It’s not a stretch to assume that most attach the prolific Japanese studio FromSoftware to the action-RPG genre. Namely, their responsibility in creating the “Souls-like” sub-genre has single-handedly put their name on the map in the West, raking in mountainous piles of positive review scores and swathes of cash with each new installment of Dark Souls or its related games. But before they would become “those guys that make Souls games,” they would find themselves experimenting with a plethora of genres. The first-person dungeon-crawling series King’s Field and their only major survival-horror outing, Kuon, are two examples of this. But one series of theirs was so successful that it would become the face of FromSoftware until the Souls games rose to prominence. In 1997, the original PlayStation would see the release of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Croc: Legend of the Gobbos, and a humble little action game called Armored Core.
In a collaborative effort between Yasuyoshi Karasawa and renowned artist Shoji Kawamori (Macross, Patlabor), an idea would be hatched to create an action game focused on modular, mechanized fighting machines. What nobody could’ve expected, however, is that Armored Core would eventually balloon into sixteen games, with the latest set to release in August 2023. Pending the release of Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon, there’s no better time to look back at the series’ humble origins on the PlayStation and how it set the stage for a titanic series to come.
It’s the distant future, and the world isn’t doing so well. An unknown cataclysm referred to as the “Great Destruction” has forced the remnants of humanity underground, sustaining life by filtering air from the Earth’s bombed-out surface. With the world’s governments weakened, large corporations with prominent financial backing have taken their place. The two biggest contenders for total domination, Murakumo Millennium and Chrome, are at the front lines in a vicious proxy war to financially crush each other. Unfortunately, not even their respective civilian assets are to be spared.
RELATED: ‘Star Wars: Outlaws’ Gameplay Trailer Revealed
In come the Ravens, a group of independent mercenaries who operate out of their respective Raven’s Nest. With no real allegiances, the Ravens wage war for the highest bidder, utilizing their blood money to maintain and refit their legion of Armored Cores. You, the player, are one of these mercenaries, and through an escalating series of difficult missions, you’ll slowly unravel a surrounding conspiracy behind the persistent warfare.
But what exactly is an “Armored Core?” Well, it’s a giant robot. Specifically, Armored Cores are mechanized suits with a “core” outfitted with modular attachments. Heads, arms, legs, and even the main guts of an Armored Core can be freely swapped in and out, similar to how one would break apart action figures and pop them back together. The concept would be attributed to Kawamori, who came up with the idea to facilitate the game’s biggest draw: customization.
The player’s ability to create their own highly-customized Armored Core — shortened to “AC” — was a main design tenet from the very beginning, and it remains the defining feature of the Armored Core franchise as a whole. Your AC is uniquely yours. Even on a comparatively primitive console, your range of customization options is astounding. Beyond custom paint jobs and either preset or handmade decals, the functionality of your AC is tailored explicitly to your tastes. Do you want to be incredibly agile? Put on some reverse-joint legs and jump all over the place. Do you want to be more like a tank than anything else? Throw together some high-powered weaponry and caterpillar treads. Every piece of your AC is critical in your speed, overall weight, carrying capacity, firepower, and overall survivability.
Yes, your AC pieces aren’t just for looking pretty. Armored Core lives and dies on its customization, which means the parts you put on your AC all play a role in how the game feels. If you opt for less armor and more speed, you must be more careful in avoiding damage. Similarly, trading the ability to take more damage means you have to approach fights more carefully, using your surroundings as much as you can in lieu of moving around quickly. Even your choice of weaponry matters, as every single bullet and missile you fire off is deducted from your resulting pay.
On top of that, you also have a resource to manage in the form of “Energy.” Energy is the lifeblood of your AC. This means that the ability to both conserve and spend Energy as needed is the key to surviving throughout. Everything other than basic movement consumes Energy to varying degrees, with the two major expenditures being: boosting, which can jettison you across the landscape in just about any direction, and your weapons, which either spend a minuscule or massive amount of energy depending on what type they are. Similar to your AC’s weight, parts that affect your Energy capacity and regeneration rate will determine the weaponry you can carry, how long you can boost for, how quickly your Energy recovers, and so on. If you waste all your Energy, you’re up the creek: depending on your build, you’ll only be able to slowly trudge around as you’re riddled with bullets and laser fire.
As you play the game, each mission you complete — appropriately referred to as “contracts” — typically comes with a defined payout upon completion. Every bit of damage you take, every bullet you waste, and every other miscellaneous thing you screw up gets deducted from your pay. Yes, you can go into a contract and somehow end up with less money than you did previously. But instead of feeling unfair, it forces you to think critically about what exactly you’re doing. It makes every contract feel like an event to take completely seriously due to the threat of financial ruin. Don’t even think about dying with an expensive AC. The cost to rebuild it equals the total value of every single part currently attached to it.
