I admire this game intensely. It is immediately and overwhelmingly devoted to customization, from the path through the game all the way down to the details of the mech's center of gravity and precise energy usage. It swarms with the endless mindboggling stats of a JRPG at the same time as it refuses the core conceit of building up a character: in ACFA, all choices are reversible, all equipment can be sold back at cost, and you can build a new mech from the ground up for each mission if you so choose.
This deep and loving mechanical crunchiness is wed to an equally strong love of the aesthetically famously immortalized as "wow cool robot." ACFA goes to every length a PS3 game can to make playing it feel cool. It understands that frictionless translation between the player's thoughts and the mech's actions isn't the goal. Even the most badass mech is still a physical object and you can feel its momentum as it pivots or struggles to raise itself into the sky. This friction is crucial to the balance of the game, in fact, since it allows mechs to trade defense and power for maneuverability and speed.
With all my admiration now laid out, though, I have to say: I found ACFA intensely frustrating as well. It's difficult, sure, but it's also opaque—which I found quite surprising, since I consider FromSoft's modern works exemplars of a pedagogical approach to game design. But here, when I died over and over (particularly in one-on-one mech fights) I couldn't understand why and I couldn't figure out how to improve. Shots would hit me and miss my opponents. Players move much faster than the camera so I'd lose track of enemy positions. Worst of all, without enemy health bars incremental improvements in my skill were all but invisible.
I have no doubt that with dedication these skills can be learned. I may have been verging on that point myself before my emulator crashed and I lost enough progress to become demoralized about redoing it all. But I consider the process of bringing a player from 0% to 70% skill one of the most interesting aspects of game design, and I'll be very curious to see how they tackle it in Armored Core VI a decade and a half on from this and with the eyes of the world upon them.
This deep and loving mechanical crunchiness is wed to an equally strong love of the aesthetically famously immortalized as "wow cool robot." ACFA goes to every length a PS3 game can to make playing it feel cool. It understands that frictionless translation between the player's thoughts and the mech's actions isn't the goal. Even the most badass mech is still a physical object and you can feel its momentum as it pivots or struggles to raise itself into the sky. This friction is crucial to the balance of the game, in fact, since it allows mechs to trade defense and power for maneuverability and speed.
With all my admiration now laid out, though, I have to say: I found ACFA intensely frustrating as well. It's difficult, sure, but it's also opaque—which I found quite surprising, since I consider FromSoft's modern works exemplars of a pedagogical approach to game design. But here, when I died over and over (particularly in one-on-one mech fights) I couldn't understand why and I couldn't figure out how to improve. Shots would hit me and miss my opponents. Players move much faster than the camera so I'd lose track of enemy positions. Worst of all, without enemy health bars incremental improvements in my skill were all but invisible.
I have no doubt that with dedication these skills can be learned. I may have been verging on that point myself before my emulator crashed and I lost enough progress to become demoralized about redoing it all. But I consider the process of bringing a player from 0% to 70% skill one of the most interesting aspects of game design, and I'll be very curious to see how they tackle it in Armored Core VI a decade and a half on from this and with the eyes of the world upon them.