holy moly is still an actual tutorial building on Three's heightened Mobility out of the gates it feels like there's much more of an effort here to ease potential players into the armored Core experience this time around and given that I actually played through this before going back to Nexus the sequel to three where duel stick aiming was finally introduced as an option there was something legitimately jarring as jarring as when I was first plonked into one's massive controls honestly about jumping into a game that well controlled like an actual video game I'd spent so long internalizing the old way of doing things that to go back to something more standardized constituted a learning process all of its own but standardized dare I say dumbed down it indeed is and don't get me wrong here as we'll come on to that's not a bad thing but despite a presentation that in some areas suggests a level of sophistication of complexity of intricacy hitherto unseen in the series The mechanics of four do signify a remarkably different altogether more arcadey experience than what came before the difficulty curve of armored Core games can be pretty all over the place at times you'll be cruising along gradually building a Mech that you become extremely effective with once you've learned its ins and outs and all of a sudden bam a mission whose volume and intensity of hostiles whose nuances of its environment forces you to rethink your entire build that eventually you manage to struggle through before a second long sortee that involves little more than moving from point A to B with shockingly little in the way of obstacles it's uneven but it does keep you on your toes constantly aware of the fact that anything could go down and you will need to think on your feet and improvise both during combat and in the menus in four on the other hand I can't really remember much of anything causing me any trouble at all where the difficulty graph charting prior AC games would resemble a failed lie detector test test in four it would be more of a flat line no part of the combat system requiring much in the way of thought the more forgiving gradation of weight limits here replacing the strict binary found in Prior games be damned pile yourself with enough weapons and ammo that you're not struggling Mid Mission build up a stockpile of Parts you can easily switch between in the garage just in case a fast enemy requires slightly more consistent fire from a railgun rather than the more Straight Ahead barrage of the grenade launcher just pick the boosters and generators with the highest blue numbers as opposed to Red because money is far less of an object here indeed less important than the time spent in the shop or garage this time fretting over every little part to maximize the efficiency of your build is getting to grips with the moment-to-moment maneuverability you're afforded during missions as evidenced by the fact that I found it surprisingly difficult to even find the shop this time around given the game's introduction of schematics in theory a clever system to allow you to store build and access full setups of enemies you've taken down but in practice just meant more steps to get to the menus I actually want whether you've picked a lightweight flight based model or a tank you're going to be dealing with a lot more enemies darting much faster around the screen seemingly as if they're teleporting or glitching at first a frenzied pattern of movement that you are expected to match speed how quickly you can pull off the action really is key here locks are far more generous meaning that your goal when dealing with the next as they're called here what were previously referred to as AC's fellow Ravens is just to try and keep them on screen while pummeling them with as much Firepower as you can hammer out health is higher energy output more generous the threat may still be high things can still get hairy from time to time but almost everything about the design of four is geared towards people being able to fly these mechs with greater ease and again don't get me wrong here it's fun to go into a level and see everything just turn into this hail of weapon Fire And Blade swipes and swarms of missiles and explosions like some mad anime but I also don't really remember a lot of what I was actually doing in four specifically for one my very real fear of the cutscenes crashing the emulator and costing me progress man I wasn't really able to focus much on the pre-mission briefings but in Prior games skipping said segments could very much drop you right in it when you suddenly had no idea what the objective was and what you were meant to do with it for example going through an entire level only to instinctually shoot the very thing they wanted you to bring back costing you an entire mission in force case though there was basically no situation where said confusion occurred because the objective always seemed to be here are some enemies shoot them I did that for a few hours beat the final boss first try and then the game just ended maybe I had to shoot a structural beam or shoot something that changed me for a bit at no point was there any doubt as to whether I had the ability or the build to pull that off in terms of game feel four can be a pretty great action game as far as action games go but it very much is just one of them where prior titles required at least slightly more thought as to how you were going to make said action play out here you just zap around until the things aren't there anymore it's decent but it's not exactly what I'd call thrilling Beyond its occasional visual flurries what I assume represented an attempt to bring the franchise to a wider audience that I don't know proved all that successful and I imagine had