Video Game / Armored Core

Raven, the rest is up to you.^note From left to right: C01-GAEA "Mirage", AC "Nine-Ball", CR-C90U3 "Blue Metal", CR-C75U2 "Sir Fire", Crest Assault Type "Fracture". Not pictured: AC "Anfang", ST-21 "Annihilator", ZCL-XA/2, 03-AALIYAH "Supplice", NEXT "White Glint", UCR-10/A "Vengeance", C03 "Malicious", AC "Nightfall".

"You seek a world of endless war and destruction. On that we can agree. The world of order [...] is not one I can live in. [...] There is no place for me other than the battlefield. To live as I please, and die a senseless death. That is who I am. Not a mere man of flesh. War is part of my existence. [...] Enough words. They are meaningless now..."

—J, embracing the Inherent in the System Humans Are Bastards themes of the series, Armored Core: Verdict Day

Congratulations [troper]! From this point on, you are a Raven.

Armored Core is a Real Robot mech-combat video game series developed by FromSoftware. It started on the original PlayStation, and over the years, has been on the PlayStation 2, PSP, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and mobile phones before rejoining the modern era after a ten year hiatus on the PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X with the arrival of Armored Core VI. With the exception of Armored Core 2 and its expansion, each numbered sequel afterwards seems to take place in a different continuity, separate from every other numbered title.

The primary appeal of the series revolves around the customization of the titular mechs, each of which has a number of different equippable parts. You can tinker with just about any piece of your Armored Core, including the weaponry, frame, treads, jets, generators, ammo supply, and more. This is highly encouraged by the game, as every mission can have wildly different objectives and enemy types depending on the situation. One mission could require fast, light frame mechs to deal with a Macross Missile Massacre, while others could require heavy firepower and a bulky frame to carry it all. A "one-size-fits all" approach is rarely possible until the endgame, and even then many parts that allow for such a playstyle are very expensive to purchase.

Notably, Armored Core places an almost equal amount of emphasis on the building of your mechs as it does piloting them. Missions often take a few short minutes if they go well (which they very well may not), and how well you perform on missions can affect your earnings by mission end. Even worse, some of the games have a large macrogame layer on top of the normal mech combat, meaning it is possible to get a Non-Standard Game Over by, among other things, firing too many bullets (due the cost of refilling your ammo supply for the next mission), taking way too much damage in your AC (due to the repairs having to be taken off your current payment to keep the mech in check for the next mission) and causing damage to valuable assets (as your employer states in the mission briefings to be of utmost importance, and as such, will be taken out of the final payment as compensation). The fast-paced and extremely fun combat is your reward for proper planning, so commit to it well.

Other major appeals of the franchise include the unique atmosphere and one killer set of soundtracks. The games are relentlessly bleak, taking place in Crapsack World styled environments. Blasted cityscapes, ruined deserts, and abandoned factories are the primary stages for battle in this series. The themes of War Is Hell and Humans Are Bastards are woven into each game, and the game takes a lot of pains to show just how devastating mankind's lust for war can be. Many Armored Core games deliberately alienate the player from other humans, making contact with them exclusive to radio operators and not much else. This is on top of allowing the player to commit some truly heroic or villainous acts without much fanfare. All of this places heavy emphasis on the fighting inside of your core, with the implication that the only place that "real" humanity remains in this universe is found in conflict between skilled pilots.

Games

The games in the series and their plots are as follows, divided into six distinct "generations":

Generation 1

• Armored Core: In the distant future, the majority of Earth's population has been wiped out in an event known as the 'Great Destruction.' In the wake of destruction, humanity has been forced to live underground while corrupt corporations battle for supremacy. You play as a 'Raven,' a mercenary of the Ravens' Nest group, who pilots an Armored Core (AC), the eponymous Humongous Mecha.
  • Armored Core: Project Phantasma: A Raven operating out of Isaac City receives a mysterious request, to 'infiltrate the Amber Crown.' No corporation or sender name is given, and due to the amount listed in the monetary reward, the danger is obviously great.
  • Armored Core: Master of Arena: In one of the corporation's more violent battles, several innocents are killed in the crossfire. One man loses his entire family in one such war, and a few months later, he decides to take revenge on the pilot responsible, the Raven known as Hustler One, pilot of the AC named Nine-Ball.

Generation 2^note Lore-wise a part of Generation 1

• Armored Core 2: Sixty-seven years after the first game, Earth's second largest corporation, Zio Matrix, attains the plans for a research project on Mars, dating back before the Great Destruction. They launch the terraforming project, which causes the Martian atmosphere to approximate Earth's. The other corporations learn of the project, and follow Zio Matrix to Mars, bringing the battle between them from Earth to Mars. As a Raven, a mercenary of the group Nerves Concord (similar to the Ravens' Nest of old), you don't care about any of that. It's all about the money.
  • Armored Core 2: Another Age: Five years after Armored Core 2, the corporations have all fallen out of favor with the Earth government after the incidents on Mars. The people, still living in subterranean cities are tiring of being ignored and armed revolts are a daily occurrence.

Generation 3

• Armored Core 3: Set in a post-apocalyptic future, society lives in a subterranean society known as Layered. It is ruled by an AI construct known only as the Controller, which dictates nearly everything that goes on in the world. The major corporations Mirage and Crest and the smaller Kisaragi vie for dominance. The Controller's strange actions seem to indicate that it is going haywire. You play a Raven of the game's mercenary group, this time known as 'Global Cortex'.
  • Armored Core 3 Portable: A PlayStation Portable port of Armored Core 3.
• Armored Core: Silent Line: Following the destruction of the machine-run society of Layered, mankind seems to be back on its feet, and has begun repopulating above-ground cities. All seems to be well, and reconnaissance teams are sent out frequently, to determine what has changed. One area, however, seems to be unable to be scouted and is dubbed the 'Silent Line,' as all communications past that point go silent. As a Raven of Global Cortex, you're employed to find out what is behind all this.
  • Armored Core: Silent Line Portable: A PlayStation Portable port of Armored Core: Silent Line.

Generation 3.5^note A sort of a transitional period between Generation 3 and Generation 4, as well as the continuation of Generation 3

• Armored Core: Nexus: Years have passed since the incident at Silent Line, but as always, the corporations are still at war with each other. Navis, a new corporation, is much smaller than its competitors but has complete control over a new resource. As a Raven of Raven's Ark, you are employed by various corporations to deal with this.
• Armored Core: Nine Breaker: As a particularly skilled Raven, you have been selected to undertake a special training regiment that will push your ability to design and pilot Armored Cores to the limits.
• Armored Core: Formula Front: As the newly hired architect for a new team in the Formula Front league, your job is to design and assemble the team's ACs.
• Armored Core: Last Raven: In the wake of Navis' attempt to recover and use lost technology, the world has been left in ruins. The major corporations have merged into one super-corporation known as 'The Alliance.' Fed up with corporate rule and oppression, one Raven known as Jack-O forms an organization of his fellow Ravens known as Vertex, out of the ashes of the Raven's Ark. After collecting a sizable force, he declares he will announce an all-out war with The Alliance in 24 hours. Leading the opposing force, a Raven known as Evangel has created an equally large force to combat him. You are approached by both forces and will ultimately be the one to take down The Alliance or uphold the corporate rule.
  • Armored Core: Last Raven Portable: A PlayStation Portable port of Armored Core: Last Raven.

Generation 4

• Armored Core 4: The human population experienced an exponential increase, putting a strain on global food supply. As populations increased, so did the gap between the rich and the poor. The governments of the world began to lose control of their populations, and the six major corporations stepped in, declaring an all-out war. Using advanced AC technology known as NEXT that relies on Kojima Armor, they toppled the world's governments in less than a month, and worked out a new system of government, Pax Economica. Under this system, loyalty to the corporations provides one with food and shelter, essentially forcing people to be slaves. The Ravens have essentially been destroyed, and most pilots are either forced to patrol the colonies for meager pay, or side with one of the armed rebellion groups.
• Armored Core: For Answer: After the events of Armored Core 4, the desolation and destruction of the surface via pollution of both Kojima particles and production has forced many portions of humanity, but especially the rich and powerful, to live in aerial Cradles to avoid the pollution of the surface. The NEXT pilots, known as LYNX and organized by Collared, feared and renowned for their skills, have been left on the polluted surface to rot and fight in the perpetual wars. However, not everyone's going to stand for this for long.

