Master of Arena
It was the last Armored Core released for PSX. It occupies two disks; it has more than 100 AC arena duels; it has better story than Project Phantasma (still worse than original game); it has the widest among three selection of parts and improved controls of your AC.
Armored Cores of PlayStation 1 era are special. They feel much different from releases for PS2 – they are more arcade, faster, less real and more mecha.
PSX hardware barely handles some duels where both ACs strike each other with multi rocket launching system and fill the screen with rockets, explosions and smoke. That’s a very enjoyable experience.
Story
Master of Arena returned to the roots: corporations. But the storyline is not as grim as in the original game. Story doesn’t have much relation to the arena despite it being in the name. Arena is just a part of the progression integrated with it.
After hitting the new game button you get a short snippet of the story – you join Ravens to kill Hustler One. The pilot of the Nine Ball AC. Someone who killed your family.
Master of arena is a sequel to the original game – Hustler One appears to not be human, but AI machine H1 that somehow survived the destruction of the mainframe.
This machine has only one goal – to save the humanity from a full collapse after the Great Destruction that destroyed most of the life on Earth and made surface of the planet uninhabitable.
H1 has a very weird way to do so – by supporting balance between corporations. It destroys ones that reach too much success and wages endless wars between them. It sees the restoration of humanity this way as the best approach.
You start the story mode by completing missions for Lana Nielson – your Nests contact. Very fast you get a sponsor required to enter the arena – Progtech and start fighting at the arena. Since your ties with this corporation get closer they start to hire you directly instead of through Nielson.
Nielson gets upset with this very fast because it goes against her plans on you and on the destruction of Progtech.
Lana Nielson is stated to be your supporter but as soon as you destroy Nine Ball AC in one of the unauthorized missions for Progtech she cuts ties with you leaving you alone. And tells you that the only thing that awaits you is death. Very cute.
At the same time you get a new Progtech’s employee contact Elan Cubis. He is one of the main targets of H1 and Progtech is really interested in protecting him which is difficult because H1 has access to ancient technologies like amphibious ACs.
Elan starts an investigation into these unknown enemies of Progtech and finds out that not only the Hustler One person doesn’t exist, but Lana Nielson is a fake as well and doesn’t exist.
When you ruin other H1 plans and get to the 2nd position at ranked arena you get an invitation from Lana Nielson to meet up and settle it once and for all.
H1 tells you that it can’t let humans be as powerful as they are because it will ruin his plans on the restoration of humanity.
The last mission is nuts. You need to fight one Nine Ball AC then two of them at the same time before getting to the final boss. Your AC will get restored before the final battle but each attempt to reach the boss takes some time.
In the original you could skip fighting at final mission but here AI locks the gates.
Several times I tried to get him with light weight ACs. I learned how to reliably destroy usual Nine Ball ACs. But the final H1 machine is just too strong – fast, precise and deadly.
In the end I, as always, used cheesy weapons and heavy platform and even this way it wasn’t easy.
My only complain about the story is the amount of missions – 19. Depending on your decisions you’ll skip some of them. It’s still not the size of the story in original AC game and it’s baffling.
Beauty of the environments improved but missions returned to the old formula of going somewhere and destroying something. Instead of experimenting with different mission types. At least they added a single bomb planting mission with a timer where you need to destroy enemy’s AC after all bombs are planted. I complained about no bomb planting in Project Phantasma.
And from this limited amount of missions there are some that you complete in less than a minute. Literally less than a minute. Some a bit longer. And the long ones organized pretty annoyingly and consist of a bunch of similar constructions making a level. That are complex just to be complex.
Aside of missions arena is now the part of the story as well, not a separate entity. So you’re forced to duel ACs to progress the story.
There is no giant boss fight. Among all three games a giant robot appeared only in the first AC. Master of Arena offers a mission to destroy a giant tank but it’s by far not the same.
The only annoying mission aside of the last one was to defend a submarine. One wrong move and you fall into the ocean and that’s a failed mission.
Arena
If arena of Project Phantasma was a low effort fun novelty, Master of Arena has arena in the title. To fit the arena mode game needed a separate CD. So Master of Arena was released on two CDs because of that.
Initially you’re given 4 ranked arenas with progression by legs type: 2 legs, reverse joints, caterpillar and 4 legs.
I’ve started with arena instead of missions to accumulate some money and parts to enjoy missions deeper.
From the start your opponents are difficult. Not like it was in Project Phantasma.
Their design and description started to make more sense as well but with some questionable decisions.
For example in caterpilar arena there is an AC with only a flamethrower. Even more its AI is unable to use this weapon effectively and it’s not at the last rank. It’s simply impossible.
At the same time in 2 legs category you finally meet real Necron (1st rank from the Project Phantasma’s arena). This one fights really well.
FromSoftware did a good job for AI. Enemy escape hits much better than it was in previous games. Overall opponents control different ACs differently and you can notice this by their actions. Even the same light AC types of AC can have different behaviors between two AI pilots.
They still struggle a lot to avoid missiles launched by multi missile launchers. These weapons are still cheesy.
Multi missile launchers is a death sentence for middle weight ACs. These ACs are not fast enough to avoid hits. And they are not protected well enough to sustain damage.
Slow caterpillar ACs with good protection just don’t work in this game as well. With faster AC you can just stay at their back and attack without taking any damage.
Close combat started to make more sense because it rises your chances to hit an enemy. Laser blades started to be more usable and I have a bunch of last hits made with laser blades. In two previous games it felt more gimmicky than real weapon.
After you beat 40 opponents in the main 4 categories you open up the fifth one – with FromSoftware ACs designed by the developers based on their likes. It’s a fun competition.
So in the end you have 50 opponents available by default. But after completing the game you open up two more categories: guests and champions.
Guests are people who send their designs to a magazine in Japan. You can actually see their photos as pilots. Champions are the ACs who competed in the AC championships. And almost all of them are light weight mechs. I even met one with the same weapons as my preferences.
This two categories have more than 20 ACs alone so if combine it with scenario’s arena you get more than 100 AC duels available in the game. That’s an insane number. I beat them all.
The bad part is they took my favorite river with the hills arena I enjoyed a lot in the previous two games.
Conclusion
Because of massive arena and some missions it took me 10 hours to complete the game. It’s longer than it took me to complete both previous games combined.
For some reason story of Master of Arena is shallow in comparison to deeper and darker story from the original AC game. There is no message. It’s just a game and I find it strange it was made this way by FromSoftware.
I can only conclude that they wanted to release this game in 1999 before the release of PS2 in 2000 and continue the series on the next generation of consoles. In the end Armored Core 2 got released in 2000 so it was already in development before the release of the PlayStation 2.
Still Armored Core: Master of Arena is a very solid game.