All right, pull up a chair because this is gonna be a long one. Let this oldfag tell you the tale of
Armored Core: Last Raven and the horror that is Zinaida.
Last Raven is hard. Brutally, unforgivingly hard. It also has five endings, plus one really shitty one. If you're reasonably used to
Nexus, which is very difficult, and you're pulling into LR directly from it, then this game is about to fuck you harder than a prostitute on her first night on the job, and the game won't be wearing a condom. LR routinely throws you into missions where you have to kill multiple ACs, or do objective missions, then an AC, or ACs, a mission, and then a boss. You need nerves of steel, some fantastic AC building skills, and maybe some customized controls to be able to eke out wins.
Most of the game's paths aren't too troublesome, barring a few cases of "that one mission" syndrome throughout. Getting the true end in LR, however, requires you face a boss of such unmitigated bullshit that I can write a thesis statement about it. So here goes. Zinaida herself you can face a few different ways throughout the story. Her main loadout is aggressive and tends to be just this constant pain in your ass from the second the fight starts, but it's fragile and you can tear it down with a few different builds.
The boss version, however, is absolute, 100%, factory-shipped, GMO-free, premium, weapons-grade
bullshit. The mission she shows up in,
Destroy the Internecine, involves you navigating a tunnel that fills with high-speed suicide weapons, followed with a room where you are surrounded by pulse rifle turrets and have to destroy power conduits. With a lot of skill and/or luck, it's possible to exploit the terrain to avoid the suicide weapons and if you stay moving with any remotely fast AC you'll avoid fire from the turrets entirely once you destroy one of the conduits.
Zinaida then shows up, and you're in for an unforgivable level of cheese. For one, she's got a new weapon that is extremely hard to avoid - a handheld railgun - and her already-fast design has been made even faster. She has, for all intents and purposes, unlimited energy, which means she cannot run out even if you were to somehow ride her ass and nail her with a full pod of generator jammer rockets, so she'll just keep zipping around like she's been doing meth. During this time, she will assail you endlessly with her arm weapons. When these run dry, she will switch to her pulse cannon and small missile launcher (which has missile extensions, so she fires like 8 small missiles per volley) and pepper you with those, before ditching one of her hand weapons to draw a handgun from reserve for additional damage. She's also faster than any player could possibly be and in a room where her mobility is a constant problem.
Oh, you think we're done? Like hell we're done.
She basically can't overheat. Which means that you can't just overheat her and bleed her HP with residual damage. Her heat decreases too fast. If you do somehow force her to overheat (as I was able to do with one build), the sheer level of tuning her suit has means it lasts under a second. For tuning, players get 10 points to apply to each part that qualifies, and they can boost a suit's parameters, increasing its accuracy, response speed, cutting its weight, etc. Zinaida's parts are basically maxed in every stat, so she has about 80-100 points per part whereas the player has 10. She has OP-INTENSIFY upgrades in the game where those stopped being available for players, so she can freely fire back weapons on the move and flat-out has a ton of abilities the player cannot possibly match. She's also notably overweight with no penalties.
An average player fighting her with a normal build will be dead in about fifteen seconds, give or take, and likely
will not hit her a single fucking time. She has exactly one weakness, and one weakness only: She will eventually completely run out of ammo and be basically helpless. However, even if she runs out of ammo, you still need to actually kill her ass.
Also of note is that in the PSP version, she is even worse and never lands her machine.
So the obvious question at this point becomes "
All right, Jaimas, how do you beat this fucking thing?" Well, that was the goal of a nearly two-month long project by me and my friend Dave in the summer of 2006. No build we used would work. She was too fast. Armor builds, except for one developed by my friend Bryan, also did not work, and the armor build he developed wasn't capable of killing her. Finally, in an effort to figure out ways to take her down, we decided to cheat and run some experiments using a Gameshark.
The first thing we learned is that even if you have Infinite AP (Health), she can still kick your ass. How, you ask? AC:LR is in the
Nexus series, which in turn means it uses AC3's engine, so she can break your fucking parts. If you're using weapon arms, there goes your fucking weapons right there. Even if you use regular arms with handheld weapons, her destroying your arms means you have a massive accuracy debuff - while facing the single most cagey and evasive opponent in the entirety of this series.
What we then learned is that there is basically one way the devs intended for you to fight her, which is to go with the lightest possible build, take to the air, lure her up to the ceiling, and then basically knife-fight her to death with machine guns. This is bullshit. Not only because of how rare such a build "naturally" shows up with that config in this game series, but because it blatantly favors alternate control schemes. Many AC veterans came here from the glory days of the old pre-analog-stick AC games with the old control scheme. These players were basically being told to fuck off and that they were doing it wrong. Where most saw a simple declaration of how things should be done, however, me and my associates saw a
challenge, and after about two weeks, the three of us, together, each managed to eke out a win against her, fairly, using a method other than what the devs intended. How I did it was stupid and basically luck.
I created
Count Nukula.
Count Nukula is a build that focuses on
Large Missile Arms, and is mostly a meme build, there to warn PVPers about being complacent. The large missile arms can potentially lock and fire four of the things, which is tantamount to instant death if they all hit, because the player hit will suffer massive damage and almost immediately redzone heat. All four on a light AC is basically a one-shot. All four on a Medium will at best leave it with critical health. On a heavy it will cut its HP in half or more. The mission was painfully simple: Load up the lightest possible AC that could mount these fucking things. Load up the fastest possible FCS. Use back weapons to handle the turrets. When fighting Zinaida, engage secondary fire mode, boost around while keeping her in my sights, then fire the missiles from point-blank range. It took about six tries, but on the final one, I nailed her dead-on and took her out with a single volley.
The way I fought her was the equivalent of rolling double sixes to end a night, but fuck it, dignity is for other pilots.
I still have the save (with all her drops) on a PS2 memory card someplace.