Generation 5^note Lore-wise a part of Generation 4

• Armored Core V: After long, bloody wars have polluted most of the Earth, humanity is sequestered in a portion of land that has grown into a large Megapolis simply called The City. Led by a despotic ruler called "Father", The City manages to get by even during harshest of conflicts, except when the Resistance takes matters into their own hands and initiates a coup, emboldened by the addition of a very skilled AC pilot: you. However, things get complicated when a nefarious third party called The Corporation seemingly aids Father by supplying strange, often powerful technology, while at the same time pursuing the Player Character relentlessly.
  • Order Missions: The survivors of The Resistance band together to become freelance mercenaries, eking out a living as territories of the City and its surroundings descend into lawlessness and fighting between factions of Migrants, freelance AC pilots. Here, the story deals with the general life of a mercenary, while introducing Men of Honor, an older mercenary establishment that one of your allies had ties to, and an enigmatic band of cybernetically enhanced AC pilots called the Zodiac.
• Armored Core: Verdict Day: Countless years have passed and the events of ACV have been consigned to forgotten history. The pollution has cleared, but what should be a celebration of humanity's revival is turning into a prelude for a new apocalyptic war. Across the land, countless structures known as Towers remain from times past, so massive that their interiors are still not fully mapped, but stocked full of valuable Lost Technology. Eager to dominate the new world, the Three Great Factions prepare to battle for the Towers and the unpolluted lands: the wealthy Sirius Executives, the dictatorial Venide, and the inquisitive EverGreen Family, setting the stage for what will come to be known as the "Verdict War".

Generation 6

• Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon: Rather than being set on Earth, Fires of Rubicon takes place on the distant, ruined world of "Rubicon 3". 50 years ago, a novel substance dubbed "Coral" was discovered on the planet that promised to revolutionize mankind's energy production, communications and other technological capabilities... until that same substance caused a cataclysmic event that incinerated not only Rubicon 3 but the entire star system surrounding it. Now, decades later, this apocalyptic element has resurfaced on the sealed-off planet, and brought a new cataclysm as off-world corporations descend to wage bloody wars with resistance groups and each other for its control.

The Marvelous-developed Daemon X Machina was developed by some former staff who worked on this series, and it shares several themes and mechanics.

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Main system: Engaging combat mode.

# to C

• 100% Completion: After beating the games, it's possible to go back and select any mission you like. Getting 100% completion means doing every mission and finding every hidden part. In-universe, some Ravens and LYNXes have a 100% mission rating.
• Ace Pilot: The crème de la crème among AC pilots are sometimes referred to by unique titles of honor, such as Nine-Breaker, Dominant or Irregular, with the last one being a bit more derogatory, but still implies immense skill.
• Action Prologue: Happens quite a lot. In fact, Armored Core V had not one, but two prologue missions.
• Affectionate Parody: AC's very own Parodius is called Metal Wolf Chaos.
• After the End: The post-Great Destruction world. The world of the Armored Core 3 universe had just recovered from its own Great Destruction-esque event, and then Armored Core: Nexus goes and blows it all up again, leaving you to sift through the rubble a second time in Last Raven. This includes Armored Core V's world.
• A.I. Breaker: Any fight with a Raven in Master of Arena who relies heavily on missiles and aerial maneuvers can be all but immobilized by fighting in the underground parking structure arena. They'll simply keep jumping straight up into the ceiling, fall down, and try again, occasionally firing missiles that explode as soon as they're launched.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Played With. Most of the featured A.I.s are designed to kill people, and that's what they do; this is played straight more than a few times, though, usually with AI systems developing egos and even agendas of their own.
• All There in the Manual:
  • Given some "Blind Idiot" Translation and No Export for You for some of the extra material collections and art books, you need to do some digging to understand some of the games' plot.
  • The Armored Core Facebook page is posting some of the information only available on the Japanese ACVD Link which include the side story Forgotten Day and says that the AC4 and AC V universes are on in the same
• Almighty Janitor:
  • Armored Core 3. Go ahead; try to challenge Exile without adequate preparations because he's in the bottom rank, it's your funeral.
  • Likewise, if you're really sure you want to ignore the warning on Nameless' profile in Silent Line, ("To judge him solely by his rank is a mistake.") then go right on ahead and fight him while you aren't armed to fight him or ready with OP-Intensify. You'll be chopped liver in seconds.
  • AC2 has its own Almighty Janitor in the form of Matthias.
    • Played straight with Werehound in AC2. His profile basically states that he could climb a lot higher, but stays in rank 42 on purpose to stop newbs from advancing further.
    • SAMSARA also takes on this role at rank 21. His description says he enjoys crushing dreams of aspiring pilots.
  • White Glint aka the protagonist of AC4, seems to have become this in for Answer. He's only rank 9, but he's also pretty much the only reason Line Ark is still intact, and nobody is willing to go against him solo (both missions featuring him are either 2-on-2 or 2-on-1). Even Otsdarva (rank 1) will almost always fall to him in battle.
• Alternate Continuity: On a surface level, the series has five main timelines:
  • Armored Core through Armored Core 2: Another Age
  • Armored Core 3 through Armored Core: Last Raven
  • Armored Core 4 and Armored Core: For Answer
  • Armored Core V and Armored Core: Verdict Day (Several elements in the latter game point towards V and Verdict Day taking place further down the timeline of 4 and For Answer. Considering the cyclic nature of the series, this is more than likely intentional.)
  • Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon
• Amazon Brigade: Interior Union, all of their hired pilots are all female. Even their mission broker is a woman. Case in point, only Sir Maurescu from AC4 is male; all Leonemeccanica and Melies (which merges into Interior Union) LYNXes put together are all females: Sera Angelic, Ay-Pool, Stiletto, Wynne D. Fanchon, and Kasumi Sumika AKA Serene Haze, your operator in For Answer.
• Apocalypse How: Class 1. The term "Great Destruction" is used in the first two timelines to describe certain ambigious background events which lead to the post-apocalyptic worlds the games take place in. They are mostly described in detail only in external materials and interviews, but they share a similar premise: following seemingly endless corporate wars and social unrests, some factions decided the best course of action would be to raze the planet to the ground in an attempt to Restart the World from a blank slate. In the first continuity, this was done with the Kill Sat "Justice", while in the second continuity it was done by the AI-controlled unmanned weapon facililty "Internecine". Both timelines include instances of people (unwittingly or otherwise) coming close to unearthing the technology that caused these events, with Armored Core: Nexus's ending having it actually happen.
• Arc Number:
  • The 9th game in the series is Nine Breaker. This also shows in For Answer with White Glint being ranked 9th, and the mission you have to fight him in says that he's better than his rank suggests.
  • The final mission of Armored Core V is mission 09 and you’re fighting something similar to Nine-Ball.
  • Verdict Day has its final boss N-WGIX/v or NEXT White Glint ver. IX
  • VI: Fires of Rubicon has several examples. The protagonist is "C4-621", and the individual numbers 6-2-1 add up to 9. The prefix of V.IV Rusty's callsign can be interpreted as the Roman numerals for 5 (V) and 4 (IV) which add up to 9, and Rusty himself is ranked 9th in the arena. And the AC Nightfall, which is used by the original Raven, is the 9th Analysis opponent in the arena.
• Arc Words: "Raven". Up until (appropriately enough) Last Raven, the word was simply the term for the series' AC-riding mercenaries; after that, the term was interchangably used either to refer to the old profession (in 4, where it was replaced by "Lynx") or as an unrelated nickname/callsign for the protagonists (in V and VI).
• Arm Cannon: There are quite a few arm models that are just weapons attached to the Core, from laser rifles to bazookas to machine guns.
• Armored Coffins: No Ejection Seat exists within the AC in any incarnations until Armored Core V (Where you bail out with a jetpack on your back). This prevents Ravens from abandoning the mech in hopes of surrender. Subverted for the player pre-Last Raven as being "destroyed" only results in your AC going inactive and returning to base, according to your AC's voiceover system.
• Artificial Brilliance: The further you go in the series, the more your AC / NEXT foes are finely tuned to put up a hell of a fight. Compare their Artificial Stupidity in 2 to the bastardly aggression and energy preservation they use in Last Raven. And if you play the fourth-gen games on Hard, be prepared for the AI to be as much of a Lightning Bruiser as you are, evading everywhere while trying to hit you with precision shots if they aren't the spray-and-pray type.
• Artificial Stupidity: Early series energy management was fairly rough without good parts, and Arena fights highlight this for the AI. It's all too common to see them attempt to boost around excessively like they think they have infinite amounts of it, only to suddenly end up in overheat and effectively crippled in mobility for the duration, making them sitting ducks. Major mission encounters typically circumvent this by actually having infinite energy, and later AI Arena battles got smarter about this.
• Artistic License – Physics: Realistically, the whole Quick Boost system in 4 and For Answer would put the pilot and machine under incredible stresses due to the massive G forces involved in speeding up and slowing down. Same goes for Armored Core V/VD's "Parkour" robots which do walljumps off buildings.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Several weapons in the series were like this, until they were replaced with Kojima Weapons in Armored Core 4.
  • Parrying blades, or physical blades, are arguably like this. They feature a long wind-up sequence, have cripplingly short range, and are finite in use. Despite their potential one-hit-kill attack powers, they are outweighed by their disadvantages. The For Answer version and the ACV version, Heat Piles, avert this.
  • Arms Forts are remarked in-game to be the ultimate projection of military strength. You get to blow them up regularly.
  • The Torus Assault Cannon against anyone with an actual brain.
  • The "Moonlight Spiders." Quad-legs equipped with dual Moonlight Blades (or dual any melee weapon really). While they do staggering damage (enough to outright kill nearly anything, including most arms forts) getting a solid hit is often difficult against any enemy that moves even decently quick.
  • Some of ACV's Overed/Ultimate Weapons fall into this. The most famous example, Grind Blade, consists of large, six-bladed, rotating superheated chainsaws. It does what it is advertised: killing other ACs in one hit, but it has a crippling feature that other models don't have. The Grind Blade ejects the entire left arm for the energy input to connect to the Core, thereby forcefully purging the left arm weapon as well as the shoulder weapon if the arm features a left-handed shoulder weapon. This makes using this particularly tricky, especially in light of the common Overed Weapon's Necessary Drawback of slow activation time, limited active time, charge time, and once-per-battle usage.
• Badass Normal: You in the Nexus/Last Raven series, in a world dominated with every other Raven equipped with HUMAN PLUS and OP-I. You are the only Raven without the upgrades.
• Base on Wheels: The land-based Arms Forts are either crawlers or massive walkers that easily fit the trope; Spirit of Motherwill is basically a walking aircraft carrier.
• Battleship Raid: Arms Fort missions from For Answer are long, drawn out, often spectacular fights with your Core taking on fortresses the size of cities, many of which have to be destroyed in sections. Well, other than "Defeat Arms Fort Stigro”.
  • Actually, only the Spirit of Motherwill requires this in order to be defeated. The Stigro, Giga Base, Answerer, Land Crab, Sol Dios Land Crab, Jet, Eclipse, and Great Wall can be easily defeated with a single hit.
  • While Sol Dios Orbit can be ko'd, it still requires you to take out the cannons, and Great Wall can only be damaged from the inside.
  • Actually if you time it right, the Sol Dios Crab will release the cannons, then you immediately one-hit it with a laser sword, and they will die as well. They are actually very easy to do.
  • In Armored Core 2, your last mission on Mars^note Which is actually the second-to-last in the game; the last mission is on Mars' moon Phobos is a two-part raid on the hitherto-unmentioned STAI battleship.
  • Pretty much all of the Special Weapons from Armored Core V and Armored Core: Verdict Day.
  • The Spirit of Motherwill again in Armored Core: Verdict Day. This time it's being rebuilt, so it lacks the massive cannons that it originally had as well as its previous Macross Missile Massacre abilities. They are instead replaced with plasma cannons and fewer but more powerful missiles that can rip an AC apart.
• Became Their Own Antithesis: Leos Klein, who fought to liberate humanity from Nine-Ball's control, eventually decides that Humans Are Bastards and attempts to become its overseer just as Hustler-One was.
• BFG: Pretty much all the guns featured in the series.
  • To clarify, the opening cut scene to For Answer shows that a basic rifle has to be transported to the launch site by an AH-64 helicopter, which is slightly smaller than the gun itself.
  • Deployable weapons, the Giga Cannon and Legion/Multiple Pulse Ultimate/Overed Weapon in 5 really get the point across by being much bigger the AC itself.

