The Huge Armored Core Playthrough

[Travis]

I'm enjoying these posts! As someone who started with ACV, I'm enjoying reading the history. I tried AC4 for a bit, and I couldn't handle those controls--and I'm sure they were a big shift from the previous games at the time. I adored ACV despite its ugliness and other problems, but I doubt it's much fun now without a big online community. Hopefully there's still something there worth playing. (Same goes for Verdict Day.)

[Lork]

Armored Core 2: Another Age (Playstation 2, 2001)

 

(Pictured: The one mission everybody remembers from this game)

 

I didn't mention it in my post for that game, but Armored Core 2 was a clean break from the first three games, being set in the distant future on Mars instead of Earth and featuring an all new set of parts to start collecting from scratch.  Next we have the expansion pack Another Age, firmly establishing the pattern of numbered sequels signifying a new "generation" bringing about what passes for sweeping changes in this series, each with one or more subtitled expansion packs to import your save data into.

 

The big selling point for this one is that it has 103 missions.  That is indeed a lot of missions, but it does come at a bit of a cost.  For one thing, the arena mode is gone.  In its place they've sprinkled a bunch of "arena like" encounters with single opponents into the campaign to pad out the mission count.  I don't really consider this a fair trade.  I really valued the experience of climbing the ladder, one fight at a time, reading the bio of each opponent, studying their design if necessary and there's no equivalent to that here.  Another common criticism is that the focus on quantity over quality resulted in lackluster mission design.  While it's true in the vast majority of missions your objectives can be summed up as "destroy all enemies" (or DAE, as GameFAQs calls it), I don't find that to be a dealbreaker, and they seemed to me to be exactly in line with quality of the missions in AC2, for good or ill.

 

I don't really have much else to say about this game.  It's a lot like people AC2, only more so.  I'm told that it has the best multiplayer maps in the series, but thanks to the lack of an arena mode I've never even seen them.  I'm not even trying to harp on them for this, I swear; it just keeps coming up on its own!

 

So anyway, let's instead use this space to talk about a peculiarity of every early game in the series up to and including this one: Human Plus.  Here's what a GameFAQs guide has to say about it:

Quote

Plus Enhancements:

If you fall below -50,000c then you will get a cutscene. After that you will have to start all
over. The good thing about that is that you get a radar. A radar built in. If you fall
below again and again here is what you’ll get:

1st time- Radar-260 click
2nd time- Laser Blade wave (press O to use the blade, then quickly press X)
3rd time- Head Reduction-hits take away half as much heat.
4th time- Fire Strong Back Weapons While Standing or Moving
5th time- Half Energy Use For Boosters and Energy Weapons
8th time- Double Cooling Power.

Overweight AC:
If you beat the game (complete the Phobos mission), then you will be able to use an overweight
AC. It will still say overweight, but you’ll be able to battle with it. You can also have your
arms overweight and still play.

Essentially if you go far enough into debt, you get a "game over" and have your mission progress reset, but you get one of the listed enhancements.  Repeat the process 8(!!) times to get all of them.  

 

On its face, this system is baffling.  Is it a Nintendo Super Guide esque catch-up mechanism to reward hopeless but persistent players?  I can see a player like that failing once or twice, but the idea of someone going beyond that naturally is ridiculous to me.  Maybe it's a hidden way for clever players to get an edge?  Well, some of the enhancements are game-breakingly powerful to the point that they greatly compromise the game's balance and render entire categories of parts obsolete.  So is it just an idiosyncratic implementation of cheat codes?  These are some pretty inaccessible cheats if so.  

 

I haven't done it myself, but I can't imagine the process of putting yourself far into debt 8 times in a row could be anything other than mind-numbingly tedious.  It also becomes more unreasonable to do the farther you are into the games.  Deciding to forfeit all your mission progress when you're deep into the game is one thing, but did I mention that you can't gain human plus status in any of the expansions?  If you have it in your save file for AC2 (or AC1 for that generation) you can carry it forward by importing the file, but that's the only way to get it.  If you don't already have it, you'll have to go back to AC2 and grind it out, then use that file to start over in Another Age.  And if (god forbid) you don't own the original AC2?  Then the option is closed off from you.

 

Like I said, baffling.  So allow me to start over:  Human PLUS is a side story element in the first Armored Core game about a sinister program in which seemingly unwilling test subjects have parts of their bodies replaced with better performing artificial ones.  There are two missions to fight escapees from the PLUS program who have been driven insane by the process, and one that has you exploring a creepy abandoned lab to discover the origins of the technology.  You'd think there would be more where that came from, but nope.  Aside from those three missions, the only other way to interact with Human PLUS is to go 50,000c in the hole, at which point you are forcibly sold into the program to pay off your debt, get an enhancement, and are let back out into the world.  I guess you're one of the lucky ones.

 

Remember way back in the Project Phantasma post when I complained about higher level opponents cheating?  As it turns out they're not arbitrarily cheating, they're just... cybernetically enhanced!  That's right, they enjoy the same enhancements that you can get via Human Plus.  The world of Armored Core is nothing if not internally consistent, and you could even call it nominally "fair".  After all these perks can be yours too, should you desire them enough.  They don't explicitly state any of that though from what I can tell.  You just have to infer it from your own experience with the system and what observations you can make by studying your enemies.  Sound familiar?

