Armored Core/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


The YMMV for Armored Core.

  • Complacent Gaming Syndrome - Hope you like shotguns and chainguns online in 5!
  • Complete Monster - Old King from For Answer, who asks that you help him destroy a section of the Cradle system that acts as a massive residential area for the world's populace. The result of the mission is the death of one hundred million civilians in about five minutes, and Old King himself begins to get excited as he counts off the number of people you have killed, twenty million at a time. And he is the only true rebel of all three paths as Thermidor ultimately betrays you
    • after completing that mission path the main character becomes one of these, hence the line The blood of the innocent will rain down from the sky from the narrator.
  • Crack Pairing - Shipping is rare in the fandom, but when it occurs it will invariably be this due to the impersonal nature of the series. Usually between the (usually male) protagonist and their (usually female) operator or an optional token female wingman that can be hired for one or two missions. Last Raven protagonist/Zinaida is also somewhat frequent, but the most popular by far is For Answer protagonist/May Greenfield.
    • As far as operators go, at least in Armored Core 2 the player's operator is shown to become quite attached to and concerned for the player over the course of the game, and AC4 protagonist/Fiona Jarnefeldt is pretty much canon. Other times though, the operators are just as characterless as the player.
  • Crowning Moment of Awesome - 4A: Blowing up the Spirit of Motherwill, AF Answerer, defeating White Glint or Stasis, the final mission of every ending, and being able to beat Occupation of Arteria Carpals. In order of awesome.
    • Beating Nine-Ball in Any Armored Core Game (including the Ultimate Nine-Ball in MOA and AC2:AA)
    • LR has its own moments, too, but the ones that stand out most are beating Uber!Zinaida and any of the Pulverizer battles. ESPECIALLY the last one, who will rape you if you take on it unprepared.
    • Surprisingly, the opening cutscene of AC3: one of the black ACs gets its head blown off by the hulking heavy AC, who begins the slow and rather leisurely process of deploying its big guns to finish him off while the black AC stands, twitches, and sparks...only to rocket backwards and launch an missile barrage that would have put Macross to shame.
    • The final bosses of 4 and 5.
    • Marche Au Supplice, Hard Mode, which pits you alone against Berlioz and his team in a four-on-one. It's by far one of the hardest missions in the game, but boy do you feel awesome when you finally manage to clear it. Same with the Occupation of Arteria Carpals mission in For Answer.
  • Crowning Moment of Funny - In 5 RD and Rosary get one where Rosary tells RD to grow a pair. Turns out to be Harsher in Hindsight
    • The pre fight dialog against A and BCE.
      • "By the way, did we ever have a Strategy?
      • "Did we ever need one?"
      • "Same as always then...wing it!
      • "And if we die...tough luck!"
    • The mission where you have to fight No Count and Big Barrel (and PQ on hard mode) where you destroy Big Barrel and PQ but not No Count, No Count will beg for his life and you can let him run away without fighting him.
  • Crowning Music of Awesome - We have a page
  • Difficult but Awesome - Any weapon or part out of your comfort zone.
  • Ensemble Darkhorse - May Greenfield, from Armored Core For Answer. As an entirely optional wingman, May has the bare minimum of characterization and a player can go through the entire game without even encountering her once. However, fans have apparently fallen in love with what little characterization she has, as a cheerful teenage girl who pilots a bright green Mighty Glacier engine of destruction. With a smiley face logo.
    • Nine-Ball probably counts too.
    • Jack-O is strangely popular in Japan with him appearing as a buff man with his AC's head wearing nothing but a piece of cloth on.
    • For Answer White Glint.
  • Fridge Brilliance - The name "Nine Ball Seraph." The Seraph rank among the most powerful of angels, yes; however, there's more to it than that. The Seraph(im) are also the 9th choir of angels.
    • How can Nine Ball fire his shoulder cannon without kneeling (ignoring computer cheating)? He/It's an AI, and automatically gets Human Plus benefits.
    • Why Genobee do the same thing in Nexus? He's an AI too.
    • Why does Wonderful Body move in the way does? Because he was a Normal pilot and Normals are basically Armored Core's form the older games. (ie: he stops boosting to save energy)
    • How can the Chief keep firing the Giga Cannon Overed Weapon over and over without fail? because he' also an AI.
  • Game Breaker - Almost every Armored Core game has one (or several).
    • A recurring one is the Moonlight Laser Blade and Karasawa Laser Rifle. In 4 and For Answer, Kojima weapons.
    • Reg 1.00 of for Answer has this with SALINE05s, White Glint's multi-missile launcher. Unlike other launchers, these ones have very good homing ability and most of the time, all 8 submissiles will hit the target. Firing them in rapid succession to an enemy NEXT will deplete their Primal Armor, at which the missiles will do double damage. One simply needs to use two of these in Reg 1.00 to easily cut half of the difficulty in Arteria Carpals, Hard mode. Of course, that kind of gamebreakerness is not allowed and since has been nerfed.
    • In AC4 and For Answer, Grenade Launchers come into this territory (doing huge damage and area damage, only slightly less useful against the faster enemies), and blades do wicked damage against arms forts.