• Black-and-Gray Morality:
  • In For Answer, you have to choose between the wholesale massacre of 100 million people as a true rebel, sacrificing the Cradle population in order to open the way to space and covering Omer's actions which led to the situation in the first place, or allowing humanity to die as the pollution on the surface spreads up to the Cradles.
  • In Last Raven, you have to choose between helping Jack-O or the corporations in a senseless war. The corporations only care about ruling the world and have no qualms about using the AC equivalent of WMDs. Jack-O doesn't care which side wins, as long as he finds a dominant to help him defeat the pulverizers that he activated. Jack-O also has a tendency to order the execution of certain Ravens who he sees is unfit to take on the Pulverizers.
• Black Box: Appears twice in Armored Core: Nexus, once when A desperate Navis Corporation attempts to activate a giant MT they discovered later called "Leviathan" in order to protect their territory, which immediately goes berserk and tries to kill them, and happens again at the hands of Kisaragi when they attempt the same thing and end up waking up a prototype pulverizer and hundreds of little robots who kamikaze their targets... apparently they also kill the protagonist.
• Blade Below the Shoulder: An Armored Core's Laser Blade is mounted on the machine's forearm.
• "Blind Idiot" Translation:
  • "Megalith" is a word in English; "Megalis" is not. Guess what the giant power plant in the two AC4 games ended up being called?
  • There's a fair bit of Engrish in the translations, but the briefing videos have even more Engrish, due to the fact that most of them are not edited. Case in point for the Megalis above, the video refers it as "Megaris". Good English, that.
    • For reasons beyond reason, the original Japanese version of Armored Core 4 correctly names the power plant Megalith.
  • Also, know that weird-looking NEXT that shows up at the end of AC4 with the pilot acting like they know you? If the translation had been done right it would be clear that that was actually White Glint's pilot, who'd been blackmailed into attacking Anatolia via a threat from Omer Science to destroy his colony, Aspina, if he didn't. This information was helpfully totally removed from Sega's localization, meaning you're challenged by an awesome-looking robot for no apparent reason who wants to kill you, also for no apparent reason.
    • Being armed with that knowledge upon going into For Answer would have also helped to explain why the main character from the first game in that continuity was now piloting an insanely modified version of some barely-mentioned enemy AC he (as far as players outside Japan knew) had met all of once on the battlefield for no apparent reason.
    • This makes more sense in Hard Mode, in which you face off against White Glint several times, where proves he is an incredibly difficult opponent at times. This is usually because he's helping your opponent NEXT.
  • Nearly every mech in ACV is called an AC. Many suspect this to be Bamco's fault.
• Blinded by the Light: 4/4A gives you 09-FLICKER Flash Rockets. These literally are flash bangs in rocket form and having one set off anywhere near you mean that you lose lock-on capability for some time. This is very bad against close-range combatants like Anjou/Ange, and especially Shinkai. Getting hit by an Assault Armor in 4A will also produce this effect.
  • In ACV, Flash Rockets are universally hated for their large area of effect and cripplingly long effect. Later patches nerfed the weapons.
• Bolivian Army Ending: Occurs at the end of Nexus in which the suicide bombing robots emerge from Nine-Ball's lair en masse, released by Kisaragi, to rain death on any and all targets of opportunity. Your pilot is tasked with defending one of these, and as your operator laments that "it may be too late", you start controlling your mech through the cut scene, and as bomber after bomber smashes into you and you get warnings that AP is dropping to less than 10%., the screen fades to black.
• Boring, but Practical: Machine guns in most games. Not counting the famed Chain Guns, a lot of players fall back to mostly machineguns to do a lot of their grunt work for them (i.e., dispatching anything short of a full-fledged AC/NEXT); sure, a laser rifle looks cool (and most likely lethal to boot), but machineguns have copious amounts of ammo, more likely to track even the fastest of enemies, and provide a steady stream of damage and can easily wipe out scores of MTs/tanks/helis/what-have-you in no time. In 4A, (regulation 1.40, at least), if you can hit NEXTs with it, the humble machine gun can eat away the mighty Primal Armor of a NEXT like cookies, and equipping two of them kills light NEXTs in 20 seconds-ish of sustained fire.
  • The rifles seem to get a second lease of life in 4/4A. A dual rifle/assault rifle combination is very popular in player-versus-player matches; something that was unheard of in pre-4 games due to several factors: Not only have opponent NEXTs have gotten much faster than machineguns can keep up with, Primal Armors made machineguns much less effective by themselves. Hence, the faster-firing and faster-velocity rifles/assault rifles are the new standard.
• Bragging Rights Reward: In many of the games, getting 100% completion would give you the ability to use overweight mechs. That is, after beating every mission and finding every hidden part with one robot, you're allowed to make a new, extremely slow one with any weapons or parts you like.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: In Armored Core 5, RD goes from a relative to coward who takes to you like a friend to a man seemly possessed and ready to kill you for no apparent reason. It's not even explained how it happened since he almost certainly should've died in that explosion... He starts talking about he will kill anything he's afraid of instead of running. He snaps out of his delusions as he is killed.
• Breakable Weapons: Implemented (poorly) in Silent Line, in which any weapon that hit you basically had a percentage chance of destroying weapons you were holding. Was revised in Last Raven, in which damage to specific body parts would accumulate over time and decrease the effectiveness of those parts until they could be repaired. If the damage was severe enough, the parts would have to be repurchased entirely.
  • This also happens in some of the games intro movies. Also occurs in AC 5 where some AC's aren't destroyed when they should've by all rights have burned the pilot alive in the cockpit. At one point, one them grabs a concrete column with loose rebar and charges at you with that. Justifed as the Chief is seemly an AI and, thus, isn't killed by the explosion or the fire set on his AC.
• Brutal Bonus Level: Hardcore Mode in Verdict Day is this. After you beat the game you can play through it again but you get to choose a challenge you have constantly effecting you while you play through the game ( i.e. higher repair and ammo cost, higher damage, a lot of stuff being cheep but you only get one AC, One Shot Kills.). It should also be noted that your given a fresh save for Hardcore mode, and teammates, mercs or UNAC's can't help you.
• Bullfight Boss: Stigro's hydrofoil turns its boss fight into this, as it's extremely fast for a full-sized Arms Fort and will use its speed to charge at you, killing you in one hit if it catches you in its wake. That said, it's also extremely fragile for an Arms Fort, so if you can manage to board it while it's charging around, a couple blade strikes will end it just as quickly.
• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": One mission in AC4 has the player intercepting "self destruct drones" fired from a submarine. Drone aircraft that only carry one warhead and are used only once are more normally called "missiles". That being said, the drones are much smaller than missiles and are much more numerous, clouding the horizon with an eerie shade of red.
  • The rather infamous Unmanned Suicide Weapons are practically the exact same thing as the mentioned AC4 drone "EX-DAGON", but are notably harder to kill.
• Canon Welding: Verdict Day bridges together the continuity of 4/For Answer and V, previously thought to be unconnected.
• Capcom Sequel Stagnation: There were three games before Armored Core 2 was released, one more before Armored Core 3, six more before Armored Core 4, and one more before Armored Core V. Thankfully, though, there are usually enough content, new parts, and a new mechanic or two to make them better than the average Mission-Pack Sequel. FROM SOFTWARE apparently just didn't want to change numbers that often. Also, a new number in the title usually means the start of a new storyline. The sole exception is Armored Core: Formula Front, a Gaiden Game that's basically a Fighting Game built on the Armored Core 3-series game engine.
• Character Customization: Thanks to the number of body parts and weapons a Self-Imposed Challenge can be to make up the sleek Evangelion or Valkyrie robots, the Fujikoma from Ghost in the Shell, your very own Metal Gear, a Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers Zord, or anything in between. Then there's the reverse joints and tank treads.
  • In for Answer, one player even managed to create a copy of Id Weltall from Xenogears and took down the Answerer with it, blades-only. Sound familiar?
• Chess Motifs: ORCA strategist Malzel has a chess piece for his emblem and refers to his protégés Hari and Vaoh as Pawns.
• Chicken Walker: A common enemy to meet when you start your mech-piloting career, they only take a rifle bullet to put in the scrap heap. Alternatively, you can choose to equip your mech with "chicken legs", which are most often suited for air combat.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Otsdarva, who starts out as the League's top-ranked LYNX, fakes his own death in order to lead the anti-League group ORCA as Thermidor, then fakes his death again to return to the League as Otsdarva.
• Colony Drop: Leos Klein attempts this at the end of Armored Core 2, with Phobos no less.
