Playing Armored Core Nexus for the First Time

Armored Core Nexus is weird man, I don’t know how to put it, cuz coming out of AC3 I was pretty optimistic about FromSoft’s quality bar increasing, and I was curious to see how that commitment would carry to Nexus, and after beating it, I’m very mixed. It’s neither a bad game because I really do believe there’s no such thing as a bad AC game where, even if it lacks something, there’s something else that usually holds it together and goes on to be loved by many other people, but nor do I think it’s a good game because the overhaul to many of its game systems are so drastic that it negatively impacted my experience and the way I was approaching the game, and it also soured the rest of late Gen 3 as well, which bummed me out. 

I tried playing Nine Breaker, but it’s the equivalent of a DLC, some filler content that doesn’t have a proper story line, but enough story to glue that whole project in place, so I skipped it. When I got to Last Raven, I came across a technical issue that completely exhausted me to push onwards, and I’ll explain why later, but looping back to the initial point of this video, Nexus is just a very middling game. Whether it was a lack of budget compared to past entries or just misdirection disguised as improvements, I genuinely feel it’s one of the weaker entries the series has seen so far and today, I want to exclusively focus on Nexus, try to understand and unpack how this game is designed, and get to the point of how its complete rework of its game systems broke the consistency of previous entries to mixed results, and there’s lots to talk about because I want to be as thorough as possible.

Nexus takes place 55 years after the events of Silent Line, where the rising tensions between the corporations and their pursuit for power is non-stop. In this case, Mirage, Crest, Kisaragi and the newcomer Navis, who when coming in contact with an ancient technology capable of decimating an entire planet, tensions rise between all parties involved and the stakes grow to catastrophic levels, while the background an ill-equipped bureaucracy named Organization for Administrating Enterprise struggles to police and act against the escalating conflicts. This is just a speculation on my part, but something tells me that Armored Core Nexus’ budget was significantly smaller than previous entries. If you’d asked me what was their biggest entry before Nexus, I would confidently say 3 because that game hit the perfect middle point where they’ve started pumping out more quality content on top of the iterative design they’ve been comfortable with, but here you can feel a sharp decline in quality, pertaining mostly to presentation, where the lack of fully voiced briefings is evident, even though the same number of assignments is no different from previous entries, and to make up for that, they’ve added much more text around, which is weird choice in my opinion, because at the same time, most missions have these really well elaborate introductory cutscenes that don’t feel cheap, as they are pretty well shot and composed compared to the more simplistic ones where the camera just pans or moves from A to B and that’s it. The change in tone also felt jarring, but honestly, I think it was the way the opening cinematic played out that set my first impression, as most Armored Core titles usually do for me, as this one felt less serious and more action packed, which there’s nothing wrong with that by the way, and the colour scheme that accentuates everything  also played a role in that.

I like associating colours with emotions and intent. In the case of 3, the grimmer tone + the use of orange felt very foreboding, where its presence symbolized the general outlook of the world on the surface with the gunfire, dust and rays of light establishing a desolate and bleak event, so having that overbearing colour in different shades sold that feel for me. Nexus, on the other hand, uses a mix of silver and white gradient, and you usually associate that combination with futuristic aesthetics like Y2K or Frutiger Aero. My thought process then, formulated an entry where so much progression has been made in technical and mechanical advancements, as this entry takes place 55 years later, that the original goalpost from corporations and ACs has also been pushed into new territory that it sounded like a novel idea to explore, which is oxymoron when we compare that train of thought with the gameplay. Maybe I’m just a weird person, but my point is that from the outside, Nexus gave me a certain vibe from what I read, heard and seen, and now that I finished it, that vibe is entirely different, which I don’t mind per se, but it threw me off for like a day until I came to terms with it. I was also disappointed with the environments, as most of them felt pretty simple, and it lacked the diversity of previous entries, not to also mention how they’re constantly reused with such frequency that I was starting to wonder what happened behind the scenes. 

