you should play armored core: for answer (2008), which is one of the most perfect, scorched earth works of art produced in this century, the unconditional end of the last vestiges of virtuous mech fantasy
However, do note that after playing ACFA, you will have played the pinnacle of the series in terms of speed. Kind of like you would play F-Zero GX as the first F-Zero entry of series.
armored core is organized in generations. each generation is like a self-contained miniseries. you only really need to play one game of each gen to get a good sense of the series’ progression over time but they have plotlines if you care about those. do play the first one. it’s a classic
mara’s picks:
AC1: master of arena. AC1 is super chunky (check out those walk cycles baby) and honestly feels perfect to me. has the least intimidating numbers. is the hardest to break. no fucking nonsense. i love it. master of arena has a whole disc’s worth of arena fightan which became the beating heart of the series over time so play that one
AC2: another age. AC2 is something of a awkward middle child, it’s really good but it feels sort of accidentally weightless and stiff and has kind of a shitty unoptimized engine bc the first one was a ps2 launch title. AC2 has more than a few hidden mechanics that it never really explains. you can do perpetual overboost if you know how to build.
AC3: silent line. there is, what, six of these games? they really overdid it. Armored Core Nexus introduced heat management and it was so unforgiving that it kinda sucked, silent line is the game directly before nexus (oops). AC3 is the platonic ideal of the series. there is an absolutely ridiculous amount of shit you can do in these games. there’s funnels. and limit breaks. the quad legs actually like, walk. silent line is amazing, play it. last raven is super underrated too imo
ACFA is sort of a leap straight past the logical conclusion of the armored core formula in most every sense and really is the most artful and moody and interesting of the lot (this is famously a miyazaki joint) so i would actually recommend leaving it for last if you’re interested in playing more than one AC game. there is a tremendous amount to say about this game in the context of the rest of the series. i would describe it as bananas. in other AC games, both visible and invisible numbers and statistics average around four digits. in AC4/FA they average six digits and you really feel it. this game is a blast to play multiplayer if you are an insane person. i long for a pc port
AC5: verdict day. i think these games are really really underrated and have an impeccable sense of weight. AC4 and AC5 have kind of opposite personalities (AC4 = inhuman, weightless, bodiless dancing death angels of eldritch scale and velocity, AC5 = smaller scale, gritty, chunky, heavy, wall jumping, check-out-my-tankfucker urban warfare) and the contrast works in their favour. AC5 had an interesting but ill-fated persistent multiplayer component. it really sucks that armored core’s multiplayer never seems to catch on because it’s theoretically brilliant. i think there’s a lot about these games that was maybe ill-considered and risky in retrospect but it really just feels so real in your hands
As someone who’s dipped toes into most of these games (~5-7 hours each in 4 of them), the one I really obsessed over was Chromehounds. How would you compare that to these games? I loved the discrete roles the builds had and the heavy weight and spider-mechs seemed best carried on in AC5.
ah! the Team Fortress of mech shooters, it was beautiful in how it hid information and had specific roles; adding a radar/map component took away 2 gun slots, necessitating a role as the coordinator/commander; the nimble scouts, the heavies that moved just slow enough the commander could read coordinates off to the artillery builds
Maybe it really played like the game World of Tanks wants to be
don’t forget the complex AI buddy system you had in acvd! you could build an entirely AI controlled mech with its own tendencies and behavior and have it go 2v2 in single player
more than bringing back the online component i wish they’d do a verdict day horde mode with the ai buddy ugh perfect game
honestly i think For Answer is a bleaker take on the human condition than Miyazaki ever conveyed in the Souls series. just this nihilistic hellstew of ecological collapse, the rich taking to flying cities to pretend nothing’s happening, all while funding pointless proxy wars over a barren planet of factories and cities swallowed by grey deserts. there’s branching story paths and they’re all horrible nightmares. AC games aren’t really known for their optimism or glorification of war but even in that context 4A stands out as this howl of rage at capitalism and the military-industrial complex. also there’s a robot named after aaliyah
it sure does come close, yeah. there’s so much to ACFA thematically that it’s kind of a tall task to pin it all together. it is without a doubt the most depressing game i have ever played
the other thing i find interesting about AC is the utter lack of humanity. i can count only a handful of times you ever see even the silhouette of a human being in one of these games. you will hear voices, but you will never see faces. because of how thoroughly AC games scrub the presence of actual flesh and blood, it becomes almost impossible to clock the actual reprecussions of the… things you are doing in most of these games. It becomes difficult to track personal stakes and motivations, difficult to track consequences, difficult to really see beyond the mechanical veil when there are literally no people anywhere to attach meaning to. AC being largely a collection of numbers, texts, and disembodied voices bears a big part of its thematic weight. ACV lampshades this to pretty cute effect by having an actual supporting cast beyond your handler, and then revealing the majority of them to be AI, which actually makes no real difference to your impression of them
nocode gave a fantastic summary of the series which I can fully endorse, so I’ll just add a little more.
The first game to add dual analog controls was Nexus, which was the game after Silent Line. I agree that Silent Line and Last Raven are the ones to play on PS2, but if you can’t handle the control scheme on Silent Line, just play Last Raven. However, if you have a vita, you can play the PSP version of Silent Line with the controls remapped to use the vita’s dual analog sticks.
For Answer is probably my favorite of the series, but I haven’t played any of games before Silent Line. I really need to play Master of Arena some day. Verdict Day is good, but the separate scan and combat modes never really clicked with me. I hope that is a mechanic that stays with the V series.
I’m currently playing Daemon x Machina on Switch, a sort of spiritual descendant of Armored Core. It is good, but it takes way too long to get interesting if you’ve played AC before. It might be a good game to start with if you are new to the series, but just know that the narrative aspects don’t capture the somber tone of a real AC game. I think it also takes a little too much inspiration from the loot-grindy trend we see in modern games-as-a-service. Overall it is pretty good though. I’m itching to try out the online once I finish single player.