Completed a full 3 runs. Excellent game. The best mech game to just control perhaps ever. The best characterization work From have done. My primary complaints are poor weapon balance and the ability to make builds too well rounded. There is little motivation to completely change build once you find the couple that work well for you. As well, the music is underwhelming for an AC game, the tracks are good, but they are mixed too low and generally too hazy to make out well. I would have preferred the techno of the earlier titles or the poppy electronica of the later titles. This game leans toward the latter, but does not go far enough.

TL;DR: Play the Project Nemo fan translation instead of the official overseas release. The international version of this game is a different, much worse game than the original.


Pretty good flight combat sim with cool visuals and a couple interesting ideas, but held back by some frustrating levels and a quite plainly told story. As my first game in this series/genre, it was a decent introduction. That is what I thought after finishing the official US version of this game.

I then searched Youtube for a plot summary (just to confirm I had everything straight), and became very confused when I heard references to branching story paths, saw visuals of comms chatter and anime cutscenes I had never seen, and read plot details with only a vague relationship to the game I just played.

A couple google searches later, I found out the following: The international release of this game was gutted. Like, slasher movie gutted. Due to poor sales in Japan, the plans for a complete localization were scrapped in favor of cutting any elements of the game that would be expensive to localize. This includes removing comms chatter, voice acting, branching story paths, interstitial dialogue, and almost half of the missions, as well as heavily simplifying the overall plot. It makes every wonky ps1/2 era Japanese RPG dub looks like a passion project.

Needless to say, I plan to play Project Nemo, the complete fan translation of the game, very soon.

PS: I HIGHLY recommend using the crt-royale shader when emulating PS1 games. I think this console's 3D library benefits greatly from the rose tinted haze of a CRT, and for my money crt-royale goes the farthest of any other shader in replicating that effect. My specific setup was using a ported version via Reshade on Duckstation for PC, but it's meant for Retroarch so you should be able to use it on basically anything that can handle the non-zero performance penalty. Feel free to tweak it to your liking. I personally prefer subtle scanlines and strong phosphor glow/bloom.