Gen 3 changed quad legs more than I anticipated. While I could equip energy weapons, they became essentially unusable due to energy regeneration getting shot. I've therefore been primarily running tank legs. Karasawa for mission fodder, back pulse rifle for extra energy ammo, and back grenade launcher for enemy ACs.
For the most part, getting through AC3 and Silent Line wasn't difficult, especially in the Arena. There were a few hard missions in the middle of Silent Line. But then when I got to the post-credits hidden parts collection phase Silent Line in which I realized that getting to 100% is a
much more laborious than in previous games. There are several times more hidden parts, and most of them are not simply found on the ground in missions. Instead, each and every mission has at least one hidden challenge to fulfill for a part, some of which are hard to do even with tips from guides, and to top it off, one hidden part is put behind S-ranking every mission. When I was finished with the Arena and played every mission once, I was only at about 60% completion. I think I'll just set Silent Line aside for now and continue on with the next game, especially since there's no save transfer for this one, but I dread further games also having such intensive 100% requirements.
These Armored Core games so far have given me thoughts on what I'd like to see from AC6.
First off, I hope there's a good sense of scale giving the impression that you are, in fact, piloting a giant robot. Visual clues to indicate how big your mech is have been lacking, especially in the abundance of tedious room-and-hallway missions that I want done away with altogether. It's so strange that they're are even times in which you're crawling through giant robot-sized vents. AC3 has the best impression of scale so far with more windowed buildings around, the panes even shattering upon damage. Despite the graphical detail of AC6, though, it has me a bit concerned with scale because of the environment appearing to consist primarily of fantastical metallic superstructures, thus making your mech appear small.
Second, this may upset some veterans of the series, but I'd really like for the story to step up from how barebones it has been. A couple of particular ideas come to my mind:
- Assuming that AC6 has corporations as usual, have them be represented in mission contracts and mail by named characters. They can present more personality and also allow for multiple characters under the same corp. I'm having issue that aside from perhaps having one defining trait (e.g., Crest is sycophantic to the Controller), characterization of the corps have been poor such that I often feel I have no reason to distinguish who I'm fight for or against on any given mission.
- I'd call this one a pipe dream, but give named characters human appearances. Even just a drawn portrait would suffice, like Metal Gear Solid codec characters. This would give characters a greater impression to stick to memory and also serve as a reminder that ACs are actually piloted by humans inside of them. Furthermore, human appearances can also provide reference to fan artists and other creators, especially since mecha drawing is a niche skill. I suppose one problem with this idea, though, is the frequency in which characters are secretly AI constructs...
- Perhaps give AC parts lore descriptions in Souls fashion? Besides just being an avenue to provide more story, it gives another reason to seek out parts besides their value as equipment.
It's been a few months, but I finally continued on my journey through Armored Core history, tanking my way through the second sequence of Gen 3.
Nexus
First off,
finally there's native modern twin-stick controls. No more having to deal with various controller-mapping tools.
Even though there's a notable lack of voiced mission briefings in the "Evolution" campaign, I was actually a bit intrigued by its manner of storytelling through news briefs and emails with focus on a single evolving conflict. It was rather amusing that by the end, all four of the involved corps fell apart (one new corp destroyed outright) as they fought each other to exhaustion, but then I was caught off guard by the surprise "rocks fall, everyone dies" ending. It made me suspect that I just got the bad ending out of multiple routes, but nope, that's the game's sole ending.
There were a couple of annoying aspects to playing this to 100% completion. First, there's not even a % completion display for "Evolution", so I had to resort to an online checklist and compare to my available parts to see if I got everything. Second, the post-campaign free mission select is incomplete, thus necessitating you to replay the whole campaign in a specific way to replay certain missions for missed hidden parts. Some mission paths are also unclear due to the limited online resources and discussions, such as how to trigger an optional enemy AC appearance in one of the later missions in order to earn a hover legs part. Overall I think I played through the campaign three or four times to get everything. Nothing was particularly hard except for one mission with three enemy ACs in a crater and another with laser-spewing MTs attacking a base.
The "Revolution" disk was a nice bonus, adding more unique missions to the game rather than the usual extra Arena battles. In this case, like with Silent Line, getting 100% completion with all the parts necessitated S-ranking everything, which I actually did do this time around as it seemed much more accomplishable, and I wanted to have everything to save transfer to the next game. A couple of missions were still
very hard to S-rank, though, particularly the one about destroying silos in a warehouse as you're required to do it with minimal damage and
incredible speed. Fortunately I had some resources and videos for builds and techniques, but it still took a long while.
Shoutout to dual-wielding WYRM sniper rifles. Definitely OP, which is why it got nerfed hard in the following games, especially with a big cut in ammo.
Nine Breaker
I really could've skipped this game of training courses, but I wanted the experience of it anyway. And as it happens, it's actually quite challenging. I made heavy use of a guide in order to get through many of the trials, and that was just to complete each one once. Going the extra mile to get gold ranks in everything is an
insane challenge that I can only imagine the absolute most autistic of players would strive for. It didn't take long for me to conclude that 100% completion on this game wasn't for me, and I only missed out on five parts as a result, all more easily obtained in Last Raven.
Interestingly, I think the unconventional challenges this game poses may actually necessitate the player to use the widest range of parts and AC builds out of any game.
Last Raven
Finally, the "retro" AC game that seems to get the most talk. As I happened to select the one of three first mission options that has a hard enemy AC, I can see why it's recommended to come with a save transfer. Getting through this game to
100% 136% completion takes a while even when starting with practically the full list of parts, and I hate to imagine how much longer it would've been without the save transfer. On my own, I got five of the endings in my first six runs before resorting to guides to play all the remaining missions. The main challenge was in many of the later bosses that I ended up getting outside help with, particularly final Zinaida on my third run, who I eventually got fed up with such that I used
a ceiling AI exploit to defeat. Fortunately, not only were S-ranks generally very generous, but only some of them had part rewards tied to them (possibly because of my save transfer). After completing all of the missions, it was easy for me to pick up the few remaining parts I was still missing.
With corps taking a backseat, this game did the best job with getting across Raven pilots themselves as characters worth paying attention to, even though that still doesn't amount to much. I was hoping that playing through the different routes would be like solving a mystery, piecing together what's really going on, but that unfortunately doesn't happen. While the 24-hour scope of the campaign makes no sense, it was at least flavorful to have the list of Ravens dying off over the course, along with the menu music becoming more foreboding as the time of the
empty threat final attack approaches.
Formula Front International
Even though AC6 is just a couple of weeks away, I decided to take the time to divert myself with the little-recognized PSP game. And that diversion really didn't last long at all, only about 4-5 hours. I already knew as much that the game is based on AI simulations rather than player-controlled battles, but I expected that I'd be earning money and buying parts as usual for steady progression. Turns out that you're simply given all the parts right from the start, so I was immediately able to build my usual killdozer and blast my way through most of the roughly 80 Arena battles the game consists of. And if battles weren't short enough already (almost always less than a minute), the ability to fast-forward the AI simulations has them usually lasting five seconds instead. Only one particular enemy AC, a short-ranged bunny-hopper, gave me a serious challenge to defeat, having me spend a lot of time coming up with builds in the garage. If it weren't for that, I would've otherwise completely ignored the AI configuration feature that the game makes a big showing of. Overall, this is just a really poor execution of what could've been a fine Football Manager-type simulation game.
Now I can finally get on to the four modern AC games I originally planned on playing ahead of AC6.