RELATED: ‘Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown’ Gets Gameplay Trailer and 2024 Release Date
Between contracts, you’re often stuck in the Raven’s Nest, where you’re free to swap parts on your AC, access a dedicated parts store, test your current AC, read emails, accessorize, and finally access your other contracts. You’re often given multiple contracts to choose from, mostly from Murakumo or Chrome, and you’ll often be dropped in via aircraft into the contract’s destination. From there, it’s up to you to figure out how to accomplish your objective, whether it’s to eliminate enemies, plant explosives, locate materials, or take down other Ravens. Your choice in contracts will also play a hand in determining future contracts, as building favor with either Murakumo or Chrome is inevitable.
The biggest thing you’ll notice about Armored Core is how little you get in terms of assistance. For the most part, what you enter a mission with is all you’re going to get. Health pickups and spare ammunition are nowhere in sight, and hidden weapons are the only real thing to keep an eye out for other than enemy encounters. Even then, they’re incredibly rare, and I had only discovered their existence by complete accident towards the end of the game.
It may be off-putting to those looking for a more arcade-like action experience, but that’s another part of what makes Armored Core stand out compared to other long-running franchises. Every numbered entry changes things up substantially while using the main mechanics introduced in this first game as a baseline. Leading up to Armored Core 4, the games heavily err on the side of simulating the more realistic aspects of mech-based warfare. With this first game it’s done with as much detail as the original PlayStation can allow.
This even translates to simply buying and selling parts for your AC. It may take a second to wrap your head around this, but hear me out: the store is simultaneously a means to purchase new parts while acting as a bank for all AC parts in the game.
RELATED: ‘Spider-Man 2’ Gameplay Trailer Shows off the Symbiote Suit, Kraven the Hunter
Money is incredibly hard to come by. If your AC goes up in flames on a contract, that’s it: the contract is gone, along with your pay and whatever it costs to put your AC back together. Thus, finding a way to use all your cash effectively is crucial. Using the store as both a marketplace and storage container for all your junk comes off as counter-intuitive at first, but it makes more sense when you realize that all parts are bought and sold for the same set price.
Parts never lose value, meaning there’s an incentive to trade old parts for new ones as soon as possible. Conversely, if you purchase a new part and immediately dislike it, you can sell it back without taking a financial loss. It may take a few missions for this to click, but when you build up a steady reserve of cash, it’ll start to make more sense.
After all, you’ll have to swap your parts out at some point. While you can reasonably coast through a few missions utilizing the same set of AC parts, there’s an expectation to tailor your AC to the best of your ability for each of your contracts. Some contracts simply aren’t made for a slow-moving tank, as they’ll be placed under a strict time limit. Similarly, unless you develop the reflexes of a rabid animal, you’re going to have a hard time in the game’s combat-oriented contracts without a corpulent amount of health. But even if you adequately prepare, you will still face significant opposition.
There’s no gradual introduction to the game’s mechanics or preface to the horrible world that ACs reside in. As soon as you name your pilot, you’re given a trial by fire in order to become a Raven. Fail to destroy two enemies before they do the same to you, and the adventure is over before it starts. Afterward, it’s on you to experiment with the various parts you receive, what weapons deal the most efficient damage with the least amount of surrounding costs, and what risks you’re willing to take to get through the escalating challenges.
There’s little in the form of a conventional narrative in Armored Core. A handful of cut-scenes convey the game’s most important moments, but a majority of the developing narrative is found exclusively in both contract descriptions and emails. Little is revealed to you at the moment, with crucial details only given to you before and after a contract’s completion. It conveys a feeling of underhandedness, with several contracts tackling some not-so-ethical concerns. Biological warfare, civilian casualties, proxy terrorist groups funded by either side and more all punctuate the cyberpunk dystopia in that Armored Core takes place. A certain contract mid-way through the game will even determine what corporation you’ll eventually side with and what resulting nastiness you’ll be forced to take part in.
But what really pushes this dark atmosphere further is the “Human PLUS” program. An idea that would pop in and out of the Armored Core franchise prior to Armored Core 4, the program utilizes the technology of the world prior to the Great Destruction to enhance the pilots of ACs with cybernetics. What you may not realize, however, is that you can even be a part of the Human PLUS program in addition to a handful of other ACs you’ll encounter. By entering a significant amount of debt, you’ll be forcibly volunteered into the program. It’ll wipe your debt, and you’ll get some enhanced abilities you can’t get otherwise in exchange for starting from scratch with your current AC parts. If you get really unlucky with your finances, you can even be volunteered into the program again. And again, and again, and again, and again.
