everyone: Nine Breaker sucks
absolutely everyone: It's just a really terrible minigame collection, don't play it
every single old-school Armored Core fan, everyone, in any context: Nine Breaker is the worst game in the series
me: I bet it's not that bad
me:
me: hey what the fuck
The only thing stopping me from calling this objectively the worst game in the series is that I can see what happens in it, a benchmark that not all of them clear. But like. Jesus Christ.
The gimmick of Nine Breaker is that instead of having story missions at all, you have a series of Training Exercises--I.E., minigames. You might think your expectations are appropriately tempered, you're not expecting more than a minigame collection, you're emulating this because it's 2024 and you didn't buy it for full price, it can't hurt you.
What you're not realizing is that the minigames are tuned to Armored Core difficulty. Most of them set you an extremely specific task, and many of them expect you to perform it to an absurd speedrunner-level standard of perfection. This makes the game feel both incredibly boring and infuriatingly unfair.
Of course, not all of them are at peak difficulty; some will be total facerolls, and you won't know which because the game clearly doesn't know either. The exercises are separated by category and each one has five ascending difficulty levels--except sometimes by far the hardest version of an exercise happens at level 2, level 5 is sometimes the hardest but more often literally can't be failed, many groups of exercises are totally redundant... it's an incredibly half-baked game.
There's also an arena, which ostensibly has equal billing with Training--they're trying to do Master of Arena again, kind of. But even the arena is one of the least fleshed-out in the series; you don't so much fight your way up through the rankings as fight whoever you want to gain points, then certain point totals unlock the next tier of opponents.
The high-ranking arena opponents are also super obviously using OP-INTENSIFY/Human Plus, which is a series tradition except that in most games it's also possible for you to acquire those without cheating. Hell, even in the games where I never did, it never really felt as.... In-Your-Face Bullshit as some of the arena matches in this one. We're talking tank legs that spend the entire fight in the air spamming heavy energy cannons.
So, this game is not just skippable; skipping it is recommended in the strongest possible terms. Why didn't *I* skip it? Or give up when it got to be total horseshit? Well, for one, I came to it so late in the process of Playing Every Game in the Series that I was too committed to the bit to add an "except that one." The cost has NEVER been more sunk. Make no mistake: I am a dumbass. Don't play Nine Breaker.
Not even for this reason.
absolutely everyone: It's just a really terrible minigame collection, don't play it
every single old-school Armored Core fan, everyone, in any context: Nine Breaker is the worst game in the series
me: I bet it's not that bad
me:
me: hey what the fuck
The only thing stopping me from calling this objectively the worst game in the series is that I can see what happens in it, a benchmark that not all of them clear. But like. Jesus Christ.
The gimmick of Nine Breaker is that instead of having story missions at all, you have a series of Training Exercises--I.E., minigames. You might think your expectations are appropriately tempered, you're not expecting more than a minigame collection, you're emulating this because it's 2024 and you didn't buy it for full price, it can't hurt you.
What you're not realizing is that the minigames are tuned to Armored Core difficulty. Most of them set you an extremely specific task, and many of them expect you to perform it to an absurd speedrunner-level standard of perfection. This makes the game feel both incredibly boring and infuriatingly unfair.
Of course, not all of them are at peak difficulty; some will be total facerolls, and you won't know which because the game clearly doesn't know either. The exercises are separated by category and each one has five ascending difficulty levels--except sometimes by far the hardest version of an exercise happens at level 2, level 5 is sometimes the hardest but more often literally can't be failed, many groups of exercises are totally redundant... it's an incredibly half-baked game.
There's also an arena, which ostensibly has equal billing with Training--they're trying to do Master of Arena again, kind of. But even the arena is one of the least fleshed-out in the series; you don't so much fight your way up through the rankings as fight whoever you want to gain points, then certain point totals unlock the next tier of opponents.
The high-ranking arena opponents are also super obviously using OP-INTENSIFY/Human Plus, which is a series tradition except that in most games it's also possible for you to acquire those without cheating. Hell, even in the games where I never did, it never really felt as.... In-Your-Face Bullshit as some of the arena matches in this one. We're talking tank legs that spend the entire fight in the air spamming heavy energy cannons.
So, this game is not just skippable; skipping it is recommended in the strongest possible terms. Why didn't *I* skip it? Or give up when it got to be total horseshit? Well, for one, I came to it so late in the process of Playing Every Game in the Series that I was too committed to the bit to add an "except that one." The cost has NEVER been more sunk. Make no mistake: I am a dumbass. Don't play Nine Breaker.
Not even for this reason.