 

So yes, it is an unconventional way to do cheat codes, but it's also an early example of the kind of thing that From Software has recently become well known for: an attempt to express word building via mechanics, mostly for its own sake.  World tendency, Humanity, Summoning...  There's an unfortunate tendency among From Software fans to solely attribute every last bit of them to Hidetaka Miyazaki, but from the perspective of someone who has played From's earlier games, these systems seem more like Miyazaki's spin on the kind of thing that From has been doing for decades.  It turns out the calls were coming from inside the studio all along!

 

As an early attempt at systemized world building, I think Human Plus is kind of an awkward kludge.  I've already gone over the gameplay implications, but it's also strange from the other side.  Why do enhancements to your human body translate to the vehicle you're piloting gaining new abilities?  It's important to remember though that it is an early attempt at something unique to From's house style, the value of which has been recently widely recognized.  I find it fascinating if nothing else to witness the ways in which they've honed their craft over the years.

 

Addendum:

 

-The Human PLUS program must have been very prolific, as Plus enhanced pilots show up near the end of pretty much every Armored Core in all the likeliest and unlikeliest of places.  They're the go to solution for when the designers start to feel that the regular rules and AI aren't enough to challenge the player, it seems.  Of particular note to me however is the champion arena from Master of Arena, with a roster supposedly sourced from participants in an officially held Armored Core tournament.  While making my way up this ladder I noticed that some, but not all of the candidates are Human Plus cheaters!  What kind of tournament would allow that!?

 

-Oh, and they fixed the new game thing in this one.  Rejoice!

 

[twmac]

I love that so much - I know that the new podcast doesn't cover this but have you thought about emailing the IT/Important If True guys with that information about the Human PLUS stuff.

 

Also, I know it isn't canon but are you planning to play Metal Wolf Chaos? It is a great mech game by From, it is a crime that Murakumo: Renegade Mech Pursuit was released in the US but not MWC.

[Lork]

14 hours ago, twmac said:

I love that so much - I know that the new podcast doesn't cover this but have you thought about emailing the IT/Important If True guys with that information about the Human PLUS stuff.

 

Also, I know it isn't canon but are you planning to play Metal Wolf Chaos? It is a great mech game by From, it is a crime that Murakumo: Renegade Mech Pursuit was released in the US but not MWC.

Ha, I'll think about it, though to me it seems like it's far too long and requires too much context to work on the podcast(s).

 

As for Metal Wolf Chaos, I wish!  It looks like a more "casual" companion piece to Armored Core, which sounds great, and the theme, in addition to being hilarious is definitely... topical.  Unfortunately I don't have an original Xbox and the game isn't backwards compatible.  So without any viable options for emulation I'm left without the means to play it.

[twmac]

If you can get a modified Xbox (they are cheap now) you can get MWC pretty easily. I bought my copy for 178 dollars but that was only after borrowing it off the internet.

 

As for writing to IiT:

 

- Lore in Fromsoftware intro

- You used to think that the AI cheated

- Discovered Human PLUS cheats on gamefaqs and how ridiculous they are to trigger (give an example of the trigger, what it means and how ridiculous it is), discovered Human PLUS lore

- Realised that all the 'cheating' AI is actually Human PLUS

- Mind blown and a 'fuck you' to From is delivered

- Suggest they go to this forum post for more detail

 

I bullet pointed it but you could explain all in less that 400 words. If you don't I might while pointing the finger at you.

[Lork]

You can point the finger (or perhaps a thumb) if you'd like, that'd be fine.  I just don't feel comfortable doing it myself.  Very lame of me, I know.

[Lork]

Armored Core 3 (Playstation 2, 2002)

 

 

On paper, Armored Core 3 is a pretty rote example of the series reputation for stagnancy: another generation, another list of minor improvements.  Everything looks a little better, moves a little more smoothly, is a little more balanced; building your mech is marginally more complicated but a bit more refined... You know the drill.  Despite this, or maybe because of it, this is my second favorite game in the series up to this point after Master of Arena.

 

To give you an example of what I mean by stagnancy, near the end of Another Age they introduced a "quick turn" booster that gives slow, heavier builds a fighting chance against faster ones that could otherwise literally run circles around them.  I'd estimate that this single part (not even a new category of parts!) did more to shake up the gameplay than any of the additions or rule changes in 3.  I can only speak from direct experience about the singleplayer, but I'm going to go ahead and say that there's no way in hell that this part didn't have massive rippling effects on the competitive metagame as well.  

 

By comparison many of the additions in 3 seem like half thoughts: the ability to drop weapons after you're done with them makes for a cool image, but doesn't really do much to increase build variety without the help of some additional mechanics added in later games.  Offhand weapons open up a lot of possibilities in theory, but not so much in practice due to the very limited subset of guns they let you use for it, to be expanded in subsequent games (they were right to be reluctant here, as we will see in due time).  And finally, "Exceed Orbit" weapons, autonomous turrets that come with some of the chest pieces, are simply not effective enough to be worth caring about.

 

So, very little has actually changed.  At the same time, the game feels vastly different.  It's a case study of how to do a lot with a little, or to be more accurate, how a bit of polish can really make what was already there shine brighter than it did before.  It seems like what they didn't put into meaningful changes to the mechanics, they instead saved for all the things around the edges that they had been neglecting until now.  The interface, while not significantly different in structure or function, looks and feels a lot better, which makes the game feel slick and polished in a way that From's other games often don't.  The atmosphere of the game's confined underground city setting is a lot more cohesive and all encompassing than in previous ones, and the story at least comes off like they cared, even if I still mostly don't.