the potential to alienate a few longtime fans in the process it's worth noting then that four was also the directorial debut as it turns out of the previously mentioned heat attacker Miyazaki the supposed king of making extremely difficult deliberately abstruse games making his mark on the world of game Direction with the least mechanic intense arguably most accessible version of a previously inscrutable franchise that said in its rather Bland mush of ideas with which to shift the franchise to something more approachable and action focused there was a lot of potential to focus in on some key areas which is where the spin-off sequel or answer comes in and oh boy are we in for a treat now we're four felt a little limp and lifeless in comparison to what came before for answer bakes this sterility into its storytelling and the results are as Bleak as you'd expect from amir's archetype the Dank sewers and pitch black underground cities may have lacked any direct human presence things look cleaner now they're brighter and yet somehow there's less Humanity more desolation to this whole scenario than there ever has been it's an irony the game plays directly into the new corporate scene of the pre-mission presentations resemble at four o'clock meeting with Jerry read the month's projections far more than the they do an outline of a military operation there's something delightfully unsettling to have some business guy drawn on about how this mission is totally a great opportunity for you to further your working relationship with this Corporation go knock their socks off champ the ultra sleekness of the presentation contrasting sharply with the utterly Barren wastelands that surround you so abstract compared to what came before so washed out so unsettlingly smooth in that way that only the PS3 can effectively render that the world is more alien than ever before as if you were still trapped in the cyberspace of forest tutorial Battlegrounds on which you try to win the admiration of faceless corporations are the long-flooded remnants of Lost Cities like Shanghai whose remaining buildings you Barrel through with no heat paid to its past it's all from so long ago that reminiscent of Tokyo 3 found in Evangelion its purpose has long since moved past residential comfort as hinted at by the Glorious intro in which The Gleam of white glints design clashing wildly with the land it so casually soars over so irreversible its desolation its Annihilation you really have to wonder why is anyone fighting anymore what is it people actually want here of course at the center of the conflict is control over what little supplies remain for the survivors of whatever great cataclysm caused this desolation now resigned to a life in floating Sky fortresses but the completely aseptic nature of the corporate dressing this conflict is draped in Scream loudly the motivator is power there's nothing else just endless lifeless oceans and deserts burying what once was the washed out Grays only serving to highlight just how thoroughly any sense of color of vibrancy of Vitality has been Zapped from the world like any other resource it's all part of the visual palette introduced in four but here it feels so much more deliberate for it in its implementation like it has a real purpose in terms of atmosphere and story because where prior titles had this set dressing but it didn't really matter whether or not you picked up on its subtext for answers seems to really want you to think about the wider implications of what it is you're doing where you're doing it who you're serving and who you're hurting with the answer to that last one in particular revealing itself on a deep structural level to be you you're hurting yourself most games in the franchise don't really conceive of you as anything you are not a character you're not moving your own plot forward per se you are just picking jobs off a board and doing them until there aren't any jobs to pick anymore people occasionally talk about your ability they'll tell you to stop doing the jobs you're doing the games might talk a bit about the legendary Raven that rolls through the ranks but the job is the job it's getting done for answer on the other hand and as suggested by its title asks you pretty Direct if that is the only answer the only outcome and it does so by telling you after the credits have rolled to Simply do it all again I mean it's not as if anything has really materially changed in that first ending might as well keep fighting and see if there's another way right more so than ever the ACs you've been fighting have been trying to get you to consider said alternate path so here's your opportunity to go down it this isn't the first time armored Core has required multiple playthroughs to get the full story or given you an ending based on your corporate Allegiance but for answer is definitely the title where such a structure was fully fleshed out where said playthrough paths felt anything other than arbitrary as a result it's possibly the first time I've actually somewhat cared about the moment-to-moment plot in one of these games because it actually comes down to your choices you get to see firsthand how destructive and pointless siding with the league of Corporations is and then you get to choose missions that explore the other side of that conflict to see if it fits you better the end results may be the same endless war countless people dying with the game going to Great Lengths to highlight just how Grim things get when you side with the next over the league but at least it's something I get to claim some small agency over the situation it's framed really well with the mission starting to trickle in from Lane Arc being presented very similarly to any other organization