The Rocky Mountain Collegian

March 30th, 2007

Misunderstood - Armored Core 3

There are a lot of games out there that mean well, but which are inevitably misunderstood by both the average video-game-playing-person (white and/or nerdy) and the average person-who-writes-about-video-games (see last parentheses). And hell, I can’t really blame either group, most of the time. Video games and people alike can be demanding, self-centered assholes. Even if they mean well, most people would rather just spend their time getting instant gratification or complimented incessantly, regardless of any involvement on their own part. Again: can you blame them? Nonetheless, it raises an interesting question: can a game be initially repulsive, only revealing itself as an entertaining experience after considerable effort on the part of the player, and still be considered “good”? If From Software’s Armored Core series and its legion of devoted followers is any indication, the answer is “maybe. Now get me a sandwich and no back-talk!”

As a long-running franchise of video games goes, Armored Core is a bizarre mainstay. Despite receiving nearly thirteen entries over multiple platforms, the series has remained in a thoroughly entrenched niche for its entire ten year existence, never achieving anything resembling widespread popularity in the United States. Truth be told, the series hasn’t moved much in a decade. Most of the games in the series have a very similar premise: as a “Raven,” a giant-robot-riding mercenary in a dystopia ruled by feuding corporations, you’ll undertake missions given to you by various organizations, all the while earning money to upgrade your robot (the “armored core” of the game’s title, or AC for short) and advance the story. Over the years, I thought it interesting that the Armored Core series saw continuous releases on a yearly basis, despite my knowing of no one who actually played the game, and hearing little from anyone either offline or on who had anything good to say about the series in general.  With the recent release of Armored Core 4 on the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, however, people started talking. An excellent gamesetwatch article by longtime series-fan Ollie Barder piqued my interest further. When I saw a copy of Armored Core 3 at the Foothills Mall Gamestop for $10 a month ago, I decided to give the game a shot. I was eager to find out if Armored Core was “misunderstood,” or if it was just not very good.

It didn’t take long to understand where the series’ bad reputation had come from. Armored Core 3 simply doesn’t do a very good job of presenting itself. It assumes too much of the player, having no in-game help or tutorial. This is exacerbated by the fact that the controls are terribly cumbersome. The right analog stick, typically used to adjust the camera’s viewpoint in most games, is almost completely unused. The d-pad handles camera control instead, with the L and R shoulder buttons controlling both horizontal movement of your AC and… looking up and down! The looking up and down part was enough to nearly turn me off to the game entirely during some missions, because your view doesn’t auto center. This means that if you, say, boost into the air and want to look down to keep your aim focused on whatever you were looking at beforehand, you’ll have to: hold down the L2 button for a second while boosting with the X button, turning with the d-pad, shifting to the right with the R1 button, and firing with the square button. <i>Then</i>, once you land, you’ll have to readjust your now terrestrially-focused viewpoint by holding down the R2 button, presumably while doing a very similar series of button-combination juggling. When some robot is shooting stuff at you, warning klaxons blaring, it’s immensely frustrating initially to accidentally look in the wrong direction due to the game’s byzantine control setup. The only silver lining to any of this is that you can change the controls, but only slightly - you can’t use the right analog stick for viewpoint control no matter what, for example. Some AC cores have the ability to overboost - a concentrated, short-term boost that gets you moving very quickly but drains your generator in seconds.

It’s an extremely handy ability, but in order to use it you have to click <i>in</i> the right analog stick, most likely while using the rest of your digits to manipulate the other controls. The whole control setup feels, well, intentionally confusing - after all, why would the developers have ignored the right analog stick <i>except</i> for its least intuitive use as a button? This kind of makes sense if you look at it from the perspective that big, bipedal robots are not easy beasts to control. Having to wrestle the control setup into submission just comes with the territory, you might say. I’m inclined to agree with this after finally getting the hang of playing the game, but the first few hours of play, spent mostly looking at the ground like a moron or accidentally overboosting out of the mission area and failing immediately without realizing it, well. They are <i>alienating</i>. It is not wonder that so few people were willing to give the game a fair shake.

Of course, that’s just the tip of the confusion iceberg! One of the big draws of the Armored Core series is the huge array of robot parts available for use in constructing your AC. The problem with this from the perspective of a series neophyte is twofold: the game offers no explanation as to what half the part types even do, and you start with so little money that it scarcely matters, anyway. Confronting the first problem was easy enough - the game’s manual has a decent enough listing of part types, and further explanations can be found online if you’re willing.

The second problem is trickier. You can complete missions in order to make money and advance the story, but this is in itself a dicey proposition. Even if you complete a mission, it’s difficult to actually make money unless you play extremely well - if you take a lot of damage, most of your pay will go into the repair bill for your AC, and if you play recklessly and use up a lot of ammo, you’ll lose even more money replacing your munitions. The first game I started saw me making no headway as far as money was concerned, and I was frustrated. So I asked a friend of mine who had played the game before about it. He recommended starting a new game, selling all of the default gear the game gives you and buying an energy weapon of some kind.

Since energy weapons draw power off of your AC’s generator, you don’t get slammed with the bill at the end of a mission. You can also earn money by fighting one-on-one duels in an arena, which proved to be significantly more interesting than actually playing the missions. Not only do you earn more money from arena matches, but you also don’t have to pay a repair or resupply bill afterwards. You also get significantly more play experience and can make more mistakes, because losing in the arena is inconsequential: if you lose, you can retry without penalty, as opposed to failing a mission, which docks you money and most likely forces you to reload your last saved game. After spending a few hours goofing around in the arena, I actually had some money, and the game opened up. From there on out, Armored Core 3 was actually fun to play.

Nonetheless, it made me wonder: why not just have the game tell new players about how to make money, give them a pointer or two in the right direction? And the reason I decided upon is that this would be, intrinsically, against the nature of Armored Core as a series. The satisfaction of playing the game, I found, is derived almost entirely from the thrill of besting the confusing and chaotic system that the game presents to you. If the game explained itself on its own, without any effort on the part of the player, would it be nearly as interesting or satisfying? Most games released these days are eager to get the player on its good side. They over-explain themselves, and have a tendency to feel hollow, artificial and  boring as a result. Armored Core 3 doesn’t tell the player a goddamn thing, and while it’s initially disheartening, figuring it all out yields a far more interesting game than I expected. Of course, now I have to check out the rest of the series and see where it evolved from here.

Maybe in a few months?

This entry was posted on Friday, March 30th, 2007 at 3:11 pm and is filed under Game Guy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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