 

It's spring cleaning for the series.  Just a lot of little improvements in off to the side areas that add up to make all the things I already liked a bit more pleasant to interact with for it.  Oh, and having the most expansive arena mode this side of MoA doesn't hurt when it comes to getting on my good side either, I have to admit.

 

Bonus content:

 

-I can't talk about this game and not mention the music.  It's just so weird.  Armored Core has always been a bit of an oddball here, with music that doesn't sound like it's from a video game, but it was still within the bounds of conventionality.  In 3, things took a turn for the bizarre.  Here's milk, an amusingly named track that probably wouldn't sound that strange in, I don't know, a Lemmings game or something, but is absolutely crazy when it plays during a couple otherwise mundane missions in this game.  "Well, it's just a random throw-away track for side missions" I thought to myself.  So imagine my surprise when I discovered that it's a leitmotif that comes back for this utter insanity that plays as you're working to shut down the malfunctioning computer that runs the city in the final mission.  What was the composer trying to express here?

 

-Don't you dare go thinking I've forgotten you, AC2 Manual.  Let's just say that me and that parking garage in the gif got to know each other very well.  With all these years of iteration, From has quietly built up some pretty impressive AI, with enemy pilots exhibiting tactics and techniques that are not only effective, but noticeably distinct from one another.  It almost makes me feel bad about forcing many of them to fight me in an ill conceived arena that tilts the odds all the way in my favor.  Almost.

[Problem Machine]

Turn boosters shook things up a bit but not as much as you might imagine. In fact, it was overboost that originally gave heavies their fighting edge back, by allowing them to reset the encounter and forcing the lighter opponent to close in again. Turn boosters helped and made EO more viable, but since you need to maintain lock-on for a second or so to get good tracking it was still fairly easy to outmaneuver the enemy's reticle at close range. Oddly enough, back boosters ended up having a bigger impact, since on a light frame they provided a massive mobility boost which could be harnessed in interesting ways -- particularly using hover legs, which had tricks to coast for a really long way using momentum from that and from OB.

 

EO isn't quite as useless as you make it sound, but didn't really see much use until Nexus, when the solid EO cores got a huge boost and the energy cores got regenerating ammo. The mid and heavy EO cores saw use, the former on light harrying builds since it had pretty good accuracy and the pressure of dodging that and conventional fire simultaneously was hard to cope with, and the latter in bulldog builds that just got as close as possible and deployed the heavy EO to do a lot of damage quickly.

 

Dropping weapons had some crazy effects in competitive play. I can't remember if AC3 had this or not, but it was sometimes possible to pick dropped weapons back up, so quads using two heavy grenade launchers who would drop one, empty the other, then drop that one and pick the first back up became a thing. Lightweights using heavy back weapons that made them overweight and emptying and dropping them as quickly as possible became a thing -- in general this became a huge boost for weapons that were previously hampered by their low ammo counts. Also a thing: Accidentally dropping the wrong weapon, which won me a round at a tournament.

 

It's funny that they were so reluctant to add left hand guns and then made the one weapon that they added so incredibly OP. I ran the numbers on the damage capacity of all the different guns and the howitzer has the most absurd damage capacity to weight ratio in the game. Its spammability, ability to stun, and high damage made it irrelevant that most shots missed: Even if you just spammed it, odds were good that you'd get more damage out of it than a laserblade. On the other hand, laserblades still managed some relevance just because of the odd property, present through all the games, of making you boost directly towards your opponent. Properly harnessed this meant a laserblade was actually a far more powerful mobility tool than any auxiliary booster. In AA I had an exclusively short range AC that was impossible to shake just because I'd swing the sword just as their overboost fired off and end up covering like 60% of their OB distance just flying off of that one swing.

 

Still, ACs in AC3 overwhelmingly used the howitzer, which was one reason why this iteration was not fondly remembered.

 

I believe AC3 is where they brought in the composer for EverGrace, which has a similarly weird soundtrack

[Lork]

Turn boosters shook things up a bit but not as much as you might imagine. In fact, it was overboost that originally gave heavies their fighting edge back, by allowing them to reset the encounter and forcing the lighter opponent to close in again. Turn boosters helped and made EO more viable, but since you need to maintain lock-on for a second or so to get good tracking it was still fairly easy to outmaneuver the enemy's reticle at close range. Oddly enough, back boosters ended up having a bigger impact, since on a light frame they provided a massive mobility boost which could be harnessed in interesting ways -- particularly using hover legs, which had tricks to coast for a really long way using momentum from that and from OB.

Heh, it's always interesting seeing the difference in perspective that being in the loop for a developed metagame can bring.  I mostly ignore overboost because of the obnoxiously long startup time.  I can see how it could be used for that purpose, though in my case it would mostly just be prolonging the inevitable.

 

EO isn't quite as useless as you make it sound, but didn't really see much use until Nexus, when the solid EO cores got a huge boost and the energy cores got regenerating ammo. The mid and heavy EO cores saw use, the former on light harrying builds since it had pretty good accuracy and the pressure of dodging that and conventional fire simultaneously was hard to cope with, and the latter in bulldog builds that just got as close as possible and deployed the heavy EO to do a lot of damage quickly.

Solid round EO cores are the only ones I would consider using since there's no external cost to deploying them, which kind of seems like the whole point of EOs.  Energy EOs use power at an alarming rate, and that's power that could've been used to boost or shoot my real gun.  Unfortunately despite specifying the ammo type in the stats screen, this game doesn't actually seem to have any solid round EOs.  Yet another one of those incomplete thoughts, I suppose.  They also seemed like absolutely terrible shots in my experience, regularly failing to hit all but the slowest moving targets, and sometimes having trouble even then.

