Armored Core: Project Phantasma (1997)

Armored Core's first sequel, and it starts quite well. It reuses a lot of the original, but it has a new spin on things and improves a lot!

The armored

• You have more ways to make money now! You can use the arena to grind for money, allowing you to buy far more equipment early on than you could.

• You can import your save file from Armored Core 1, allowing you to access all the benefits. Including human plus.

• Far more weapons. The selection has been rebalanced and there are dozens of more weapons, including the arena only ones. I recommend to grind the Arena first using Human Plus so you can get them all, then go ham in the game with them.

• The plot is simple but it gives you more hindsight into the world. You have to defeat a paramilitary organization called Project Phantasma, who are using pre-apocalyptic tech to create an army of super powered ACs. The rivalry with Stinger is really well done, mostly because he goes crazier after each defeat and starts taking drastic measures.

The debt

• Human plus is almost mandatory to beat the game, if you don't have human plus, certain enemies become an absolute pain to deal; especially in the Arena because the last enemies are human plus. And guess what? Because this game happens right when AC 1 is ending, you can't go in debt to get Human Plus; you have to go in debt in AC 1 to do it

• The final boss is a joke if you have the final arena weapon, the finger gun. The finger gun hits with a 1/6 part of the Karasawa, but it fires like six bullets at the time and a volley of three seconds is enough to destroy any AC. Just go towards the final boss, press the fire button, wait five seconds, and is dead. The worst thing is that the developers knew that the boss was a joke, so they made him almost inmune to energy weapons so you can't use the Karasawa on him.

Conclusion

The game is an improvement over the first one. But they really dropped the ball at the final boss and it made human plus mandatory to beat the Arena.