  • As the Player in Armored Core for Answer, you can drop no less than 5 of these in rapid succession, whilst a cheerful Russian records the kill count in blocks of 20 million murdered civilians.
• Comeback Mechanic: Ultimate/Overed Weapons in 5 are intended to be this given that they can one shot an AC... Then again some of them can wipe out the team if timed right.
• Competitive Balance: General AC types are Mid-weight Bipeds, Lightweight Bipeds, Light Reverse Joints, Tank ACs, Heavyweight Bipeds, Snipers, Missileboats, Pure Bladers, Balanced Bladers, OverBoosting Jousters and a few more. All of these archetypes are available to the player, provided (s)he can access the needed parts, with each style requiring different skills and tactics to utilize properly. If one wishes it is possible to blend two or more styles together, though the results of the more ambitious blends (like sniper OB jousting) end to either be unremarkable or somewhat crappy. In ''For Answer’’, there is PA Bombers. As of regulation 1.40, PA Bombers have been nerfed and rendered unplayable.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: Sometimes, especially in missions, enemy AC pilots throughout the series regularly violate the rules you have to strictly obey. From infinite ammo and inexhaustible energy for certain foes, to being able to fire weapons that lock you down without certain legs while they use them with impunity as they overboost through the air. Sometimes this is explained away with the pilots having Human-PLUS capabilities, something you can get for yourself in the earliest games; this includes some of the top-ranking Arena pilots cheating their Overweight builds in. Most of the time, it's just them deliberately being given unique advantages to make them nastier bosses and arena challenges.
• Continuity Nod: The games occasionally mention Hustler One/Nine-Ball, the final boss of the first game, and the antagonist of the third. In Armored Core 2, one pilot claims to be his descendant (dramatic irony for those who played the first and/or third game, as Hustler One is an AI), and another's emblem is a red beast destroying Nine-Ball's. He also appears as an Optional Boss or Final Boss in several other games.
  • Furthermore, a number of iconic weapons or AC parts have been carried over from one game to the next. Among them are the high-powered laser rifle "Karasawa" (a.k.a. KRSW and Canopus), named after one of the game's designers, and the "Moonlight" Laser Blade, which is named after the Moonlight Sword from FROM SOFTWARE's first-person RPG series King's Field (said weapon has appeared in some form or another in almost every single game FROM SOFTWARE has ever made).
• Continuity Cameo: In For Answer , your own pilot from Armored Core 4 shows up as the head combatant of Line Ark, guided as usual by operator Fiona Jarnfeldt, though for some reason piloting an updated version of Joshua O'Brien's White Glint. You may choose to fight against him or support him. He gets put out of commission either way, though Fiona's reaction to his defeat implies he survives. The White Glint, on the other hand is a very unique AC, and can't be replaced by Line Ark.
  • In Armored Core 2, Leos Klein is outright stated in game, and on the promotional site at the game's launch, to be the original "Ninebreaker", the player character from Master of Arena. He was part of the Mars research project, making him at least 90 years old.
  • Characters from the Japanese only story Armored Core Brave New World appears in the portable 3 era games as bonus arena fights.
  • Various maps in Verdict Day are ruined versions of maps from Armored Core V like Father's Tower and the Marine facility not to mention the wreckage of Spirit of Motherwill and the Cradles.
  • The final boss of Verdict Day is White Glint.
• Continuity Reboot: Several. AC3, and then 4, and now V. So with the exception of Armored Core 2, the series gets a reboot with each new number. Averted with Verdict Day, which is in the same continuity as 4.
• Convection Smonvection:
  • Notably, averted. In any mission near lava or other high temperature environments, being anywhere near it increases your AC's heat. Post-Nexus, your boosters also contribute to your AC's heat output. If you pair really powerful boosters with a weak sauce radiator, your AC will overheat begin to take damage until it cools down. Kojima does this too in 4/4A.
  • Verdict Day's final boss really averts this in his 2nd phase where J cranks up his generator output to the point where his 'Primal Armor' field hurts you wherever you go.
• Corporate Samurai: Genobee in Nexus, Evangel and the rest of Alliance Tactical Unit in Last Raven. By the time Armored Core 4 and For Answer roll around, the Corporations have entire stables of LYNX on their payroll.
  • The player character themself generally starts each game as this, a fledgling Raven taking on whatever missions the various corporations will offer. Generally though, as they gain respect and fame from their many successes, they start to take more of an active role in whatever the main arc is, often leading them to break the status quo in some way against the interest of the corporations. Though some installments allow you to remain a corporate warrior until the end, though this tends to lead to more cynical endings.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Though you never meet they face-to-face, many corporations and their representatives show signs of this. While fighting off opposing corporations is the norm, some corporations may draw civilians into the crossfire (one Kisaragi mission from Armored Core 3 requires you to blow up a civilian monorail and make it look like another corporation did it, Emeraude in 2 has you blow up a solar power plant in order to cause a black out that will make Zio Matrix look bad, and in 4, Omer Science orders Joshua to attack Anatolia.) Others may wage war against themselves or their own subsidiaries in order to prove a point. Crest and the OAE both do this in Nexus, Zio Matrix's entire Mars Division goes rogue in Armored Core 2 and sides with the Frighteners, forcing the head office on Earth to step in and obliterate it, and GA America and GA Europe go at it in 4, resulting in GA Europe and AkvaVit merging into Torus in 4A.
• Cosmetic Award: You usually get the emblems from any enemy you beat in an arena match.
• Covers Always Lie: Nexus, Ninebreaker and For Answer, despite the prominence of the AC's Oracle, Nine-Ball, and White Glint on the front covers and opening cut scenes for the three respective titles, the number of times these AC's appear in game, not to mention their pilot's impact and relevance to the plot, is almost non-existent. The same can be said of pretty much every single AC that appears in a CG or Intro.
  • The Spirit of Motherwill in 4A is likewise. Endings B and C don't even require you to fight the damn thing.
  • The US cover of Armored Core 4 shows 3's NEXT's battling in Gryphon, this can't happen in single or multiplayer sadly.
  • The oldest one in the book is the cover for the first Armored Core game which shows a AC dual wielding rifles which is something you can't do for five games.
• Crapsack World: The exact details vary depending on the continuity, but generally speaking, the whole series takes place in bleak dystopias where governments and private corporations are locked in endless, reptitive wars for control over what is left of Earth (or Mars, or Rubicon 3). Taken to sadistic heights in Armored Core 4, you pilot a Core that uses a particle that kills the environment as you work for corporations who will gladly throw many lives away and in the sequel, things go From Bad to Worse. Really upped in Verdict Day, V and VD is the future of the AC4 continuity.
• Critical Annoyance: In every game, bonus points to Verdict Day for giving players the ability to change the AI voice to a story character like Maggy, Fatman and two Big Badsand having them mock the player for getting hit.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Poor Arms Fort Stigro's mission takes longer to load up than it does to destroy the target. The target is a colossal missile-launching hydrofoil with a giant bow-mounted sword blade. Know what else it has? No defense at all against laser blades or rockets, the latter destroying it the moment the mission begins.
  • Most things in combat with even a basic NEXT in 4/fA are going to be melted in a matter of seconds while dealing little to no damage in return. The only things a NEXT pilot may have trouble with are other NEXTS or arms forts. A skilled NEXT pilot is virtually unstoppable, rendering arms forts and all but the most skilled NEXT pilots useless against them.
  • Many players' first encounter (at least) with Nine-Ball or Nine-Ball Seraph (especially) amount to this with the players on the receiving end.
• Cutscene Power to the Max: Averted, though not apparent until later: Most ACs featured in openings (at least in earlier games) are overweight and impossible to make. That is, until you get Human PLUS upgrades. Other than that, most openings really depict realistic AC-to-AC combat like it would happen in game.
  • AC4/FA actually shows battles that would happen in game realistically. Not only is it plausible to do battle at those speeds, you can do it "faster".
  • Then again, some things you just can't do or can't happen occur in the AC4/FA intros, like sliding down walls, or impaling your enemy with an assault rifle, or getting your weapon shot out of your hand. But hey, Armored Core V added the sliding-down-walls part!
• Cyber Punk Is Techno: At first. The series gradually goes from pure techno to synthesized orchestra. Played straight from Nexus to Last Raven, but by Armored Core 4, rock guitars are in full force for a Desert Punk vibe.
• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: Angie and maybe the rest of Zodiac in Armored Core V lampshaded by Zodiac #3
  "I guess you did give everything up for the project, your body, your brain... your soul, am I right Angie?
  • The Foundation's Leader and Reaper Squad in VD.
  • Plus enhancements from the older games are noted to be this story-wise; they're said to degrade mental faculties, and you do see it with some of the Plus-enhanced Ravens you fight.