they offer to pay you what they can because you're still a mercenary at the end of the day but you finally get the chance to be an active participant in the fight against the corporations that have kept you locked in such endless Conflict for multiple games now and let me say this my second playthrough of for answer I realized too late that I had accidentally picked the wrong Mission and locked myself out of that second ending a good couple of hours of progress wasted normally that would be the thing that got me to say I'm putting this game down now in four answers case however I had absolutely zero problem going back and replaying the campaign again because man is so great the more frenetic action-focused control setup and moveset is carried over from four but it's all been tightened up so that the button layout is even more conducive to zooming around the more open battlefields but crucially wherefore felt like such a flat line in terms of actual Mission design for answer marks a return to the sorties of all where you really had no idea what to expect just at a scale that like so many things about four answer has never been seen in the armored Core games up to this point even when you're tasked with just destroying enemies there are usually more of the radar tricks found in a game like three that serve to bring more tension to previously explored scenarios and environments but the real star of the show here are the absolutely gigantic fortresses you're tasked with bringing down to size often requiring a good deal of strategy as to where you'd even begin with something this huge how you'd even approach it encounters that can absolutely decimate your health if you're not instantly moving internalizing the rhythm of countless salvos from various types of Weaponry bursting from these Industrial behemoths in a way that's honestly not that far off the kind of approach you'd have to take with certain bosses from the director's future endeavors suddenly things are not only mechanically engaging they're tough again they require thoughts and careful analysis of the enemy and your surroundings on the flat just like the best moments of the older titles and side note it's very funny to me as a Scottish person to hear people freak out about the dominance of motherwell talk about how motherwell has to be stopped to ask you with destroying motherwell rejoice as motherwell crumbles to the ground I can assure you it's a joy most people here would probably share hell the central combat is so satisfying that while the tactics rarely change much for answer was the first game in which I felt compelled to blast my way to the top of the leaderboard rankings the schematic system making so much more sense thanks to of the story missions more effectively building up the personality of the characters and the mix they control multiple missions saw me come up against a particularly tough Fall using techniques that my projectile Focus build simply wouldn't be able to achieve making me all the more Curious to explore how these foes were able to pull this stuff off and with their unlock schematic combined with the same abundance of currency found in four allowing me to conveniently purchase everything required and get to testing things out in an instant indeed shopping for and tuning your Mac upgrades in for answer feels less like the desperate cumbersome struggle to get past just one more encounter found in earlier titles and more like entering a showroom in Gran Turismo all it's missing is the smooth jazz perhaps mirroring the glossier more coldly business-like framing of the corporate War hanging over it all such mechanical systemic World building and storytelling is still going on and what what's more it's as effective as it's ever been that said while for answer is fantastic it's one of the best straight up action games I've played I don't know that I'd call it the best armored Core it's the best version of this version of armored Core but it's also not really what comes to mind when I think of this series I choose to play three and four answer for completely different reasons to one another the heft of things has been dramatically reduced for very good reasons in four answers case but that weight is armored Core for me and I think with Miyazaki leaving the franchise for more soulsy pastures perhaps the director that replaced him now Yuki Takahashi saw that too because the actual numbered sequel that follows for is about to go in its own Direction in some ways creating The Highest Potential return to the series Roots I could possibly imagine and in most other ways completely shooting itself in the foot so remember the very start of this piece how I mentioned that I played through almost all of the the numbered armored Core entries and it was complicated well 5 or V is that complication where four and four answered ended up running pretty flawlessly after some messing with the settings these games including the spin-off sequel verdict Day were a case of rpcs3 hanging on for dear life for what other people have been saying it's a wonder I got as far as I did as most people seem to suffer crashes immediately after the first mission if they can get to that point whatever the case though especially during its more chaotic moments my time with Vive could be described as less playing and more observing given that for some reason my PS3 died on me and used copies of the games can seemingly creep alarmingly close to the cost of a whole replacement console nowadays that simply wasn't a price I was willing to pay to check out a game that even if I did get it running flawlessly on original Hardware is already a shell of its former self see five released in 2012 a time in which online multiplayer on consoles was arguably