 

Dropping weapons had some crazy effects in competitive play. I can't remember if AC3 had this or not, but it was sometimes possible to pick dropped weapons back up, so quads using two heavy grenade launchers who would drop one, empty the other, then drop that one and pick the first back up became a thing. Lightweights using heavy back weapons that made them overweight and emptying and dropping them as quickly as possible became a thing -- in general this became a huge boost for weapons that were previously hampered by their low ammo counts. Also a thing: Accidentally dropping the wrong weapon, which won me a round at a tournament.

I just tested it and weapons disappear as soon as they hit the ground.  So unless the rules are different in VS mode, the lack of that feature as well as hanger weapons make it mostly a novelty at this point.  Bringing an overweight weapon and then dumping it as quickly as possible is pretty funny though - although I would think that a lightweight AC using a shoulder weapon would surely be the loser of almost any exchanges it takes part in.  Maybe that's what the side boosters are for?

 

It's funny that they were so reluctant to add left hand guns and then made the one weapon that they added so incredibly OP. I ran the numbers on the damage capacity of all the different guns and the howitzer has the most absurd damage capacity to weight ratio in the game. Its spammability, ability to stun, and high damage made it irrelevant that most shots missed: Even if you just spammed it, odds were good that you'd get more damage out of it than a laserblade.

It probably escaped their notice for the same reason that I dismissed it.  I tried it once, couldn't hit a damn thing due to the lack of a targeting system, then put it away and never thought about it again.  I swear that's the most common vector for overpowered things in games: a designer saddles something with what most people consider to be a disqualifying weakness, nobody pays any attention to it as a result, and any hidden power it has goes unnoticed until it's too late.

 

On the other hand, laserblades still managed some relevance just because of the odd property, present through all the games, of making you boost directly towards your opponent. Properly harnessed this meant a laserblade was actually a far more powerful mobility tool than any auxiliary booster. In AA I had an exclusively short range AC that was impossible to shake just because I'd swing the sword just as their overboost fired off and end up covering like 60% of their OB distance just flying off of that one swing.

Reminds me of people abusing the sword in Halo 2 to send themselves flying.  The "lunge" mechanic for melee attacks in that game (and its sequels) is actually extremely similar to the way blades work in Armored Core.  Great minds think alike, and all that.

[Problem Machine]

6 hours ago, Lork said:

Solid round EO cores are the only ones I would consider using since there's no external cost to deploying them, which kind of seems like the whole point of EOs.  Energy EOs use power at an alarming rate, and that's power that could've been used to boost or shoot my real gun.  Unfortunately despite specifying the ammo type in the stats screen, this game doesn't actually seem to have any solid round EOs.  Yet another one of those incomplete thoughts, I suppose.  They also seemed like absolutely terrible shots in my experience, regularly failing to hit all but the slowest moving targets, and sometimes having trouble even then.

Ah I forgot those came in later. Yeah that's right, I'm getting my timelines mixed up a bit: Later games added the solid EOs and fixed the tracking on the energy EOs to make them good. The heavy one still saw some use in AC3, with people just trying to get basically point blank to make it hit, but it was a pretty non-viable strategy competitively, especially since the ACs that could spare that kind of weight were mostly the ones that needed OB the most.

6 hours ago, Lork said:

I just tested it and weapons disappear as soon as they hit the ground.  So unless the rules are different in VS mode, the lack of that feature as well as hanger weapons make it mostly a novelty at this point.  Bringing an overweight weapon and then dumping it as quickly as possible is pretty funny though - although I would think that a lightweight AC using a shoulder weapon would surely be the loser of almost any exchanges it takes part in.  Maybe that's what the side boosters are for?

Ah they must have added that in a later game then, maybe Silent Line. The most popular weapons for the fire and forget strategy were the orbit launcher and the missile pods, since they didn't require any particular input to be effective and could be quickly spammed and dropped. Personally, I honestly didn't think much of this strategy: Even these weapons were usually greatly improved by careful and judicious use (some people favored using missile pods as just an extremely powerful short-range rocket, since if you hit someone with the pod itself all the missiles would detonate in their face) -- and, even though you're just firing them out as quickly as possible and then dropping them, that's still a chunk of the fight where your mobility is hampered and your opponent's isn't. I think it was largely not worth it -- nevertheless, it was a strategy that popped up fairly often.

 

[Lork]

Sorry for taking a little unscheduled break there.  Zelda will do that to you.  Anyways...

 

Silent Line: Armored Core (Playstation 2, 2003)

 

There's a joke I heard that while other From Software games have low budgets, Armored Core games are the way they are because From spends most of the money on their overproduced intro videos.  So let's take a moment to enjoy the one they made for this, the expansion for Armored Core 3:

 

 

 

Yep, that certainly is some exquisitely rendered, gratuitous giant robot action.  The thing I want to draw attention to in particular though, is the music playing in the background.  I, and I think a lot of people who played this game, have grown to hate this music.  It's not the composer's fault, really.  The problem is the associations built up around it.  It's called "Silent Line" on the soundtrack, and the name along with its placement suggest that it's a kind of musical thesis statement for the game.  Whenever it comes on, you know you're witnessing a Signature Moment.

