- Joined
- Aug 22, 2014
I lost touch with Crash post Warped, and you've made me infinitely glad that I was busier with other games to even try to PS2 successors. Except maybe Twinsanity, I heard a lot of good on that one.
To toss in my own, it would have to be Armored Core V.
For anyone not relatively in the know of this oddball mech builder series, the transition from the PS2 era to next gen got off to a really shaky start for a lot of people when 4 and For Answer came out. The shift in emphasis from building to your specs and making it work in a generally open ended game fell flat on its face when we enter into the era of the NEXTs, where speed and twitchfiring is literally everything period. Not merely on a competitive level either, but the story missions were godlessly and artificially imbalanced in a way that was liable to make one THANKFUL for fighting Human PLUS tweaked Cores with perfect AI setups in the half and half mess that was Last Raven (and you can ask @Jaimas for more on that if you like). For Answer improved some of this, but it couldn't save what so many had already given up on; and so the bright and shining era of the NEXT cores died whispering and mumbling in its sleep. But that wasn't the death of Armored Core, that wouldn't come until some odd years later.
Enter then into the year of our lord, January 26th of 2012 when Armored Core V was released worldwide; showing great promise in comparison to its predecessor. A return to the older methods of Core building, an intuitive new control scheme that put a spin on the old Reserve weapon systems, WIDE open maps and spaces to mess around in, and a storyline that, while lacking quite a bit in the flesh and meat of the older series by way of giving you a choice in your mission lineups, nonetheless did much to cover the post-NEXT collapse and how humanity was dealing with the consequences of mass pollution by trying to escape it. For its run, you had a pretty great game that made older fans really feel a sense of joy in returning to Armored Core...of course, when the game was said and done, the multiplayer half killed it in mere months. Because From Software seems to possess a complete lack of concern for maintaining any servers, balancing, and so forth except for their Japanese players, but this wasn't isolated to the region. You had cases of Clans, groups of players banding together to wage constant war over the map territories in real time, meeting a stone wall in the Japanese playerbase who had access to patches, balance changes, parts, and weapons that nobody ever got a hold of. Not even as DLC. In March just two short years later, the only servers were shut down and the game went more quiet than the Silent Line. A completely avoidable situation that wouldn't be the last case of FS and Namco Bandai exercising themselves in incompetence and irresponsibility.
What only makes it hurt more is that the psuedo-sequel/revamp, Verdict Day, was released awhile later with a newer, longer, meatier storyline and, while learning from the mistakes of its last iteration, brought the story full circle. Hell it even brought the much beloved Arena mode back! But by the time it rolled around, nobody was left to give a shit.
apologist, I have to agree that the combat/gameplay was terrible. They were obviously wanting to have a CRPG-esque system in a 3D-setting, but it just failed.
