I recently replayed the game, and wow what a shock after playing the Playstation games right before. This game is such a massive improvement it showcases everything you want in a full fledged sequel.

The game is massively larger than the previous ones, far more missions and the arena while not perfect is far better balanced and challenging. There's of course an increase in parts for your AC, and types of parts too. The missions are a fair amount more varied than the PS1 games. The scope is much bigger too. Just about everything is improved.

I was worried about the visuals coming back to the game, and coming off fresh from the originals, which have a distinctive and well aged aesthetic, but boy was I wrong. AC2 is peak early 6th gen visuals, totally soulful. In fact, looking at this as a generational leap makes you realize how much diminishing returns (or worse, negative returns) have been a standard since 6th gen. It's a game with a 4x resolution increase, a 3x increase in framerate, incredible texture work, incredible lighting, massively improved controls and camera, and so much more. What happened to gaming where not only did stuff like this happen, but was expected? That aside, really, the only thing worse is IMO the music, but still very fitting and listenable, and I generally prefer the new sound effects. The story also holds up, but the original Armored Core is a masterpiece of paranoia sci-fi so what can you do?

With the generational leap this game takes place on Mars, a world that's a frontier, in contrast with the Earth of the previous games, where the only place to build was down. This game features much bigger wider areas, as opposed to Earth's endless corridors, taking advantage of the superior hardware. Along with the clearer, better visuals it makes the game feel grander. The story is on a much larger level too, a very fitting follow up to the original game, tying back into it in various ways. It's impressive too that despite everything being much bigger and grandiose, it never loses sight of the original tight vision that you are a mercenary, a single person, not a hero, in a web of much larger forces than yourself when it very easily could have.

As other reviewers have pointed out, this game is markedly more difficult than the previous ones. Maybe to its own detriment. But, I really do think the difficulty is appropriate especially if you're already experienced. The game does in fact expect you to make different ACs for different missions, but that's fine because selling parts gives you the exact money you get from buying them, it's almost like needing to respec stats than managing finances for a build. This game does not hold your hand and expects you to keep up. The beginning is a fairly big spike in difficulty, and then it ramps up much more in the last third of the game. The game never quits, and it's one of the few games where the story is that people actively want to kill you, and then ACTUALLY try to kill you. It's rare at first when an enemy AC appears unprompted in a mission, but at the end of the game it becomes standard that multiple ACs will swarm you. It's such a satisfying difficulty increase that looking back I'm impressed with my 10 year old self beating this game.

Overall, it's everything you want from a sequel and then some. A generational leap, truly. This game's contemporaries are landmark 6th gen titles like Final Fantasy X, F-Zero GX, Gran Turismo 3, it is exactly like in line with these huge games in how big of a jump it is. Looking back on this game it's actually surprising it is niche, though perhaps the difficulty is the reason why. If you want to get prepared for ACVI (or want to go back to the old games after playing it in the future from this review) play this one, provided you are willing to sweat through it. I would recommend this game to any gamer wanting a challenge and a game with robots.