in its Haiti with numerous action games releasing trying to capitalize on that then unbelievably lucrative Market armored Core whose previous attempts at multiplayer amounted to a bunch of PVP Mech battle modes decided it was going to get in on the online action and so it shifted its focus away from the single-player campaigns of old in favor of a PVE team-based approach to missions for sure a novel idea and given that the servers were shut down almost exactly two years after the Western release one that proved unsuccessful the single player component that remains then in both V and verdict Day if not completely gutted I mean there are several missions available for solo players to choose from still feels like you're playing a different game to the one they intended the one they wanted you to play a comparatively incomplete Experience One whose design was intended for multiple people to tackle as an ongoing online experience and therefore we're single player air feels somewhat incompatible but the thing is getting my hands on it for a bit at least and reading a few reviews from the time it doesn't seem like the reason five got shut down so soon why the player base dwindled was because of the game's ambition no it would appear that region-specific server issues and the series still very prevalent issues with tutorialization presenting a steep barrier to entry for groups had more to do with how things went down because honestly for every misstep it seems like there's at least the seed of a really interesting idea four and four answer represented what was probably a necessary shift in the series trajectory in terms of increased speed and emphasis on Mobility at least an attempt to lean into the action side of things a bit more to increase the wider appeal of the series V and verdict Day on the other hand seem like they're trying to take just a few steps back towards something resembling the older more tactical style of play mix are smaller moving more quickly along the ground than the early Beatles at least but they are very much grounded of course you can still jump around and over enemies and the like but gone are the days when you're essentially flying with near infinite boosters across vast stretches of land in seconds things can still get incredibly fast and frantic but we aren't talking for answer levels here things feel suitably heavy matching up with the general Vibe of the encounters you Embark upon reflecting the Grim dark Aesthetics of similar action or war games of its time armored Core 5 leans into what I would consider the gritty PS3 aesthetic where everything is brown and green and kind of lifeless but also simultaneously very very shiny and blown out it really reminds me of that Ace Combat game that released a year or so prior assault Horizon where everything was close up and shaky and indeed gritty everything looking like it's been kinda brushed with a layer of dirt in a manner entirely fitting with the style of media released in the early 2010 end part of me thinks it's this visual style that led to the introduction of scan mode as an alternative to combat the equivalent of detective Vision in the Arkham games where an environment as filled with overly shiny debris and weather effects and light Bloom as five can be it can become quite difficult to pick out these Michael Bay Transformer s call Styles in the map in the gritty world of the PS3 forget intricate patterns shininess is indeed the most effective camouflage but jokes aside I do think that scan mode serves a larger purpose or at the very least contributes to the kind of game armored Core 5 is trying to be the approach you're encouraged to take in the five games isn't quite as gung-ho as its predecessor its levels are more expansively maze-like the streets are winding the lead up to individual battles often requires a fair bit of tracking often with long spaces between the action these are environments designed for you to take your time to really analyze your surroundings and plan your way through sending the Recon drones available to you in order to gauge the number of enemies in any given area then scan to see exactly where they are obviously it's nigh impossible to be completely stealthy in these games but the tall buildings feel like they're designed to be snaked around trying to get the jump on your enemies from multiple different angles and using the winding streets and Rubble to avoid staying out in the open too long it's certainly in these moments where you feel the absence of multiplayer the most where you imagine one player would have been able to take a commander role assigning each player to take out a specific Target to achieve the objective more efficiently in a multi-tiered plan of attack but that said there is certainly a charm to the more gorilla-esque tactics encouraged by the level design even when approached Seoul it just obviously becomes much harder when you realize that all enemy fire is subsequently honed in on you and you might begin to wish that there was at least someone else there to draw some of the attention away even briefly look I have no idea if these missions Scale based on whether you take them on Solo or as a team but in my experience as the Farmer they certainly seem more difficult to pull off than in Prior games a large part of that though comes down to how much of a battle of attrition things often devolve into the previous games were brilliant because no matter how difficult the task ahead of you was you knew you were almost always planning for a short sweet two to five minute Excursion it kept everything chugging along at a rapid clip in an online game however constantly dropping in and out of mission select screens maybe isn't the best approach I imagine you want to keep