 

Like this mission, that has you defending a base from dozens of enemies while orbital laser blasts rain from the sky before fighting a boss:

 

Or this one, which expects you to spend several minutes in a blinding sandstorm that disables your targeting systems while being swarming by extremely fast moving enemies, then take on a top tier AC with whatever you have left:

 

These missions, which the designers obviously had in mind when they set about making Silent Line, sound pretty cool in theory but end up really frustrating in practice.  To beat them you'll need some combination of an extremely specific build, perfect execution and pure luck, which does not make for a good time.  These are the most egregious examples, but the underlying problem goes much deeper than that.

 

You see, this series has a difficulty problem.  Each successive game after the first one has been ever so slightly harder than the last.  The individual difference between any one entry and its immediate successor is small enough that you might not even notice at the time, but in a frog-in-a-pot like fashion, the increased difficulty accumulates over time until it gets to a breaking point at which it becomes a burden.  For me it was this game but for you it might have been the previous one, or even the next one or the one after that, but rest assured, they'll get you eventually.

 

The biggest problem I have with this trend of ever increasing difficulty isn't even necessarily that it steadily edges out all but the most hardcore fans, though anybody who mentions that the series "got away from them" can attest that it definitely does that.  No, my problem is that as the difficulty of a mission rises, the pressure to design an increasingly specific AC to meet its demands goes up and up until it becomes practically mandatory.  While talking to a friend who knew of but had never played these games I offhandedly mentioned that I was custom building an AC for each mission in this game, and he seemed almost disgusted by this fact.  I was taken aback at first, but after even a second of reflection I realized that his reaction was the correct one.  The core fantasy to this entire series is that out of an enormous possibility space of different combinations of parts, you build your own giant robot to take on all comers.  Your giant robot, not "dozens of different giant robots each radically optimized to meet the precise demands of a specific mission".  This isn't just my interpretation either.  Look at the way your fellow AC pilots are universally depicted in the games - every single one of them has "their" AC, the design of which often explicitly reflects some facet of their personality:

 

 

There's a compounding issue as well.  As I alluded to earlier, when "Silent Line" is playing, any deviation from the optimal is downright impossible, but what of the rest of the missions, which aren't quite as ridiculous, though still harder in general?  I suppose you could, with great difficulty, force your way through most of them using your favorite general design with minor modifications to suit each one, as you could do more comfortably in previous games.  You could do that and squeak on by, but then you'd run afoul of the grading system.

 

Now even if you manage to get through a mission by the skin of your teeth, the game will helpfully inform you that you're an abject failure anyway.  Hooray?  It's one of the worst trends in Japanese game design at the time, thoughtlessly shoehorned into Armored Core, adding nothing but frustration in the process.  The implementation is abysmal - you're given no indication of what the criteria you're being judged on are whatsoever, but even if the system was less opaque, the end result would still be the same.  Yeah, maybe you can beat that mission with your generalized design, but to beat it and get a good rank?  Forget about it.  In truth this unfortunate system was added in the previous game, but it was easier to ignore there, and well... I wanted to save it for this rant.

 

This post has been all doom and gloom but I should say that it's not all bad.  Aside from being a little harder it's the same old Armored Core it ever was.  The biggest mechanics change is the introduction of "clone" parts with miniscule differences from existing ones.  On the one hand, it's a pointless addition that adds nothing of value to to the series, which is why it was immediately dropped for the next game, on the other hand I don't have to feel too bad about not bothering to S rank a mission when the reward for doing so is a minor variation on a part I already have, so that's not too bad.  Stay tuned for (finally) some real changes next time.

 

 

[Lork]

Armored Core: Nexus (Playstation 2, 2004)

 

 

Ah yes, 2004: 6 years after the introduction of the Dual Shock controller, 4 years from the launch of the PS2, and 3 since the release of Halo: Combat Evolved.  It's ironic that From Software is frequently credited as the studio to finally break the widespread perception that Japanese developers were too stodgy and stuck in their ways to compete in the modern games industry, given that they almost certainly bear a significant portion of the responsibility for creating it in the first place.

 

If you haven't guessed already, this is the one where they added in the option to use dual analog controls, which is kind of a big deal for the series.  You could be forgiven for being confused by the title though.  Is it a full sequel to 3?  Another expansion for that game?  Maybe a side story?  Fans seem to consider it a generational half-step.  It re-uses the assets from 3, so perhaps From was feeling self conscious about that when naming the game, but in truth it features some of the most significant changes in the series up to this point even if you discount the controls.

 

The models for these parts and weapons might be the same, but every other aspect of them is different, especially when re-contextualized through the lens of the new overheating system.  Previously overheating was essentially a status condition that could be inflicted on you by the environment or certain enemies for a moderately dangerous damage over time effect.  Now, heat is something that can build up simply by using your own boosters if you're not careful, and in addition to the DoT, overheating will cause your radiator to go into an emergency mode, sucking up massive amounts of power to vent the excess heat, likely overloading your generator in the process and leaving you a sitting duck unable to use your boosters to avoid enemy fire, or shoot energy weapons if you're using them.  It's something you constantly have to think about when designing or piloting your AC, giving the whole thing a decidedly more sim like feel.

 

As for the much hyped controls, they work about as well as you could hope.  Longtime fans were probably happy that they left in the option to use the old control scheme, but for everyone else the dual analog scheme is much more natural, agile and familiar.  There's always going to be a certain unavoidable amount awkwardness inherent in controlling a character whose turning speed is variable and dictated by game balance, especially when combined with a locked behind the back camera system, but it's an ultimately minor problem and an understandable one at that.  The important thing is that I no longer feel like I'm being arbitrarily limited by the controls, which to me is an important step for this series.  It's almost fitting that in the same game that they finally solved their long standing control crisis, they immediately blundered into another one...

