Did you hear the rumor that FromSoft is working on a secret! new! game?
And that that game might be the revival of one of their biggest franchises?
And that that franchise is
ARMORED CORE!?!? (EXPLOSION)
Now I know that 14% of you are already pounding your fists on your desk, ready to SUIT UP.
But the rest of you are probably asking: what's an Armored Core?
And what could this possibly be the Dark Souls of?!
But hear me out! Because inside its shiny metal core beats the heart of a FromSoft game.
This is a series that's obtuse and famously hard to control, but its fans (like me!) couldn’t
get enough of it.
Even though it may not look like Elden SoulsBorne Dies Twice, there are three very compelling reasons
why Souls-likers should still care about Armored Core.
Armored Core was released on the PlayStation in Japan back in 1997, and it was an immediate hit.
Compared to the sim-heavy mecha games of the time, it was absurdly fast.
Its signature feature allowed players to build their robots piece by piece.
Just six months after the game’s release, FromSoft dropped a sequel-prequel-sorta-just-an-update
called Project Phantasma,
which added a player versus AI arena mode that would eventually become a mainstay of
the franchise.
And from that point on, the series became an annual franchise, releasing at least one
new entry every year between 1997 and 2006.
That’s right, I can make an totally accurate but but extremely weird Venn diagram with Armored Core,
and Madden.
The series arguably had its heyday on the Playstation 2 with seven Armored Core games,
and the beefier console allowed the game to get even faster with the addition of
a rechargeable “over boost” feature that let you rocket your mecha around at ludicrous speeds.
In 2006, the series jumped to the next generation with Armored Core 4,
which was actually the fourteenth Armored Core game.
It was directed by none other than Hidetaka Miyazaki, current President of FromSoft, and
rumored director of Armored Core 6,
which will be the eighteenth Armored Core game.
With a bigger emphasis on aerial combat, AC4 was the fastest entry in the series yet.
FromSoft kept the momentum going with three more games, but by the early 2010s, it was
clear they had something much bigger and better to work on:
Ninja Blade!
I’m kidding, it was Dark Souls.
Why would it be Ninja Blade?
In 2013, Armored Core: Verdict Day was released and that would be the last anyone would hear
of the series for the next 9 years.
These days, you’d have to try really hard to play even one of the Armored Core games!
None of them are backwards compatible on current or previous gen systems and barely any are
available digitally.
So I get it, based on all of that, you might not think it feels or plays much like a FromSoft game.
But the ethos the studio honed on Dark Souls was already there, just waiting to be amped up.
And the first way I’m gonna convince you to get in the robot is Adaptability!
The concept of adaptability, not the Dark Souls 2 stat that nobody liked.
Armored Core’s gameplay was pretty straightforward: you could accept missions or duel another
robot in the arena.
But, like I mentioned earlier, what made it so fun was that you could completely customize
your robot, right down its arms, boosters, and even targeting computer.
The sheer amount of parts meant you could make robots that truly felt different from
one another.
Like a nimble mecha capable of staying in the air forever, or a brutalist artillery
platform on gigantic tank treads.
If you needed quick ground speed but still wanted to carry heavy weaponry you might use
reverse jointed “chicken walker” legs.
You could also save a lot of weight and just make your arms into guns!
Different parts affected things like how large your boost bar was or how quickly you could
get a missile lock.
That type of flexibility is core (wink) to FromSoft’s action RPGs.
You can be any variety of weird little guy! Scrawny wizardling, big sword boy, nudist!
Or any combination of the three!
Since the “classes” were more like vague suggestions, you have freedom to build something
that works with your playstyle.
The distinctions come from the armor, accessories and weapons you pick, as much as your stats.
At first glance, Armored Core’s bot building might remind you more of GUNPLA than FromSoft.
And it is true, they both share a certain sort of meditative quality as you learn how
the pieces fit together, or in the case of Armored Core, how all the parts SYNERGIZE together.
The difference is that neither Armored Core or FromSoft include a step by step instruction manual.
It’s what FromSoft games are known for: they don’t hold your hand!
You have to figure things out, usually by dying a lot in the process.
Building your robot in Armored Core had a lot of that same trial and error.
And it could be costly if you weren’t thoughtful; regardless of whether or not you succeeded,
you still had to pay for ammo and repairs after a mission.
And what is “currency” if not the “souls” of the economy.
Armored Core also had some hidden parts that let you make comically overpowered mechs.
Finding that secret, overpowered weapon in a game that otherwise punishes you at every turn,
doesn’t feel like an exploit so much as “turnabout is fair play.”
Now, I know you’re not ripping your little guy’s arms and legs off between every quest in Dark
Souls, but you are rebuilding in other ways.
There comes a time when you must wear the Covenant of Artorias to traverse the abyss,
and god help you if your build relies on the equip load reduction you’re getting
from Havel's Ring.
Talk about getting caught with your pants down!
It’s also a perfect example of how Dark Souls, like Armored Core, rewards adaptability.
Now I’m sure a lot of y’all are ready to get into the robot, but some are still wondering…
why should I get in the robot?
And it’s because of the game’s story.
Over the course of the franchise, Armored Core has had a bunch of different timelines
— kinda like Gundam!
These all share some commonalities — also kinda like Gundam!
In Armored Core, the player is always a gun-for-hire.
There are also lots of post-apocalypses, underground cities and interstellar colonization.
There’s always a bunch of competing corporations or governments to get missions from.
Each individual game’s story subtly reveals itself through these encounters.
But I’m not gonna pretend like that story ever amounted to much of anything.
Frankly, it was rarely more than paper thin window dressing.
Karasawa MK2 to my head, I couldn’t remember a single character from any of the 7 games
I played.
But I remember that gun.