I’ll touch on the positives first. Nexus marks the first entry to introduce dual analog support, which is a very much welcome appearance as late as it was, but better late than never, and it’s just about beat to beat with the control scheme I made for the entries that don’t support it with Steam Input, and jumping from that setup to here felt as smooth as I expected. Not just that, but the game also felt more feature friendly too, like the more simplified stats screen of your AC performance instead of numbers, which goes a long way for accessibility and ease of access for those who are playing the game for the first time, and it’s something I always advocate when applicable. The ranking system has also been ditched and, like I said in my AC3 video, I never really felt its impact, so its absence here doesn’t bother me that much, but the two elements that have been downgraded are both the arena and the mail system. 

With mail, you don’t just receive mailing from your operator or corporations, but you also receive reports of your actions that you partook in missions, almost like a newspaper, which is a neat concept, but I felt   like the organization for it could’ve been better, where you could have tabs that clearly define what are conversations and what are reports, but the changes to the arena mode are the most baffling more than anything. Instead of having a separate mode, they are now incorporated into the main mission, and instead of having a list of 40+ AC right at the start to battle against with, the game will sporadically throw in somewhere close to 8 or 9 battles that feel like limited time events, and if you dare to do any other assignment besides those arena fights, it will completely disappear until you beat the game and unlock a proper mode that lets you battle them in any order. To mitigate the loss of that mode, what they’ve done is to design each high ranked AC battle you’re given as a checkpoint, and if you’re successful in defeating them, your payout increases, and more high-risk missions with even higher payouts compared to the standard ones become available to you, and speaking of missions, they’re really weak here, almost bland and under baked, and you feel it when they are reused countless times, which is shame coming out of Silent Line, and it made me question once more if they really had a more reduced budget that meant if compromises had to be made.

From game mechanics, the game remains static, as there are no new additions, and it mostly adheres to the blueprint established by both AC 3 and Silent Line, but there have been changes that worsen the quality on the smallest and biggest scale, with heat management being one of the most obvious examples. In previous entries, radiators were an afterthought, and you could ace through most of the missions with just the stock one. I myself am prove of that, as it was the only part I never preoccupied with in AC 2 and 3 thanks to my light + machine gun build, and crack head play style. Here they’ve reworked it, so as now if you take too much shell damage or use energy for too long, with your boosters being the main culprit in most cases, your AC overheats rapidly and if you’re not equipped to deal with that, you get penalized heavily in your energy, and how much you can use before you cool down. This and by itself would’ve been fine, because from a game designer’s perspective, you clearly want players to engage with almost all of your systems when possible, especially the ones they’ve been neglecting, and maybe have some conflict, so they can figure out how to overcome it, which usually leads to a very engaging experience, but the problem here is that the general balancing is all over the place that any attempts at relying on old strategies from the past will severely punish you to the point where your options become limited, especially when they added the new tuning mechanic that is poorly introduced by the way, on top of everything else that’s under the main core problems.

The weapons have also been nerfed significantly, especially the machine gun, one of my favourite weapons, where once we could just spray and paint the town red, but now they have magazines that in game turn all weapons that have it into burst weapons, and I do see the vision, as it adds a layer of realism of being a pilot, but at the same time it sacrifices the video game ass video game trope of living a power fantasy, and it severely detracted my enjoyment from the experience but wait, it doesn’t end here, as we also have to discuss the core systems that have been overhauled as well. Right off the bat, the economy, progression and customization systems have gone through a significant rework, which is so drastic that if you’re coming fresh off from 7 mainline entries that saw minor improvements and tweaks throughout the years, and you already had an established play style and builds in mind, there’s a chance that 97.9% of those optimized builds you prepared have either been nerfed or turned completely obsolete, because they are so deep-rooted it forces you to completely alter your play style, and it betrays the main point of customizing your AC, which is player freedom on top of all else.

