Pretty great. I think Armored Core is at its best when it revels in the dark metal nigh non-human aesthetic, swimming in the cold metal and ethereal ghostly artificial nightmare that is the world; this game has a lot of that. Vibes back and forth with an incredibly memorable and pulsating soundtrack, corny dialogue lines delivered in the most drop dead non-human ways within a soulless and cold realm. Theres enough dark remnants within the emails and spliced out cutscenes to really hold its AC charm and personally I do find it to hold up pretty well. The customization is great and the combat feels good when you get used to it, quite literally nothing feels better than to whip your Mech into shape from a janky hard to control piece of shit to a slightly less janky dominant metal force. Unfortuntately, the game really really drops off in the last few levels. The last mission is downright cruel in almost every way. I could conjur up some trans-humanist excuse to how cruel it is but simply put its just FromSoftware being fucking dicks. Still, I'm glad to have experienced the original AC and I'm even more happy that it is so charming and enjoyable on its own as a memorable piece of mech fiction; one that would explode into numerous additions into the series.