this is peak armored core 1. it's the refinement of the arena mode, abundance of content, return to a story full of investigative wonder, and of course: giant mecha annihilation. it's everything project phantasma should've been, but admittedly master of arena wouldn't be what it is without its younger sibling expansion.
arena is more in-depth due to it being intertwined with the campaign. at certain points in the game you won't receive any more missions until you progress through the arena, incentivizing the player to be a gladiator outside of a side hustle. even then, if youre fighting in the arena too much, your sponsor will temporarily suspend your arena license to make you do their bidding like a mother unplugging an xbox. it's not aggravating, but arena is so engrossing that you forget to do your obligations. like there's a total of 120 arena fights for fortune and glory to be made. the first disc has the campaign and 20 arena fights, but the second disc has 100 fucking fights if you ever get a bad itching for crunchy ps1 Armored Core combat. for as fun as beating up other steel giants is, the mission design in this expansion blows project phantasma and AC1 out of the water in both story and gameplay.
there's a greater innovation in the nuance in missions, learning not just to kill things but to kill specific things, to protect a submarine while killing other things, and destroy generators to permanently kill some lil dudes. it's all so much better than running to a target, killing them, and returning to the raven's nest screen, which got a nice makeover since it's pretty much the set of screens you'll see the most in the game. that's one thing master of arena fails to improve in: keeping the player more in the action gameplay than navigating menus. in the AC1 trilogy, you'll be spending so much time going from the mail, to the garage, to the shop, then back to the garage, and then maybe back to the shop to sell the part you just bought, and then finally to the mission select to then scroll through blocks of debriefing to THEN finally enter a mission that'll be over before you know it. it's tedious, monotonous, and repetitive, especially in long play sessions. one thing the first armored core has still done better than its expansions is the story. master of arena is undoubtedly better than project phantasma, but in this case, it doesn't say who you are IN the game. in the manual, assumedly, and through googling, master of arena's story is about a raven whose family was killed during the first game's events. this raven, who goes by the annihilator, seeks out revenge for his family by aiming to kill Nine-Ball, the top-ranking AC pilot of the entire Armored Core trilogy. it's a great premise, but it's only brought up in-game through an email saying something like, "oh yea, you were looking for nineball? you seem like you have some beef with him... ill help you." it never expands beyond that. it's something i think even those who own the manual skip over and miss. because of the ability to bring my AC from both the base game and project phantasma, i don't feel like a new character too. EDIT: came back to say that i think theres a cutscene that plays at the start of a new game with a fresh character on master of arena that sets up the game's premise, so i need to look more into this because that makes that whole bit of critique null lol. still even with that in mind, because of the very straight forward premise and the previous entries, there isnt much mystery to the story. you know what raven's nest is, you know about the powerful war AI, you know that something's up with Hustler One since there were TWO of them in the last mission of AC1.
an abundance of wealth, a much less mysterious story, and the continued slog of the heaps of menus make master of arena only slightly better than what came before it. the highs are definitely the highest the series had seen at this point. i mean, that final cutscene was fucking PEAK. a very good game, but sadly also not a very improved one. maybe i should do a king's field break before ac2, ooo maybe evergrace instead
arena is more in-depth due to it being intertwined with the campaign. at certain points in the game you won't receive any more missions until you progress through the arena, incentivizing the player to be a gladiator outside of a side hustle. even then, if youre fighting in the arena too much, your sponsor will temporarily suspend your arena license to make you do their bidding like a mother unplugging an xbox. it's not aggravating, but arena is so engrossing that you forget to do your obligations. like there's a total of 120 arena fights for fortune and glory to be made. the first disc has the campaign and 20 arena fights, but the second disc has 100 fucking fights if you ever get a bad itching for crunchy ps1 Armored Core combat. for as fun as beating up other steel giants is, the mission design in this expansion blows project phantasma and AC1 out of the water in both story and gameplay.
there's a greater innovation in the nuance in missions, learning not just to kill things but to kill specific things, to protect a submarine while killing other things, and destroy generators to permanently kill some lil dudes. it's all so much better than running to a target, killing them, and returning to the raven's nest screen, which got a nice makeover since it's pretty much the set of screens you'll see the most in the game. that's one thing master of arena fails to improve in: keeping the player more in the action gameplay than navigating menus. in the AC1 trilogy, you'll be spending so much time going from the mail, to the garage, to the shop, then back to the garage, and then maybe back to the shop to sell the part you just bought, and then finally to the mission select to then scroll through blocks of debriefing to THEN finally enter a mission that'll be over before you know it. it's tedious, monotonous, and repetitive, especially in long play sessions. one thing the first armored core has still done better than its expansions is the story. master of arena is undoubtedly better than project phantasma, but in this case, it doesn't say who you are IN the game. in the manual, assumedly, and through googling, master of arena's story is about a raven whose family was killed during the first game's events. this raven, who goes by the annihilator, seeks out revenge for his family by aiming to kill Nine-Ball, the top-ranking AC pilot of the entire Armored Core trilogy. it's a great premise, but it's only brought up in-game through an email saying something like, "oh yea, you were looking for nineball? you seem like you have some beef with him... ill help you." it never expands beyond that. it's something i think even those who own the manual skip over and miss. because of the ability to bring my AC from both the base game and project phantasma, i don't feel like a new character too. EDIT: came back to say that i think theres a cutscene that plays at the start of a new game with a fresh character on master of arena that sets up the game's premise, so i need to look more into this because that makes that whole bit of critique null lol. still even with that in mind, because of the very straight forward premise and the previous entries, there isnt much mystery to the story. you know what raven's nest is, you know about the powerful war AI, you know that something's up with Hustler One since there were TWO of them in the last mission of AC1.
an abundance of wealth, a much less mysterious story, and the continued slog of the heaps of menus make master of arena only slightly better than what came before it. the highs are definitely the highest the series had seen at this point. i mean, that final cutscene was fucking PEAK. a very good game, but sadly also not a very improved one. maybe i should do a king's field break before ac2, ooo maybe evergrace instead