RELATED: ‘Maniac Mansion’ Re-Released on NES and PC by Limited Run Games
The soundtrack, or lack thereof, also adds to this atmosphere. The thudding of metallic feet, bursts of constant gunfire, whooshing jet exhaust, and booming explosions are often the only thing you’ll hear on your contracts. But it’s fitting: the areas you fight in are often just as sparse and listless, and the deceptive peacefulness found in these areas being broken up by the sounds of conflict feels appropriate for the kind of illicit wet work you’re undertaking. The music that is here, however, is serviceable enough. It’s composed by Keiichiro Segawa and Masaru Tateyama, with the former contributing to every Armored Core soundtrack leading up to Armored Core: Last Raven. The soundtrack is the same kind of fast-tempo electronica and breakbeat techno you’d find in games like System Shock 2. It’s futuristic, it’s fast, and it’s highly enjoyable outside of the game itself. Notable highlights include “Response ~ Infraction” and “Shape Memory Alloys.”
There are some flaws. Being the first entry in an expansive franchise, there are certainly some ideas introduced here that would be fully realized in later games. The ability to compare parts in a store to parts on your current AC is admittedly lacking. The game rarely utilizes platforming in its level design, but a particularly infamous portion of Armored Core’s final mission has you climbing an ascending tower of floating cubes. This wouldn’t be a problem, but the game’s control scheme admittedly doesn’t make it all that fun. Utilizing a mixture of traditional tank controls with a camera affixed firmly to the back of your AC, it’s an absolute low point compared to the game’s previous levels.
Hardware limitations of the time also constrict some of the game’s various environments. What’s there is fine by itself, but the repeating textures and maze-like layouts of interior-set levels pale in comparison to the wider exterior levels. Several of these environments are repeated throughout, though this can be forgiven due to the game’s mission-based progression. In a backward way, it can actually be helpful in later missions to have some familiarity with their large, labyrinthine maps.
Armored Core was released to positive reception, with almost every review outlet praising the game’s emphasis on modular mechas and their usage in the game’s multiplayer mode. A few criticisms would be understandably lobbed towards some parts of the game’s control scheme and its comparatively limited graphics. Some felt the game’s story was also somewhat underdeveloped and that the game’s fifty missions amount to a paltry overall length.
But that’s in Armored Core‘s favor. In a formula that feels eerily tailored to the kind of short-form tastes younger generations have developed in recent years, Armored Core offers two completely different experiences based on what exactly you want to get out of it. If you want nothing but action, you’re free to have it with no strings attached. If you want something a little more in-depth, you can explore and study the scant information given to you before the game’s dramatic reveal. After all is said and done, you can replay missions for better scores, hidden weapons, and new ways to accomplish your objectives. It’s a very hands-off approach to telling a game’s story that’s frankly appreciated, with value placed on the actual playing experience over sacrificing player agency.
Is Armored Core worth playing today? It’s an interesting question to consider. In any franchise with more than a dozen separate entries, you’d have to wonder if a better jumping-off point would be the very beginning or some arbitrary installment part-way through. For the Armored Core series in particular, the games have since been grouped into generations associated with their respective mainline entry. Gen 1 would be Armored Core 1 and its surrounding expansions, Master of Arena and Project Phantasma. The subsequent PlayStation 2 games would either fall into Gen 2 or Gen 3 based on their connections to Armored Core 2 or Armored Core 3, respectively.
RELATED: ‘Spookware’ Game Review: Charming Microgames Prevail Over Horror
With Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon marking the series’ newest generation, there’s nothing wrong with starting from there and potentially working backward. Every generation of Armored Core has its own dedicated fans who’ll argue the upsides and downsides of each for years to come. But as for where it all began, the first Armored Core game remains a fascinating start for what is one of the most prolific action game franchises in recent memory. The roots of what makes this mech-combat series so unique all start from here, and seeing how the series has grown and changed over 26 years later is genuinely fascinating.
Being a PlayStation 1 exclusive, Armored Core can be played as a backward-compatible title on PlayStation 3 systems. It’s also available on the Japanese version of the PlayStation Classic.
We’re hardworking geeks that love to geek out, but we can’t do it without you! If you enjoyed this article and want to see more like it, please consider tipping our writers. Also, as an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases.