Customization, for example, is severely impacted by the heat and shooting systems. My favourite build has always been a light build with a machine gun, as those two go hand in hand for the longer missions, and a hover build that allows me to be agile while also carrying heavier artillery. In the early hours of each entry I would mix the money I earned from early missions, the money and parts I’ve received from the arena, and even sell some of my default parts to get back to those build as soon as possible. That dream is mostly impossible in Nexus because for starters, you can’t sell any of your default parts, and having my default radiator mixed with the low shell AC puts me in a position where I would come close to overheating constantly, as the quick energy consumption limited me from bunny hopping to save some, and I couldn’t rely on the machine gun to become a maniac and spray everyone because I now I had to deal with the magazine. A good counterbalance would be an increase in weapon accuracy, but that isn’t a thing, even with the tuning you can do to your arms, it doesn’t do much, and in turn, this build becomes a very high risk, low reward set, that completely debilitates most of my qualities, but isn’t the whole point of this series to find problems to your solutions? oh shi  wait, but isn’t the whole point of this series to find solutions to your problems? well, yes, but not when it comes at the cost of other builds not being viable long term, and you could argue that this change leads to more depth being present in the system thanks to the changes, but it subsequently sacrifices the consistency present in previous entries for the sake of something trivial in the long run, which leads me to the solution I found, and the build that literally carried me from missions 19 until the end in a breeze, and I’m not joking.

I went for the most expensive generator that gave me the lowest calorific value possible, the most expensive radiator that provided the quickest amount of cooling, and I just gave myself the most high damage weapons I could think of, like my energy rifle, a Gatling gun, and a beam blaster capable of opening your insides and cut you of any misery in a snap of a finger, and lo and behold, I was literally decimating ACs in a couple of seconds for reference. While fun in terms of sheer power, The thing I really hate about this build is that I had to compromise my preferred play style to tolerate a system I wasn’t jiving with, and in turn leading me to having the easiest time I’ve had with the game, even though I wanted that challenge, but not on those terms, speaking of which the economy is poorly balanced as well. Jumping from AC3 to Nexus, we see an increase from 200 to 400 parts available, which is impressive, but given that AC3’s economy was tuned as, so you couldn’t get access to the higher quality parts in the early or mid-game, the arena mode here had to be sacrificed, so it could be like I mentioned before, used as checkpoints to increase your payouts from a fixed rate. In terms of lore, that makes sense, as the more skilled pilots you fight up against, the more rewarded you are for your position, and it’s congruent to the world politics of this universe, but at the same time, you end up hoarding so much money as you can’t mix and match as freely as you could in the past, that it feels like you’re using cheats to get there, and believe me when I tell you, I finished the game with more than 3 million credits for taking them any chance I could, and that never happened with previous games.

At the end of the day, I really don’t know how to wrap my head around it because, as negative as I’ve been so far, I genuinely don’t hate Nexus. There are some changes that make sense for me as a designer, as it’s fun to find ways for you to accommodate around those changes, and design problem-solving scenarios around push and pull principles, but at the same time, as a player, so much was streamlined for the sake of making it different, and when you add the poor balancing, it gives the game a clunkier feeling compared to what came before, in turn making Nexus one of the weaker entries I’ve played so far.

On a more positive note, Nexus is split into two discs, the first one entitled Evolution, which contains the main game, and Revolution, which is a bonus disk containing remade levels from some of the PS1 Armored Core missions, spanning from the first game, Phantasma and Master of Arena, and I felt weirdly nostalgic not gonna lie, even though I played those games a month ago, now I was just going down memory lane. What fascinates me about these remade levels is seeing how the newer design philosophy and some of the lessons FromSoft has learned throughout the years have influenced this disk, which made the whole thing worth revisiting. What I mean by this is that these missions are not 1:1 remakes, but in fact a reimagining that still sees through the original direction of the missions, but taking the advantage of the hardware and said years of experience to turn them into something new. Every facet gets affected, from the environmental design, the pacing, the enemy placing, the signposting within the levels, and they haven’t stopped there, as those 15 remade missions were also extended with extra objectives tally up the number of missions up to 39 or so you can complete which speaks to just how willy-nilly they wanted to flex their new expertise and I fully love them for that, yass queen slay and everything. Personally, I wished this wasn’t remade with the gameplay changes of Nexus because not gonna lie, the combat was starting to sour that trip down memory lane for a moment, that I just did the main 15 missions.

