oh i beat it. Understandably very short, I liked it a lot though! I like how the story is a bit more hands on instead of just "mission briefing based on which side you picked".
Not going to 100% it yet because Master of Arena lets me pull my save from Project Phantasma.

of course the NPC thats a woman has a pink AC, because girl.

holy SHIT the quality jump from AC1 to this is noticeable. Nearly all the missions have intros with little cutscenes, they smoothed out the menu speed and framerate. It really does just feel like AC1 but with a little bit extra. I'm a little sad though that when From swapped publishers and republished AC1 they didn't go back and do like a 1.1 of the game with the improvements from the expansions.

turns out when i stopped playing yesterday I died like a minute and a half away from the end of the game.
I enjoyed the game quite a bit!
Also surprisingly ahead of its time in terms of quality of life.
After you beat the game it lets you save and then when you go back into the game it just lets you pick from every mission in the game AND tells you if you've beaten one before. Its a small thing but so many games from this era just did not give a shit, especially to people who wanted to see all the content. I'm not going to do the other missions yet, I want to play the expansions first since they can grab your save file from AC1, so i don't want to use a 100% save.

oh GOD the last missions are brutal, on one hand its nice that they just kick you back to the main menu after dying in them instead of risking you going into debt and having to restart, but there's not really a clear "hey this is how the game works now" so I got lucky that I saved before the mission where they started doing that. the missions themselves are ROUGH, and also i want to know who at from software decided to put a fucking moving platform jumping puzzle in a game that controls like this and has a camera like this. I just want to talk. I promise.

wow! I got literally back to where I was in about half the time, and now my mech is even better.

finally getting around to playing armored core. its pretty damn neat! The controls definitely are pretty stiff and confusing at first (took me like 3 hours to feel even remotely comfortable with them and even then I barely use the triggers), and at times the game can be pretty brutal, but it holds up surprisingly well.

Honestly i'm trying to decide what the most frustrating thing is right now, the camera or the unfortunate fact that the game runs at 20 fps. The camera is only annoying sometimes, like when you jump, but the framerate is a constant, and when you're moving as fast as you are it can be very hard to keep up. At least in Ocarina of Time you don't move at 80mph, so 20fps works out a bit better.

I barely played this, I got from like the smelter demon bonfire to the old iron king bonfire then got distracted by other stuff, most of the playtime is AFK

i forget what i did this day i made this log a week later

I did so much today its unreal
Sinner's Rise and the part of Lost Bastille I didn't do (ruin sentinels), Belfry Luna
the ENTIRETY of grave of saints through to Black Gulch.
Went back to Heide's to get into the blue sentinels.
also went back and did a bart (leaving this typo its funny) of FoFG i missed
Hunstmans Copse
and lastly, Shaded Woods

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

making some actual progress in adventure mode yay

apparently elemental attack bonuses do not apply to resins (unless the weapon already has an element) because fuck you. very sad. I did heide's, wharf, and a good chunk of lost bastille

when my hard drive died i thought i lost my save file and i was about to just give up, but luckily gamesave manager had my back!

shit dude return to drangleic started like 2 weeks ago how did i forget. doing a build that primarily uses resins and shit. apparently they do not scale with elemental attack ups unless the weapon already has that elemental damage, which is CRINGE.

Did FoFG, quit in lost bastille cause i was tired

everytime i get carlock he dies in the next mission, its very funny (its not very funny)

fucked up my timer, 1:30 is a guess.

yeah i started a new save. lowered difficulty from classic to normal, disabled damage roulette, lowered cost of soldiers from 25 to 15

things are not going well.
considering my next playthrough boosting how much money I get, disabling damage roulette (I really should've done this long ago), overall making it a bit easier.

got the first terror mission, it was one of the best ones i've ever done in long war, 11/18 civilians saved. It was a small map tho

that playthrough is over. I was running out of money for the past few months ingame and just couldn't keep up.
Started a NEW save though. I will have a little bit of a different approach now, instead of just building foundry and repair bay immediately i'll hold off, start with satellites and at least 1 workshop to get more funding, then will move to laboratories and shit

I forgot to time these sessions haha