D to O

• Darker and Edgier: The first two sets of games weren't pleasant, but 3 begins long After the End already forced humanity underground. While there's the occasional Breather Episode in this continuity, it all eventually goes tumbling downhill into Last Raven. Then they try to top that in 4 and V alike as each subsequent continuity is grittier and more destructive than the last.

• Dashed Plot Line: Massive amounts of time pass between games, even those with the same story or continuity.
• Death Equals Redemption: After Phobos heads toward Mars in a collision impact, Klein, defeated by your hands, tells you to destroy the orbit control mechanism. This results in the destruction of Phobos and saving of Mars.
• Deconstruction: Armored Core effectively tears down the usual, over-the-top Humongous Mecha tropes in favor of bleak, desolate and dying depictions of Earth where History Repeats as war stopped being personal and instead became a commodity of profiteering violence at the hands of corrupt and morally bankrupt corporations, and the awesomeness of piloting one of those mecha is offset by a rough balance of pay versus expenses on top of the horrible things you regularly do to earn that pay. Even the Armored Cores themselves, as befitting of the Real Robot genre, are excessively powerful yet a pain in the ass to pay maintenance upkeep on.
• Destroyable Items: In Last Raven parts of the AC's anatomy were damageable and would lead to noticeable drops in the AC's performance if they were destroyed. A busted head means no more radar. Lose an arm? Kiss your weapons good bye. Busted legs=crippled AC. And a destroyed core left your AC nothing but a fiery wreck.
• Deus Exit Machina: The reason why White Glint is taken out so early in the story of For Answer.

• Double-Meaning Title: Ostensibly Master Of Arena is about the protagonist's goal to defeat Hustler One/Nineball, the number one Raven in the arena. The final mission reveals that the entire arena setup has been created by Nineball to control humanity, making it the Master of Arena in more than one way.
• Downer Ending: In For Answer, it doesn't matter which ending is canon; it still leads to V and Verdict Day.