 

You see, the other big thing they added was a more fully fleshed out system for dual wielding.  Instead of being limited to a small subset, you can now buy left hand versions of just about every handheld weapon in the game, which can be equipped as the same time as a right handed gun and fired independently.  I didn't think anything of it for much of the time I played this game, ignoring it in favor of what worked for me in the past, but in retrospect I consider it an unwelcome opening of Pandora's box moment for the series.  Once you realize the implications of being able to put out literally twice as much firepower at the same time are, you can't go back.  It's so powerful that it's effectively the new standard, from which anything else is considered a deviation.  This isn't necessarily a bad thing from an abstract balancing point of view - it's different, but that's fine.  The problem is that the new status quo requires you to press two buttons to do essentially the same thing you were doing before with one.

 

And make no mistake, it's a huge problem.  It turns out that one extra button was the straw that broke the camel's back.  Like most third person shooters, playing AC effectively requires you to be able to access the controls for moving, aiming and firing at the same time.  There's also the boost button, which is your primary means of both going fast and gaining height, and so needs to be readily accessible at all times.  If you think about the way a gamepad is held, things would be totally fine if we stopped here.  You've got your left thumb on the stick for movement, your right thumb aiming, your right index finger on the fire button, and your left index for the boosting.  This is an optimal control scheme, putting all of what I would call the "primary functions" needed to control the game literally at your fingertips at the same time. Secondary functions like weapon switching don't need to be accessed at a millisecond's notice, so it's no problem if you have to momentarily change your posture to use them.

 

If you add another primary function, like, say, another fire button, you've just created an ergonomic nightmare.  It's one too many buttons to be able to comfortably access at the same time.  It's technically possible, but most players will hate you for doing it.  The most common way to hold a modern gamepad is with your index fingers alternating between the triggers and shoulder buttons, but what you can do is shift your grip up so that your index fingers are dedicated to the shoulder buttons, allowing you to use your middle fingers to pull the triggers at the same time.  For most, this would be an awkward and unfamiliar way to hold the controller, but you're going to have to use it unless you want to have to choose between aiming, firing or boosting.  You might think that this is an attempt by From to scare us straight so we all come crawling back to the old control scheme, but in that case all you're doing is moving the problem.  If you want to boost while aiming and firing you no longer have to muck about with the triggers, but you're instead in the unenviable position of having to press three face buttons at once.  Good luck with that.

 

I eventually pushed through and got used to it, though it'll never stop being an uncomfortable way to hold a dual shock.  Most are not as persistent or forgiving of this kind of thing as I am, and so this series now suffers from an even harsher reputation for being impenetrable to all but a tiny niche than it did before.  I frequently see this image passed around as an automatic punchline any time people are discussing how to hold a controller online:

Apparently some people in Japan consider this the optimal way to play these games?  I don't even want to know.

 

Despite massive sweeping changes in future entries in the series that apparently put a lot of longtime fans off, this dual wielding system is one of the few things that remains completely unchanged through all of them, and some even exacerbated the issue with other changes, which is very unfortunate.  My hope against hope for the new Armored Core that we know is coming is that if they absolutely insist on keeping dual wielding as a feature, they switch to a weapon group system instead of having two separate fire buttons.  That's probably not going to happen though, and I will be sad.

 

[Problem Machine]

Yeah dual wielding really did not add a lot to the game -- At least when it's just the howitzer there's a kind of fun timing/guessing game element, but when you're just hosing at your opponent with a rifle there's really not much interesting going on.

 

I ended up using a modified version of the original controls to address this issue, myself. I changed triangle to jump/boost, square to right hand, x to left hand, and circle to switch weapons. It might sound awkward, but it let me fairly easily roll my thumb down a half step to hold boost and shoot and then another half step to hold boost and both shoots.

[Lork]

Armored Core: Nine Breaker (Playstation 2, 2005)

 

 

According to Wikipedia: "In a some-what controversial move, developer FromSoftware remodelled some of the basic elements of the Armored Core formula for Armored Core: Nine Breaker. Removed altogether are the storyline-based missions and instead 'training missions' have been added into the game, intending to develop a player's skill at piloting an AC."

 

"Some-what controversial" is putting it lightly.  This is easily the worst game in the series. I'm not even fundamentally opposed to a 'training' conceit - after all, my very best memories of the Metal Gear Solid series were all produced by the second game's excellent VR Missions mode.  It's actually a formula that has been proven to work, but Armored Core does not wear it well.

 

The first questionable thing about it is whether or not Armored Core even stands to benefit from this kind of structure at all.  MGS has often been criticized for its short, cutscene and boss filled campaigns that hardly give its stealth action gameplay any room to breathe.  And even as short as the campaigns are, having a multi-part continuous streak of gameplay ruined by a single slip-up is no fun.  A massive array of bite sized, easily repeatable chunks of pure gameplay is the perfect cure for what ails MGS.  On the other hand, the traditional mission structure of AC games is already already optimized for serving up a ton of small, self contained, repeatable missions, so nothing is gained.

 

The biggest problem is that From took the concept of 'training' way too literally.  Where VR Missions offered a light sprinkling of arbitrary challenges like target shooting over a healthy core of fully integrated 'missions' that could be tackled as you saw fit, Nine Breaker consists entirely of one note, score-able activities like target shooting, dodging missiles, obstacle courses and so on.  It's Japan's unhealthy obsession with scoring systems and s ranks taken to its logical extreme.  When talking about the last few games I complained about the steadily increasing difficulty and the mere existence of ranking systems conflicting with the core of creativity and individual expression that the series was built on, but that was small time compared to this.  There is nothing to this game other than finding out the right combination of parts for a particular challenge (there's usually exactly one) and then just beating your head against it over and over again until the game considers your performance acceptable.