The soundtrack is, without a shadow of a doubt, one of the most incredible aspects of this game, and coming out from my lukewarm feelings with 3 and Silent Line, Nexus feels like taking more than 2 gummy bears and being in a constant frenzy of hard hitting musical compositions that are so ridiculously good that by the end of the sugar rush you feel at peace. This time the soundtrack is big, spanning across 40 tracks filled with complex arrangements between the series’ traditional electronic roots, even playing around with some of those weirder and unconventional loops present in the PS1 entries, while also incorporating more rock elements prominently, and it absolutely delivers on a banger soundtrack.

Kota Hoshino is now the main lead composer for this entry, and alongside Tsukasa Saitoh, new members such as Yukinori Takada, who most recently works at Capcom as a sound editor for the Resident Evil Series, Shohei Tsuchiya, who most recently did music arrangements for the Smash Bros series and finally Kohichi Suenaga, who’s worked on the series from Nexus up to V, and also did some work in Darks Souls 2 as a sound designer, they all formed a band formerly known as N.O.Y.B, and just my speculation, but I think this is the early days when we can see the flourishing roots of what would later become FreQuency, which is awesome.

Now it’s time to explain why I’m not covering both Nine Breaker and Last Raven. If you couldn’t figure out by now, Nexus left me exhausted, broke me if you will, and I was more than ready to put it aside and see what was up with the other games. I first booted up Nine Breaker, only to be met with a gameplay opening cinematic we haven’t seen since the PS1 days and the further I got into it, the more I realized this boils down to “Tutorial: The Video Game” glorified into a full release. I can see the appeal for people who really want to hone their skills and become the best pilot possible, and Nine Breaker allows just that to materialize, but for me, I just wasn’t feeling it because it’s not a main game, it’s just the equivalent of DLC, so I decided to drop it and next came Last Raven.

Now, Last Raven is pretty notorious in the community for how difficult it is, and I was semi prepared to jump into it, even though I knew it would control like Nexus, so I just had to put those feelings aside and carry my save data to start, and that’s where my first problem arose. I tried to convert my Nexus data into LR, and it wouldn’t work, I tried multiple times and it just wouldn’t do it. I looked up solutions online and someone mentioned to have roms from the same regions, but I had all the roms in the same region, I even tried with a European rom to no avail. I went back to Nexus, made a new save and even transferred that save into Nine Breaker, but it was all fruitless in the end. So the next solution was starting fresh, which was the worst idea I could think of. I was really salty I couldn’t bring my builds, so I forced myself to just start from scratch and see how far I could go, but not even far into the first mission, I got completely decimated. I was thinking of installing cheats like infinite life and ammo, but that just strips away the challenge and appeal of fighting other ACs for me, so I just threw in my towel, called quits and pretty much said… *Estoy cansado Jefe clip*. So yeah, that’s it. At this point, I just want to put this all behind me and start Armored Core 4 next because for so long I’ve been so curious to see the changes in the game design that I’ve even played the tutorial on again and off again just to get a feel, so I’m glad I get to do that now. 

At some point though, I really do want to visit Nine Breaker and Last Raven properly when I have more time available, because they also deserve to be discussed. I’m currently in a position where I’m busy starting a new job in a few days as well as personal life shenanigans, but I’ll make sure to talk about it when I do so in a single video, and to be frank, I just need a palette cleanser to wash out Nexus from my system at the moment.

Closing Statements

And that’s all folks, my genuine thoughts on Nexus and to be completely honest, I’m disappointed. Playing Gen 1 to early Gen 3 felt like a rush, as I was experiencing the incremental rise of the old formula and seeing where FromSoft was cleverly investing in the features that really mattered, but coming to Nexus, the entire game completely flips itself into a worse experience that soured the taste in my mouth, and at this point any positives I still feel for the game is just out of sympathy, besides Revolution, which I loved a lot.