players engaged in game as much as possible and so missions are often substantially longer in five even in single player you could have spent ages completing what would have constituted a whole maybe even a couple of missions in its predecessors ending up mentally exhausted after draining yourself of ammo and health and still your mission Handler will call up telling you that they've updated your roots to go take on the next objective luckily five introduces workshops allowing for one of the first times I think outside of a couple of mission-specific resupplies and three maybe two the chance to repair and resupply Mid Mission a potentially genius idea but when I've just spent 20 minutes methodically clearing an entire city of enemies and you then send me into an underground Railway system to catch up with and take on a fast-moving train wiping my health with its numerous weapon emplacements while also chasing after me with multiple extremely capable ACS you know likelihood is I'm just terrible at the game and missing the point I don't know my play setup is hardly the optimal way to experience this thing but to me it just doesn't seem like this was built for one person to take on even with the workshops I just don't feel like I have the resources for this kind of task and at the very least give me a bit of time to process one thing before having me immediately follow the dotted line to the next major task it is worth noting though that for as much as I'd heard beforehand about how verdict Day doubled down on its predecessor's online focus apparently gutting its single player component even further I actually found the opposite to be true not only seeing a shift back to the more condensed bespoke structure of sorties no emphasizing the surprising snappiness of five's action but the addition of customizable AI controlled unecs completely shift the tide of battle in your favor the resulting tactics that open up to you might not be quite as malleable as if you were approaching these engagements with a human player but they do open up slightly with the brunt of enemy fire being divided between two Targets rather than just yourself the AI in particular marks a dramatic step up from the consorts in three for example and while they come with their own significant costs it's wild just how many of five structural problems the N dot solving even if occasionally they do trivialize certain encounters especially what were originally made meant to be one-on-one votes and there were multiple occasions where I'd break down and simply wait floating around as this little jet pack dude until some point where the mission was arbitrarily completed for me all that said I actually had a pretty good time with verdict Day when it worked armored Core games aren't known for their extremely lengthy campaigns anyway I found that most can be beaten in around 5 hours or so while verdict Day might seem unbelievably short by the standards of its contemporaries it's not exactly out of character with the rest of the series five then is the game I most wish I could have experienced back in the day when I could see all this stuff functioning in the way it feels as if it was intended because honestly even with all these vibles it seems like there's a really fascinating game under the surface of five some truly ambitious ideas at play whose failure stems not from their individual lack of Merit but the structure of the release surrounding them five being but one of many casualties of the aforementioned Chase for online focus to claim that didn't materialize in a manner sufficient to maintain the servers holding it all up coming at the expense of a complete single-player experience that would have sustained things beyond the point at which that online switch was flipped but I guess at the end of the day it doesn't really matter because it's not like you could easily get a hold of these games even if you wanted to they're all on Long obsolete consoles never brought to new platforms none available on PC indeed the upcoming fires of Rubicon will Mark the first time PC players especially will have been able to dip their toes into the world of armored Core I'd bet for most console players the lack of preservation of basic availability of these games will mean that most will have absolutely no idea what they're actually getting into with six is it any Wonder then that we've been seeing so much questioning since that trailer dropped about how closely ac6 will resemble the souls games Elden ring as someone who has now played the games I can see why that questioning might be seen as odd you know what do people actually mean by that an open world slow weighty melee combat big bosses mechs but written by grr Martin and set in a fantasy world but I don't know I get it from soft has seen such Monumental success with this esoterically designed game the audience has invested in that thing and they were understandably expecting more of that thing only to get presented with a relatively unknown quantity a series arguably more esoteric less accessible than soulsborne or Elden ring people are just wondering if in fires of Rubicon they'll find an experience that they can gracefully slip into following dozens of hours in Eldon ring whether there's the potential to be as engrossed as that game left so many well as far as I see it no graceful isn't necessarily in armored course vocabulary this is a series you are meant to hammer away at bit by bit one whose design held whose basic controls don't gel with the standards set by other games and who makes no bones about alienating those unwilling to meet the individual entries on their own terms from the moment you start in this series if you aren't picking up what armored Core is putting down it will