• Early-Bird Cameo:
  • Not in the form of characters but in songs. Two albums that FreQuency (the band that does Armored Core's soundtrack) released Armored Core Reprises and Sunrise have a few songs that are in the full games of V and Verdict Day.
  • A proper character can be peeked at early in the first game, though, if you look up Hustler One in the rankings, aka Nine-Ball. Nothing besides them being the top Raven really implies to you that they're going to become the Final Boss and that they're secretly part of an AI running the story from behind the scenes.
• Early Game Hell: Your starting AC for every game (when you don't import from the last viable entry) is near-universally terrible, having a basic rifle, laser blade, and missiles, with such mediocre stats that it will usually run out of energy within seconds of boosting and has no real capability to fight against anything more advanced than basic enemies and early Arena battles. You have to earn your Credits to pay for better parts, if missions don't have rewards or parts to scavenge, and overhaul your unit to try to really mix things up and be ready for fiercer encounters; even mid-game AC units will leave starter units in the dust.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: The very first game in the series doesn't have any idea of a plot at first and just immediately throws you into a test battle with two MTs, which can very readily kill you if you don't play carefully and send you straight back to the title screen. On top of that, the Credits you pay for ammunition refills and AC repairs will easily blow out your budget compared to the amount of Credits early game missions give you, making it hell to even scrounge up the scratch for a new part or weapon with a high potential for game over through debt. Project Phantasma starts you in the Raven's Nest menu to let you get your bearings, and raises the earnings out of the gate to make it much more approachable and that you aren't so easily bankrupted by operating costs. There's also the fact that Project Phantasma is the first game to actually introduce the Arena proper, as the first game was nothing but missions with varying routes depending on the corporation you opted to stick with.
• Easter Egg: Verdict Day has two maps that are ruins of the Spirit of Motherwill and the wreckage of a Cradle.
• Elite Tweak: And then some. Each game boasts hundreds of different parts, each part boasts dozens of different stats, and dozens of parts go into building an AC, not including the time spent on the paint job and emblems. One can spend more than half the game constructing and tuning the AC for optimum performance.
• Enemy Mine: Basically happens in every game, since all Ravens are mercenaries and will often be recruited by corporations that they may have fought in the past.
• Energy Weapon: A lot is fired from laser rifles to back mounted cannons, to cores that shoot pods that shoot lasers.
• Energy Blade: A common melee weapon you can equip onto your core, usually comes in a Blade Below the Shoulder form, but sometimes they resemble proper swords.
• Even Evil Has Standards: For Answer's Ending C features the normally mortal enemies Wynne D Fanchon and Maximillian Thermidor joining together (with two others) in an attempt to kill you and Old King for the Cradle massacre.
  • In the Original Armored Core, if you Choose to Side with Chrome in the Corperation wars, the Chrome Executive who hires you for the mission "Destroy Giant Gun, Justice" seems horrified that Murakumo is attempting to reactivate the orbital weapon platform singlehandedly responsible for destroying essentially the entire world and forcing mankind underground during the Great destruction. In comparison, in the Murakumo route, Chrome's desperate last-attempt to turn things around is mobilizing a small army of CHAOS unmanned attack craft.
• Ethereal Choir: 4A's entire soundtrack is riddled with this. This is most noticeable in Today, White Glint's battle theme. 4 have it in the Overture and Mr. Adam, among other songs.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Last Raven's Pulverizers.
• Excuse Plot: In classic FromSoftware fashion with leaving something of a Creator Thumbprint, the story in most of the franchise is threadbare at best. You're a Raven, or LYNX in the 4 pair of games, corporations are waging conflict upon one another, and usually there's a Greater-Scope Villain manipulating everything from behind the scenes or out to destroy everything. If you just do your missions and build your AC, what semblances of plot there are typically revolve around certain antagonists or other rival mercenaries getting in your way, and in cases like the very first Armored Core game, it can lead to a straight-up Gainax Ending with little context. The games that do try to have more of a plot still stretch it out between several missions at a time, and in 5 and Verdict Day's cases, are incredibly short with a lot of unanswered questions and some Japan-only explanations or context for certain things. A lot of hints of various tidbits, world-building aspects and fragments of the plots of each game are usually strewn about in emails, mission briefings, loading screens, Arena opponent bios and even AC part descriptions.
• Expy: Some noticeable examples include the similarities between your operator in For Answer to Sumika Juutilainen from Project Phantasma, and every continuity having a Nine-Ball Expy. Hell, Nine-Ball himself is an Expy of Char and official art makes him look kind of like Quattro Bajeena◊
  • White Glint in For Answer could be considered an Expy of Gundam Seed Destiny's Kira Yamato and his Freedom Gundam, in that he's the former protagonist, now opposing the new protagonist in a white mecha that's legendary for its firepower and aerial acrobatics, and is also the sole combat pilot of 3rd party organization that lets it none the less hold its own because he's that much of a One-Man Army.
• Famous Ancestor: Maggie from Verdict Day is related to Fran from V.
• Fan Vid: There are quite a few, with the biggest being Armored Core Limit Release.
• Face–Heel Turn: Strung in 2, Thermidor/Odstarva in the Orca path hard mode and the player character in the Destruction ending of For Answer, RD in 5 and Maggie in Verdict Day.
• Featureless Protagonist: The player character is always one of these. They are also referred to exclusively as "Raven" in the PS2 games and 4, a simple you in For Answer or Rookie in V.
• Final Boss: In order of appearance:
  • Armored Core: Nine-Ball
  • Project Phantasma: Stinger
  • Master of Arena: Nine-Ball Seraph
  • Armored Core 2: Leos Klein in Scarabaeus/Filial
  • Another Age: Antares and Carlyle
  • Armored Core 3: The Controller
  • Silent Line: IBIS
  • Nexus: "UNKNOWN" ("Nine-Ball" in the English version)
  • Nine Breaker: Nine-Ball Replica
  • Last Raven: Depending on the route, either Jack-O, Zanida, Evangel, or the Final Pulverizer
  • Armored Core 4: Joshua O'Brien in the 00-ARETHA
  • for Answer: Route and difficulty-dependent.
    • League Route: Thermidor and Shinkai
    • ORCA Route: Wynne D and Roy Saaland^* On Hard Mode, Thermidor joins them, revealing himself as Otsdarva and a Mole in Charge.
    • Destruction Route: Thermidor and Wynne D along with Lilium Wolcott, Roadie, and on Hard Mode, your operator, Kasumi Sumika/Serene Haze.
  • Armored Core 5: Chief in Exusia
  • Verdict Day: "J"/N-WGIX/v (AKA NEXT White Glint IX ver. )
  • Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon: Route-dependent.
    • Fires of Raven route: Ayre
    • Liberator of Rubicon route: Handler Walter
    • Alea Iacta Est route: ALLMIND and G5 Iguazu
• Flash Step:
  • Not entirely. In AC4/fA, your mech has a Quick Boost option. It's exactly what it says on the tin, accelerating you to nearly double your speed for almost a second, allowing you to dodge enemy firepower. It's possible to do this while using your Over Boost and the speedometer tops out around 2500kph, and doing soand equipping two energy blades allows you to dash continually (at least until your energy bar runs out).
  • Aretha, the Final Boss in 4, pulls this one off much better. The Quick Boosters on that thing are insane, often causing players to completely lose track of it as it disappears off their screens.
• Friendly Enemy: This happens quite a bit but the two most prominent cases are Evangel in Nexus/Last Raven and Antares in Another Age. Evangel turns out to be a jerk with an inferiority complex, and Antares smooth talks you into giving him access to a space elevator for some vaguely malevolent purpose.
• Four Is Death: The Reaper Squad (Shinigami Butai) has four members.
• Gaiden Game: Formula Front, though set between Silent Line and Nexus, has no ties to either major story arcs of the 3 timeline and instead focuses on in-universe sports.
• Game Over: Usually, failing a mission will only cost the price of repairs and ammunition, but failing certain story missions will give you a game over.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • Zig-zagged with the intro cutscenes for the series. In the early games, no, your AC will not be as nimble and cool as some of these machines, though they do all use in-game parts and gear that you can acquire with enough credits and work. However, CGI units also will blow apart and die from machinegun fire in some cases, with certain unfortunate ACs being cannon-foddered easily by enemy gunfire; unless you build your machine to be a Glass Cannon or face certain bosses and Ravens that hit like a truck, your own AC is not quite that delicate.
  • Flipped on its head with the intros for 4 and For Answer; if you think the CGI looks intense, you're gonna be outstripping those speeds easily and doing much crazier combat scenarios than any prior game or the intros.
• Gatling Good:
  • Every game has gatling guns. V also added auto guns, which are so big that you can't move while using them without a tank body. The USG-23/H Gatling gun models, with the added rapid fire increase mechanic from high precision arms, have such a high DPS that later patches would nerf it.
  • The Arms Fort Great Wall from For Answer is armed with Gatling guns the size of battleships.
• Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: While they're not exactly "Giant Space Fleas" since you fight them directly all the time, enemy ACs and NEXTs often show up without warning during (or even after) certain missions to make things more difficult, especially on Hard Mode.
• Glass Cannon: In 4 and 4A, your NEXT better be capable of hitting 900kph with quick boost or you are going to die very quickly. Even with an AP in the 6 digits, you're going to need to dodge a lot of dakka to make it last. In general, the standard lightweight AC/NEXT builds are all like this. The weapon arms in Verdict Day have flimsy, paper-thin armor, but make up for it with firepower and mobility.
• Grenade Launcher: All titles feature grenade launchers, both handheld and shoulder-mounted. They typically fire projectiles that have the biggest blast radiuses amongst explosive weapons, though there are exceptions depending on the title.
• Guns Akimbo: Is an option in later entries to the series.
• Guide Dang It!: Good luck trying to find and/or unlock the secret parts in the 1-3 era games and in V or the hidden Zodiac fights without one.
• High-Speed Missile Dodge: Depending on your build, you can either dodge every one or simply shoot them down. Or just sponge up the damage without a care. In fact, it's possible to kill a Missile Boat build by just shooting at him while he fires his missiles, as they explode right next to him. Note that the AI is usually more capable of this, and shooting missiles is only valid in later entries in the series.
  • To be fair, the missiles do a tiny bit of splash damage when they blow up, so if you shoot just one missile in a cluster of missiles, you'll take out more than one because of the chain reaction. This is why Missile Boats die horribly against a machine gun, because one bullet is all it takes when the 50 missiles you just shot are within inches of each other and your face.
  • This trope may be the reason most Missile Boats use vert-fire missiles instead of head-on or sideswipe missiles. Doesn't help much against enemies with good air time, but you can forget about shooting down the missiles if you can't stay off the ground.
  • VTF Missiles are meant to subvert this as they do proximity detonation, but a fast and agile enough AC can still dodge it.
• Humongous Mecha: MTs, ACs, and in the later games, NEXTs and Normals. NEXT's are around 10 meters tall. V's AC's are around 5 meters. Then there's massive MT's and Type D No. 5 which are bigger than you.
• I Am Not Left-Handed/Restraining Bolt: In Armored Core 2, it was possible to do something known as 'Limiter Release,' which gave your mech infinite energy for about 30 seconds, followed by an extremely long recharge time.
  • Would that make it Trans-Am, then?
  • Ultimate/Overed Weapons in 5 are this by removing the limiter in the AC's generator to charge the weapon for a massive attack.
  • In a more traditional sense to I Am Not Left-Handed, it's a common play style to equip guns on a sword AC and then drop the guns after using up the ammo and switching to your comfort zone (swords).
• Improbable Aiming Skills: The Spirit of Motherwill is able to snipe (at a distance of several kilometers) an extremely fast moving target with high caliber cannons with shocking ease.
• Improvised Weapon: All of the Overed Weapons in ACV are not specifically meant to be used by an AC. Most weapons are held by crane-like arms, and in the case of Huge/Giga Cannon, crane arms with steel claws. But even then, the reigning king of improvised weapons everywhere is the Mass Blade: a heavy concrete girder with rockets attached to it meant to be used as a mech-wielded hammer with bent iron bars and spikes as its "hammerhead".
• Instant Armor: Primal Armor in AC4/for Answer.
• It's All About Me: A recurring theme, from the mercenaries known as Ravens to the LYNX spiritual successors, is that any AC pilot that doesn't align with a cause is out to make a name for themselves, rake in the mission or arena profit, and will do anything to get that. From any amount of collateral damage so long as a job permits it, to killing other Ravens for the slightest infractions, and even throwing the world into chaos for the sake of just another job.
• Kill It with Fire: A popular solution in the series is to hit the enemy not with raw damage, but heat. Overheating drives your AC into a Damage Over Time state until it cools off. It could be a hell of an annoyance in Arena battles yet was usually insignificant in normal missions, but then Nexus made it so that your AC rapidly expends its energy to cool the unit down; suddenly Heat damage could fundamentally shut down an entire opponent, which combined with a certain handgun could melt opponents down in short order.
• Law of Chromatic Superiority: Nine-Ball, Amazigh, and Hari but you can do the same things Amazigh and Hari can.
  • It's also perfectly valid for the player to invoke as well.
  • In-universe, White Glint is this due to the name coming from how he moves so fast that all you see is a "white glint". Having completely-custom NEXT parts (until you get your own) helps as well.
  • Two bonus bosses of V are even redder, one of them is an upgraded version of the final boss.
  • Verdict Day's final boss does this in it's 2nd phase averting Convection Smonvection again.
• Leitmotif: A good one is Nine-Ball's 9, Spirit of Motherwill's theme of the same name.
  • In the 2 series, Magnetism is the theme of the Disorder units and Frighteners is the theme of Special Forces group of the same name.
  • Grip is the theme of Stinger and Phantasma.
• Lethal Joke Item: Technocrat Company's FSS-53 Shock Rocket is described in-game as "A dummy rocket that doesn't explode". The stats however say something else: it has the highest Primal Armor-reducing capability of any weapon, meaning one lucky hit and say goodbye to your usually very tough Force Field. To put things in perspective, weapons that usually reduce PA do so by continuous hits, large explosions, or the Awesome, but Impractical Kojima weapons. This being a rocket shoulder weapon, not only you can spam it without needing to free a weapon slot, a good hit means that you can immediately follow up with weapons that deal most damage to PA-less targets. Like grenade launchers, for example.