 

I supposed you could consider it a sort of puzzle game where you test your knowledge of AC construction and your mastery over the controls to find the right solution to every challenge, but even if you try to accept it on those terms, it's still terrible.  Most of the activities are banal and joyless, the criteria you're being graded on are still just as opaque as ever, and the later challenges push the gameplay way beyond its natural limits and emphasize the weaknesses of the controls and camera incredibly frustrating ways.  In regular AC gameplay, landing on a big skyscraper in the middle of a fight is no big deal, but when you're asked to precisely land on a series of tiny moving platforms in as little time as possible, you suddenly become acutely aware of the fact that the camera doesn't facilitate seeing what's beneath your feet.

 

That was way too many words for a game that can be accurately summed up by the gif at the top.  Nine Breaker belongs in the trash.

 

Odds and ends:

 

Check out these bizarrely human-like idle animations that play during the intros to challenges involving an enemy AC:

 

 

According to the ~*lore*~ ACs evolved out of MT or "Muscle Tracer" technology, implying that they mimic the movements of their pilots, so it's not completely out of left field.  Even still, we've never seen them move this way before or since.

[Laco]

This thread is the best. Having never played an Armored Core game I don't have anything to contribute, but I love reading your detailed thoughts on each game. Thanks, Lork!

[Lork]

13 hours ago, Laco said:

This thread is the best. Having never played an Armored Core game I don't have anything to contribute, but I love reading your detailed thoughts on each game. Thanks, Lork!

Thanks!  It makes me very happy to know there's an audience out there enjoying this stuff.

 

Annnnnd despite having put it off for way (way way way way) too long, I actually did mean to respond to this post:

On 4/7/2017 at 10:16 AM, Problem Machine said:

Yeah dual wielding really did not add a lot to the game -- At least when it's just the howitzer there's a kind of fun timing/guessing game element, but when you're just hosing at your opponent with a rifle there's really not much interesting going on.

 

I ended up using a modified version of the original controls to address this issue, myself. I changed triangle to jump/boost, square to right hand, x to left hand, and circle to switch weapons. It might sound awkward, but it let me fairly easily roll my thumb down a half step to hold boost and shoot and then another half step to hold boost and both shoots.

I can see how that would help, but I'd find it to still be quite an awkward maneuver that no game should ever ask you to do without a very good reason, and as you said, dual wielding fails to justify itself.  Coincidentally, Halo 2 also introduced a control layout altering dual wielding system of questionable value.  It didn't stick around forever though; unlike From, Bungie found the resolve to kill the feature after it had become clear that it wasn't worth the cost.  

[Problem Machine]

Sure, but frankly I've never actually liked dual stick controls much, usually finding them an inferior interpretation of mouse and keyboard controls. Perhaps ironically, Dark Souls is one of the only games I'll actually put up with it for.

[Lork]

Armored Core: Last Raven (Playstation 2, 2006) - The Dark Souls of Armored Core*

 

This is the last in the very long line of PS2 titles, and thankfully it's a "real one" unlike Nine Breaker, but other than that I'm running out of things to say about them individually, mostly because From was running out of things to do with them.  Like the last few entries, they've added a few parts, tweaked some mechanics and adjusted some stats to change the game in increasingly imperceptible ways, but honest to god, by far the most significant thing is that they've finally replaced the clunky old UI for assembling your AC that had been more or less unchanged since the original game, with a much better one.  It's actually a really nice change, but it's not much to write about.

 

So instead let's take a detour into something I was curious about when I first embarked on this journey.  Nowadays everybody knows FromSoftware as "The Dark Souls company", and the world has fallen madly in love with every little intricacy and idiosyncrasy of the Souls games.  I wonder, though, how many of these 'Souls-isms' are actually unique to those games, and how many are actually just 'From-isms'?  To attempt to answer that, let's take a look at a few similarities I've noticed:

 

 

Look familiar?  If nothing else, we can say that someone over there clearly has a deep and abiding love of spreadsheets.  The similarities go beyond the abundance of statistics and the way they're displayed though.  One of the peculiarities of Dark Souls that caught my eye when I first played it was that someone over there clearly despises the role of dice in RPG combat, because they've gone to great lengths to eliminate any randomness in outcomes from several concepts that are traditionally settled via RNG even in most action games: damage variance, stun, status effects and critical hits.  It stuck out to me because I, too hate the idea of having my fate be determined by a pair of virtual dice, and so this is a design aesthetic that I really admire.  What you probably won't be surprised to learn is that half of these systems come from Armored Core and the other half is just further extensions of the same philosophy.  Dark Souls' way of handling status effects, (which you may notice popping up in lots of other recent games, because it's really smart) is ripped almost verbatim from AC. Likewise, the (in)famous poise stat is a more robust version of an AC stat called 'stability'.  And getting away from the elimination of randomness, the concept of differing weight classes with tradeoffs between protection, utility and mobility is one that should be very familiar to players of either series.