grind you into the dirt but if you are willing to put in the effort you will be rewarded with bounties unseen in other titles some of the heftiest action out there with an extremely high skill ceiling and customization options that more than most games really allow you to hone in on an individual style of play that works best for you all of these mechanics and systems being backed up by and themselves backing up a truly fascinatingly constructed Mysterious World whose details aren't made readily apparent to you a sense of intrigue that only deepens your connection to the intricacies and themes you do uncover because you did the work to uncover it yourself and tell me listening to all that doesn't it all sound a bit familiar I don't think armored corset is going to be an open world or have super deep melee combat or anything like that although who really knows on the latter it's going to have missions and you're going to spend a huge chunk of time in the shop and the garage getting out your Mech rather than exploring a massive dungeon or whatever but in terms of the mindset these games expect of you and I should reiterate while we still know basically nothing about the structure of fires of Rubicon at this stage I can imagine soulsborne players would be if not comfortable quite satisfied with the process of getting to grips with an armored Corgi I would also be surprised if this upcoming sequel with the years of experience bromsoth now has experimenting with how to make their unique games more approachable albeit with mixed results doesn't make some kind of effort to introduce more quality of life features to more effectively onboard new players to smooth that process out a bit so even newbies can get to the really good stuff more quickly but if you ask me after all this time over the last wee whale spent playing all of these games well I now want fires of Rubicon to be I'm not sure I could tell you with any degree of certainty I think if I had to pick a favorite it would be between three and four answers but I can't remember the last time I so thoroughly enjoyed myself digging into a series like this there are legitimately aspects of every single game I played that I would love to make the jump over to this Rebirth of the franchise I just can't say enough good things about armored Core I've had a video plan brewing in my head for years entitled where are all the good Gundam games because despite seeming like a series so ripe for adaptation the dozens upon dozens of attempts we've gotten over the years have ranged from it's all right to unspeakably unplayably bad with the vast vast majority falling squarely into the latter category Well turns out that I at the very least need to rethink that video because the answer is obvious it's armored Core mechanically thematically aesthetically scale wise armored Core is is everything I could want out of a Gundam game and more which coincidentally makes it all the weirder that fromsoft has developed a number of Gundam adjacent games that happen to largely completely suck I'm getting off point here the point I want to make is that I'm not being hyperbolic when I say that armored Core has confidently entered the realm of one of my favorite series of all time rewarding my effort with the same feelings of joy and Revelation I experienced upon finally getting to grips with dark souls the Adoration I have for this series really is that profound there is no game I am more hyped for than fires of Rubicon as stated it's not nearly as simple as it should be to play these games but if you are at all curious and are aware of the barriers you'll have to overcome to do so both Technical and philosophical I guess then especially when the industry has been so replete with game after game that just do absolutely nothing for me there are few game franchises I could recommend diving into to head first more so than armored Core oh as I say this is my longest video project to date and if you've made it this far thanks so much for watching projects like this as you can imagine take a lot of work and so if you could like And subscribe to help out with its performance I would really appreciate it I also have to thank my wonderful patrons whose names you're seeing on screen now without your generous continued support there is absolutely no way I would have been able to justify turning down the many releases of the last couple of months to instead play all the armored Core games for an hour-long video in all seriousness I would have had to give the channel up long ago if it wasn't for my patrons you are all the best and if you want to join the lovely folks on screen as well as get access to a bunch of exclusive videos I've been making fully produced scripted videos on some pretty wild subjects that I don't think would do so well on this main Channel but many have told me might represent some of my best work then you can do so while directly supporting the channel for as little as a dollar over at patreon.com writing on games I am forever thankful for your support in whatever formatting special thanks go to Mark B writing arctim vitsuk Charles J Liu Aleister Dunn beat out his guitarist Matthew Bowman Ben Pace David Carstens young Condor Mike G Tom Webster Max Cohen Dana sikowskis Christopher variety nicholasvillenew Ruth natman Matthew Grover yoga strasbande Leah chinello Captain canusbrick Bray Snyder Lucas David Bjork Miguel a Rivera paulou winter Timothy Jones Urban cheese Tommy Carver Chaplin Rickety Cricket cpg MLT limited Lynn Browning Bill and army Cameron sinisaros Dallas King Charlie Kimball Jordan Midler and Charlie Yang and with that this has been another episode of writing on games thank you all so much for watching stay safe and I will see you all next time