    • Also the finger machine gun in Project Phantasma, the has an incredible rate of fire, does massive damage, has a ton of ammo and is extremely light, but in got nerfed in Master of the Arena. They they brought it back in Last Raven.
    • Chainguns and shotguns in Armored Core 5 both of which can destroy any AC build with ease and take away all the difficulty of the final boss, thankfully the next patch will be nerfing them.
  • Germans Love David Hasselhoff - Although the Armored Core series is somewhat big in Japan, in North America it's a perennial niche title. So niche, in fact, that Agetec could no longer afford to localize the games after Last Raven and lost the rights to Armored Core 4 to Sega. Sega in turn dropped the license after Armored Core 4 failed to meet sales expectations. Ubisoft then snatched up Armored Core for Answer, but it failed to meet expectations as well... Are you noticing a pattern yet?
    • It would help if they could advertise for it a little more...
    • In this case, it would be a curious mix of gameplay issues, how well the series does in general and new players being inconvinced as usual. Imagine, being able to afford a mecha game is as good as able to afford a game, so players in general expect a fun gun time. However, since PlayStation 2 games failed to implement =Dualshock= analog sticks control schemes which would comply well to players of FPS control schemes (for a decent amount of installments), and the general gameplay can be broken down between Crippling Overspecialization and Excuse Plot to the point that the series is a brewery of a miniature Cliché Storm, at this point it would be very hard to convince someone new to ever try another Armored Core game.
      • Armored Core 5 is now being localized by Namco Bandai.
    • In a reverse example, if any comments on Niconico are to go by, Japanese players laughed at the inept translation errors that was abound in Armored Core: for Answer, but they absolutely in love with the full range of English voice cast, whether it's GA rep's hammy voice, to Shamir Ravi Ravi's murderous voice, and of course, the various accents that Canis, Dario Empio and Do Su employed. They don't even seem to be bothered by the massive change in voice type that Ay-Pool has.
  • Moral Event Horizon - For Answer, Ending C.
  • Narm - Fragile's death scream in For Answer is full of this.
  • Scrappy Level - Occupation of Arteria Carpals. (It's That One Boss x4 or 5)
    • Well, you deserve it, you bastard.
    • Arms Fort Answerer too, unless you know what you are doing.
      • White Glint the first few times you fight the bastard. Every time after that? Cakewalk.
        • AF Cabracan. Not because of the difficulty (it's a piece of cake), but the Land Mines and the Drones. It takes most of your ammo to take half of them out if you are using any guns, and you can forget about explosives because of their mobility. Oh, and they can walk through walls, apparently treating the sand you stand on as though it weren't even there, and making it impossible to hit them until they resurface. They are not designed with that ability in mind. They are also fairly nimble and airborne, making swords very difficult to use.
        • Sol Dios Orbit in For Answer... unless you're playing on hard mode.
  • Scrappy Mechanic - Overheating in 3.
  • Special Effect Failure - Either your NEXT sponteneously turns into a Behemoth during For Answer's Cradle missions, or those 20 million people on board are very, very small indeed.
    • It could be handwaved by having their living quarters inside the portions you are supposed to attack. But even then, I highly doubt that those areas are big enough to house 10 million people total.
    • When you lose an online match in 5 you bail out of your AC and fly around with a jump pack which is fine, but your so much bigger than the cars that sit idle on the maps, even worse when you touch them they explode.
  • That One Boss - Let's see...Stinger from Project Phantasma, The Frighteners from AC2, the Massive MT and the Bonus Bosses from Another Age, Leviathan and Ofanim from AC3, Big White and IBIS from Silent Line, Agraya, Genobee and Nine Ball from Nexus, Nine Ball from Ninebreaker, Nine Ball from any game he appears in, Zinaida (On the Last Raven path) and the Pulverizers from Last Raven, take your freaking pick.
    • For some players, ANY AC of relatively equal quality is That One Boss.
    • Sherring in AC 4 isn't exactly a pushover, either.
    • Anyone who can take on the Answerer without blades deserves a fraggin medal.
    • Nineball. Seraph. Compounded by the lack of cover and your inability to match his speed and flight ability. Much less so in Another Century's Episode R, however.
    • Chief 'piloting' Exusia in 5 who is fast enough to easly kill the standard AC build in a few passes if you give him room to breath.
  • That One Level - Missions set in fog will sink your mission rating due to the time it takes to complete them.
    • Same with the above that one boss entry with any AC/NEXT being one the same goes for missions.
  • Play the Game, Skip the Story: Come for the chicks digging giant robots, stay for the subtle war between MegaCorps using tactics that would put General Ripper to shame, along with a corrupt Private Military Contractor, lead by your operator, which is a Master Computer / war machine whose recruits began as Child Soldiers, caused by Hustler One, a Crush! Kill! Destroy! alter ego...or not.
  • Screwed by the Network: On the English front of AC V which has two different servers for the game being US and EU, this is bad because the series doesn't sell as well as it does in Japan and the playerbase is starting to drop due to the game being three patches behind the Japanese version of the game, having multiple game breaker's and having Unstable Equilibrium kick in. There is however a petition to merge the serves here.
  • Visual Effects of Awesome - As far as this trailer is concerned, the Polygon Ceiling doesn't exist.
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Armored_Core/YMMV?oldid=1505507"