It’s got a really cool sound.
(metallic, chunky laser gun noise!)
But, if you look hard enough and really squint your eyes, the series kinda looks like
a metaphorical musing on the privatization of military conflicts.
And giant robot stories are NUTS — and bolts — for those kinda metaphors!
Giant robot stories love to ruminate about the complex toll of war on individuals and
society, but they also explore depression and human connection.
They’re frequently about humans inhabiting mechanical bodies, modifying and changing
them and sometimes becoming a literal extension of their psyche.
Despite being about cold metal bodies, these stories can often be downright soulful.
And sometimes, the metaphor can be a literal
cock.
pit.
This is Zone of the Enders and I’m only half-joking when I say that Armored Core’s
story makes Zone of the Enders look like Dune.
Sure, its robots were designed by the artist in high school and it was directed by
Hideo “uncomfortably sexy” Kojima,
but even a standard coming of age story feels a little different when it’s set in a giant
robot’s dick.
That’s what kinda bums me out about Armored Core!
Not that the robots aren’t hangin' hog,
but that it feels like a missed opportunity.
Now if all of this sounds like a criticism of Armored Core, well, you're not wrong.
But it’s also a “criticism” of the earliest Souls’ games, which are still pretty opaque.
You have to put hours into interpreting and extrapolating what little lore there is before
you can understand the epic story of cycles and sacrifice that’s hidden underneath.
With each subsequent game, FromSoft has refined how it builds its narratives.
Elden Ring even had some famous outside help for its worldbuilding, which shows just how
seriously they take this element of their games now.
It’s not the existing lore of Armored Core that I’m excited about.
I’m excited that FromSoft has gotten better at telling stories, and that this time around
we might get giant robots that mean something!
It’s not like there’s some long-term narrative they need to preserve since they’ve started over
four times already:
all they need to do is keep calling you a Raven!
(It’s what they call mercenary Armored Core pilots.
I think it’s neat.)
There’s even been hints that FromSoft might be working on SOMETHING with the authors of
the very popular sci-fi series The Expanse.
If that SOMETHING is Armored Core 6, then of course I’m be excited about its story!
You kidding me?!
It wouldn’t even be that unusual for the series to have some outside creative input,
which brings me to the last and most important reason that you should care about Armored Core:
THE ROBOTS.
Way back when the first Armored Core game was being made, the legendary mecha designer
Shoji Kawamori was tasked with designing the game’s robots.
As a young man, Kawamori attended engineering school before dropping out and pursuing an artistic
career.
But that brief engineering stint did inform the way he designed mecha: with an emphasis on
practicality and realism.
Arguably his most famous creation, Macross’s VF-1 Valkyrie, was a transforming robot specifically
crafted so that its pieces could be reconfigured.
This might have also been a hold-over from his experience working on transforming robot
toys, which included the bot that would later become Optimus Prime.
In Armored Core, he built his mecha around a central torso piece or “core” onto which
every other part connected.
This is literally where the name “Armored Core” comes from... which shows that Kawamori’s
designs inspired more than just the look of the robots.
His design ethos led to all of the wildly different-looking robots sharing a common
silhouette.
No matter how much you customize your whip, it was always identifiably an “armored core”
thanks to its… armored core.
Kawamori’s penchant for practicality also meant you could see each of the weapons on
your robot at any given time, which is critical when you’re frequently swapping them between
missions.
The problem was that despite being cool, these bots were hard to pilot.
With six directions of flight, and multiple weapons, the game was complicated and the control
scheme reflected that.
In fact, Armored Core’s controls inspired the most-likely apocryphal legend
of "AC claw grip."
The joke, which most likely originated among the passionate Armored Core fanbase, was that
the game’s basically required you to have an extra pair of thumbs.
By the time the series made it to the PS3 and Xbox 360, the control scheme had thankfully
been streamlined — but it still required patience and lots of practice.
Even at the game’s blazing speeds, you had to be thoughtful about attack timing.
Blade attacks in particular were high-risk and high-reward:
they could deal more damage than practically any other weapon in the game, but made your
armored core super vulnerable if you missed, putting you at risk of getting shived right back.
Now, what other game series has a control scheme that has been maligned for being obtuse and
difficult, but also rewards patience and thoughtful attack timing?
It rhymes with “park doles”!
This is the strongest connection between Armored Core and FromSoft’s other games: you get
out of it what you put into it.
You can be the powerful wizard, but you gotta learn to live with being squishy.
You can be the badass ninja, but you gotta learn how to hit that mikiri counter.
And in Armored Core, if you wanna fly around like a hummingbird, you gotta streamline your
mech and practice your overboosting.
If you wanted to carry an entire armory on your back, then you gotta learn to use tank treads.
Never has a “build” been so literal.
Lots of games give you a power fantasy, but few make it feel like something you built
and earned through honing your skill.
And no other mecha game has quite matched that feeling!
I cannot deny that Armored Core is still a niche series.
It has a small, but dedicated fanbase.
And it may just be the kind of game that turns off as many people as it attracts.
But the same thing could have been said for Demon’s Souls, and Dark Souls, and
Dark Souls 2 and Bloodborne and… you get my point.
FromSoft has given us lots of rich, complicated worlds, but they also refuse to shave off the hard edges.
And that's why Armored Core — a prickly, obtuse, and hard-to-control franchise —
fits right in.
(groovy synth music - so chill, so fine)
Clayton: And sometimes, the metaphor can be a literal cock. (softly) Pit.
(An UNHOLY YAP OF CONFUSION as Simone hears this line for the very first time)
(garbled speech and shrill honking laughter from off-screen)
Simone, through laughs: I'm sorry—
Clayton: It's the reaction I'm hoping for, so... (terrible laughter continues)