Channel: Writing on Games

Views: 517,548

Keywords: armored core, armored core 6, armored core vi, fires of rubicon, armored core series retrospective, getting to grips with armored core, armored core analysis, armored core critique, from software, elden ring, hidetaka miyazaki, armored core for answer, armored core silent line, armored core nexus, armored core 2, armored core 3, armored core 4, armored core v, armored core verdict day, dark souls, bloodborne, sekiro, demons souls, armored core review

Id: sAOcPx5EwkY

Length: 83min 50sec (5030 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 22 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/ShortBrownAndUgly]

The worst thing about the series is that there is no way to play past releases on current gen as far as I can tell.

[u/SutsOfGods]

I keep watching stuff about this series but still getting confused as to what the hook of the gameplay is (I haven't watched the whole vid, just pieces). Just customization and arena battles?

[u/FiveGuysisBest]

I’ll probably give this a shot but I’m very skeptical.

I adored Chromehounds because of how methodical, strategic and grounded it was. However I’m very turned off by the arcade style twitch/speed of AC.

[u/RicoValdezbeginsanew]

It’s fun seeing all the AC newbs discussing, most won’t be interested, but for those of you who will….. welcome to heaven.

[u/MyKidIsSpiderman]

A buddy of mine is trying to get me to buy Diablo IV but all the recent posts of AC is making lean towards it instead. I've never played Armoured Core or Diablo before

[u/shobot11]

!remindme 4 hours

[u/haynespi87]

Solid information. I think one thing to note is what type of souls player will try this out.

AC fans will love this I'm sure, but you have to remember that souls fans put up with a lot of difficulty and are meticulous. Also they love build specs, min/maxing and figuring out what multiple pieces do. While a new to souls Elden Ring fan, may hate AC6, I actually think many long term souls and AC fans will actually enjoy AC6

[u/M0rbidly-0btuse]

I appreciate this! My first game is AC:4A and I have no idea what is happening story-wise or what I’m doing.

[u/Gwynbleidd_1988]

Never played Armored Core. I know they’re different types of games apart from shooting and mechs: but as a fan of Titanfall series would I enjoy Armored Core?