• Long-Runners: Armored Core 1 has been out for over 16 years (July 10, 1997 in Japan). They are on their 15th game right now (20th if you count the mobile).
• Lost Superweapon: There's usually one per game. Its relevance to the plot varies from game-to-game.
• Lyrical Dissonance: Sort of. Nine-Ball's theme "9" has a distorted, mechanical voice chanting to "Destroy Nine-Ball." Which is exactly what the player is trying to do, as if he's daring you to try and fight him.
  • Alternatively, it's "Destroy, Nine-Ball." and commanding him to annihilate you.
• Machine Empathy: In AC4, the AMS Piloting System links the pilot to their AC for perfect reaction time. The title LYNX comes from the word sounding similar to LINKS.
• Macross Missile Massacre: This happens in all games, but 4A takes the cake. Starting with the Spirit of Motherwill, we work our way up to the Answerer. Barring Stigro and Orca's Arms Forts, every AF has missiles by the dozen (Stigro has them too, but he's special).
  • You can also do this yourself in 4A with chain missiles, especially the "Mussel" series - large shoulder pods that can't fire on their own, but add extra missiles to the barrage of other launchers.
  • One notable Raven in Nine Breaker has Missiles as its weapon of choice (save for a Pulse Cannon), the name of her AC? "MMM." Take a wild guess what that means.
• Made of Explodium: Most MT s blow up after a couple hits from even the weakest of weapons and once you acquire the really heavy artillery stuff tends to explode if you look at it funny. ACs on the other hand are tough to bring down with even the best equipment. Anything larger (warship, building, Behemoth, Arms Fort) has a tendency to explode gigantically if you so much as poke it with a half-decent energy blade.
• Mana Meter: ACs live and die by their energy bars. If an AC runs out of power it can't use its boosters or energy weapons until the generator recharges, which can take a couple minutes if you have an energy-dependant AC with a poor generator.
  • NEXT's are an even worse case; a NEXT that is not boosting is a NEXT that will die very, very fast.
• Master Computer: R from Armored Core, The Controller from Armored Core 3 and IBIS from Silent Line, though remember that A.I. Is a Crapshoot.
  • There are some implications that Nine-Ball is one, too.
  • Chief and Carol in 5 in the same way Nine-Ball might be.
• MegaCorp: Every continuity has one or several.
• Memetic Badass: In-universe example; Nine-Ball/Hustler One isn't actually the first/only one to hold the spot of #1 pilot, just the one that managed to hold it the longest. As a result, the titles given to those that get to #1 are called "Ninebreakers." Nine-Ball himself is practically a fan-based one, often being cited as the hardest boss in the series (e.g. the Chuck Norris of ACs). Additionally, getting 100% Completion in some games gives you a piece of him (e.g. his head part, emblem, etc.)
• Mini-Mecha: In Armored Core V the ACs are now 5 meters tall, similar to METAL WOLF CHAOS.
• Minovsky Physics: The Kojima Particles from Armored Core 4 are generated by a pseudo-radioactive substance, and are used to power the NEXT's force field-like Primal Armor as well as the Overboost, as well as several excessively powerful weapons. They are also highly corrosive and poisonous, turning anything powered by them into a Walking Wasteland. In some missions that take place in highly populated areas, you are restricted from using Primal Armor as a result, meaning that your Humongous Mecha is suddenly Made of Plasticine.
• Mission Control: Most of the games have 'em, usually female.
  • In Armored Core V, this is a player-handled role on team missions but is still done traditionally in story and free missions.
• Moe Anthropomorphism: Since the series has next to nil human characters, most featured mechs have gotten this treatment in fan works. Really.
• Mook Maker: Arms Fort Cabracan.
• More Dakka: Ever-present in the form of Chain Guns, but applies doubly to any Arms Fort, which is essentially a mobile gun made out of other guns.
  • ACV one-ups the great tradition by offering Autocannons which is essentially as strong as regular cannons, with three to four barrels, and an extremely astounding fire rate. While all ACs require kneeling to use this, tanks don't, and in addition can dual wield it for even more dakka.
• Multiple Endings: Armored Core: For Answer. Works a little oddly in that there's no clear decision point; it just comes down to seemingly arbitrary choices of the unconnected early missions what you'll end up doing, though there are a few obvious attack it/defend it mission pairs later on.
  • Last Raven also has this. The "canonically" accepted one is there one where every last raven but you are killed and both sides of the war are devastated by the Pulverizers. The other endings are just one of two variations: Alliance wins, Vertex wins.
• My Rules Are Not Your Rules: Any opponent that is a Human-PLUS (or ostensibly an A.I.) has advantages the player normally cannot access without becoming one themselves, from better system functions to a Sword Beam, and even being able to break regulations by fighting in an Overweight unit without consequence. OP-INTENSIFY in 3 and Silent Line is something more legitimately gainable as a post-game power-up — and then all capability for the player to earn these abilities disappears from Nexus onwards, making them entirely enemy-exclusive.
• Mythology Gag: A given, considering all the different continuities all over the place. Some examples are:
  • Kasumi Sumika, your Operator in For Answer, plays a similar role that Sumika Juutilainen in Armored Core: Project Phantasm.
  • The way Wonderful Body moves in For Answer is similar to the way you pilot Armored Cores in pre-Armored Core 4 games.
  • The Classic Palettes in 4 and For Answer are color schemes from older games.
  • The ninth game is called Nine Breaker.
  • Michael F in Last Raven Portable to Michael F from 4
  • The Moonlight due to it being in every game FROM SOFTWARE makes.
  • Armored Core: Nexus and the Revolution disk has this.
  • Chief and Carol in V who are basically Nine-Ball/Lana Nielsen from ''Master of Arena''
    • Even better in the side story "Forgotten Day" Carol quotes Nine-Ball/Lana verbatim
• Neglectful Precursors: In Armored Core 2 It is implied that all of the Lost Technology was left behind by a long dead alien race.
• New Game Plus:
  • Save data from each main entry can be converted/transferred to their respective follow-ups. See Old Game Save.
  • In an interesting (and darker) example in the first and second games involves getting 50,000 credits in debt. You character is then made "Human+". You start over from the beginning but each time grants some bonuses, such as a better radar, double energy, and the ability to fire large weapons without kneeling.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Happens quite a bit. Because he or she lacks a personality, your protagonist is usually quite slow on the draw and can be tricked into doing things detrimental to their own best interests.
  • Leos Klein lures you into a fight in the reactor room of a space elevator with the intent that the ensuing fight will cause massive damage to one of Mars's most vital pieces of infrastructure.
    • However, the game warns you that collateral damage is possible before going into the mission, so if you're savvy enough you can put together a strategy that minimizes the collateral damage, such as luring Klein into close-combat with a blade, or simply using machine guns, snipers, and other single-target weapons in lieu of explosives.
  • Antares, who literally appears out of nowhere at the end of Another Age, cons you into helping him gain access to Earth's version of the Mars space elevator, and then the government sends you in to clean up your own mess after he usurps control of said space elevator.
    • Not quite a con. Antares outright tells you he's keeping his objective a secret. As a Raven, your only interest in the end is money. Naturally, you don't care about either side. And since you get paid by both sides anyway, the situation is closer to Playing Both Sides.
  • The entire plot of Master of Arena is pretty much this. You catch on to it fairly quickly though.
  • In AC4, your ammo, repair, and operating costs all come out of your budget. Screw around too long and you can go into debt from a series of successful missions.
    • Same thing for online mercenary contracts in V.
  • In Armored Core V, you play a prologue mission that starts shortly before the story and you are working with Fran and Rosary. They are part of the resistance. In the second prologue mission, which takes place a year beforehand, you work with Carol and Chief which are part of the Corporation. You then help kill the resistance Leader... who turns out to be Fran's father. The next mission you are working under Fran for the resistance who are now in dire straits because of you.
• Nintendo Hard: Hard mode will kick your ass in 4 and 4A, usually completing your objective isn't too hard, then a tough NEXT (or 2!) comes along. Or you have one target to kill; suddenly there are 4 more, each a crazy tough flying fortress with mega-damaging weapons. Or killing the Final Boss, using most of your ammo in the process, then getting ambushed. Most Hard Modes are not easy.
  • Except for in For Answer, where one Hard Mode actually allows you to One-Hit Kill a boss that normally is annoyingly hard to take down.
  • Occupation of Arteria Carpals
  • Marche Au Supplice. On hard mode, it's identical to Normal Mode Occupation, except you have no back up at all and the enemies are already in the arena, so no free One-Hit Kill shots while they're doing their dramatic Entry.
  • Last Raven in it's entirety is a horrendously difficult game. Some missions more so than others, but to put things in perspective, one of the very first missions you can select at the start of a completely fresh run is one of the hardest missions in any game of the series. It doesn't help that the game's difficulty is built around you importing a file from either Nine-Breaker or Nexus (you can't import from 3 or Silent Line due to the game's engine changing after Silent Line.) So starting Last Raven without a file import is just asking for trouble.
  • Verdict Day added Hardcore mode and the game itself is already difficult.
• No One Should Survive That!: Erik survives being on the end of a brutal Curbstomp Battle against the rogue UNAC Unit in Story Mission 06 of Verdict Day. Apparently, he does this often enough to be considered a mercenary of exceptional skill, despite his poor battle performance. This could be why he serves as your sparring partner in the AC Test mode...
• Non-Standard Game Over: Failing certain missions, including the final ones, will trigger a special "Game Over" cutscene.
  • The player in 3 receives a message in such a scene, saying that their "Raven" status is revoked for their failure, and the rights and benefits are gone along with it.
• Nominal Hero: The PC tends to be this at the best of times. They are generally just a mercenary working for whichever megacorporation is currently paying them, generally showing no loyalty to a single side. They participate in all sorts of shady business like corporate espionage and straight up assassinations. Usually they can shift towards more of an Anti-Hero role towards the end of the game as a bigger threat takes shape, but occasionally they can become a straight up Villain Protagonist.