 

Or how about the saving system?  Rather than the manual systems of the past, or the "modern" at the time system of regularly spaced checkpoints, Demon's Souls aggressively saved at every available opportunity and would chide you for turning the game off without first selecting the option to save and quit from the menu, all to ensure that every time you booted up your console, the game world would always be exactly as you left it, or as close to it as was practically possible.  At the time, it seemed like a very forward thinking way to handle saving, leaving players completely free of the responsibility of having to think about save management while also preventing them from abusing saves to subvert the game's design, but without the usability pitfalls of manually placed checkpoints ("How long has it been since the last checkpoint?" / "How close am I to the next one?").  But did you know that Demon's Souls wasn't the first time they attempted such a system?  Way back in 2004, Armored Core: Nexus tried something very similar.  It even complains at you if you quit without saving!  Unfortunately for From, the realities of the way the PS2 handled memory cards would've made constant autosaving (or really any saving outside of the player's direct control) impractical, leaving them powerless to stop any player who wanted to subvert the system by simply turning off their console if things didn't go their way, making the whole thing kind of quaint.  Still, it shows that the idea had been floating around the studio for quite a while.

 

There's also the matter of the controls.  Many first time players of a Souls games are initially put off by its unconventional control scheme, putting attacks on the shoulder buttons instead of the traditionally used face buttons.  It has a certain inherent intuitiveness due to the way it maps actions performed by the character's right hand to buttons pressed by the player's right, and vice versa, but players who were used to jamming on the face buttons to attack were in for a bit of an adjustment period.  Anybody who had been using Armored Core's "new" control scheme for the past 5 years would've felt right at home though, because it's the exact same paradigm.  Dark Souls extends the idea by adding additional actions for each hand to its corresponding trigger, but the core idea unmistakably arose from the same school of thought that came up with a way to "modernize" Armored Core in the first place.

 

Oh, and then there's this from the original Armored Core:

 

 

But that's just an amusing coincidence...  Or is it?  

 

It is.

 

So there you have it: a loose assortment of trivia that nonetheless shows a common thread of predilections and ways of solving problems among the people who made these games.  The two series may be very different in some ways, but neither of them could've come from anywhere else.  

 

Before they started focusing on projects with massive Dark Souls sized budgets, FromSoftware (or From Software as they used to call themselves before they got self conscious about their goofy ass name) was a very prolific developer, releasing a ton of games across a variety of genres, so it can be tough to pin down any one common aspect between all of them and call it a house style, but if I were to pick one, I'd say it's an unwillingness to compromise.  From's culture seems to engender a focus on a particular vision for each game, and any conventions or standards that get in the way of that vision are immediately bulldozed over without a second thought, even if they might inconvenience players.  Where other developers might balk at the idea of requiring players to join or form an online team before they can even participate in a game like Chromehounds or the latest Armored Cores, From seemingly doesn't even think twice about it, because to do otherwise would be to compromise their vision of a persistent, dynamic online war.  Likewise, they would gladly force you to fight an invading black phantom in Dark Souls, even going so far as to remove your option to exit the game to do so.  Or maybe if they were to make a local only coop game that is almost impossible to play by yourself...  I'd call that a very FromSoft move.

 

*Not really

[Problem Machine]

Yeah it's fascinating that Dark Souls didn't actually represent a change in approach for From, it just represented them getting good enough at the kind of game they've been making all along for people to really sit up and take notice. It's really blatantly obvious how much shared DNA there is there if you've spent a lot of time with both series, with the biggest standout common element being the stamina/energy system.

[osmosisch]

I know that for me the graphics/look of Dark Souls is what made me sit up and take notice, more than the buzz or the alleged difficulty. In the era of WoW neon colours the understated realistic look was such a relief for me, fantastical elements notwithstanding. Technology finally caught up with their design ideas in other words.

 

Anyway, thanks for the thread, it's a fascinating read.

[syntheticgerbil]

My friend is having me play V, Verdict Day with him. Hopefully we can get all the trophies before From finally decides to shut down the servers. That would really piss me off if they did. My friend is a huge AC fan from the Playstation games, even though I think he skipped a good few, while this is my first time messing with one. I'm so lost, I have to keep asking him question on almost everything. It doesn't help the UI is such complicated ass but I am getting the hang of it. The actual game is quite fun and a lot of neat experimentation but I really suck at it right now. He says it gets easier the better weapons and lock on stuff you get, so I'm really hoping that comes sooner than later. I think all the stores unlocked are attached to your player rank, of which right now I'm a measly D.

 

I hope you keep doing this thread and get to Verdict Day. I'd be very interested in a write up now that I can relate.

[Lork]

I take it from your reference to trophies that you're playing on PS3, which means we should join up for coop!  I'm actually very slowly making my way through Verdict Day now.  I've been putting off my write up of AC4 because work has been extra shitty lately and I'm planning on continuing this series once that finally dies down.

[syntheticgerbil]

Sure, my PSN username is simply Syntheticgerbil, what is yours? You can PM it as well. My friend's username is OddjobBR. The team is Crimetap if you want to join that as well.

 

I don't know if I will be playing much in the next week and I think my friend and I are doing co-op through since it's two player only, however we will definitely need help when doing the online team stuff, which I should hopefully get too sooner than later, I think we are halfway through story mode but haven't gotten all subquests done.

 

I think he said you can have four players and an operator (of which I'm still not quiet sure what that means) and the only other person we have to play with is his brother. He's pretty good at games too. So I would be the worst player if we went on an adventure, hope that's okay.

[Lork]

Mine's Clorfhanger.  Are you on the Idle Thumbs Discord or Slack?  @ me on there when / if you need me and hopefully I'll be around.  If you want to play through everything with your friend first that's fine, but we could still replay missions to help each other get those pesky S ranks and sub-missions.