• Old Save Bonus: Games that directly follow up from the previous title (ie. Armored Core to Project Phantasma to Master of Arena, 2 to Another Age, 3 to Silent Line, Nexus and Nine Breaker to Last Raven, 4 to For Answer and finally V to Verdict Day) let you carry over your AC and an extra good chunk of credits to start the linked game with. In cases like Last Raven, it's almost a necessity because the game is so Nintendo Hard that you need to be The Ace to survive with a generic starter unit.
• Ominous Latin Chanting: Around half of the songs in For Answer revolve around a pseudo-version of this. Spilit of Motherwill (yes, Spilit), Today, 4 The Answer and Scorcher are standouts.
  • Scorcher is actually Ominous English Chanting, like several other songs in the series.
• One-Man Army: Old King lampshades this in Ending C of For Answer, asking Otsdarva if he thinks of himself as a One Man Army. In actual game play this is mostly avoided.

  • Comes back in Verdict Day with The Foundation and The Reaper Squad trying to kill you because they don't want another incident like in Armored Core V.

• One-Hit Kill: At least in 4 and For Answer, using dual energy blades on a four-legged chassis allows the blades to be thrust forward; dealing absurd amounts of damage that can kill anything if enough of the animation connects.
  • Overed Weapons play this straight by doing 60,000 to 150,000 damage a hit while the standard AC has around 34,000 AP.
• Optional Boss:
  • With the exception of Master of Arena, you're never required to defeat the Arena opponents to advance the storyline, and if you do more, are usually added after you beat the game. In the more usual sense, Armored Core 2: Another Age also has the lost field missions.
  • Verdict Day follows in the same foot as V with it's special sorties:
    • Fighting a Scavenger, Hunter, and a Predator over water.
    • Six To-605's on sloped terrain.
    • Fighting a bunch of Gray Lotuses.
    • A Spirit Class Moving Fortress aka Spirit of Motherwill 2.0
    • Exusia again, now that plays more like a combination of his two forms from V.
    • NEXT White Glint ver. IX with an attached VOB which also has laser cannons, plasma bombs and it's normal mode is equipped with laser blades.
    • L.i.V. she's small, fast, fires lots of missiles and lasers, has a energy shield, a charging attack that does a lot of damage, and if that doesn't sound bad enough she litters the area around her with jamming devices to make you go slower so you can't dodge all that she throws at you.
• Overzealous Underling: The term "Irregular" has been used in various parts of the series to describe unusually overachieving Ravens or Lynx who are perceived as a threat by virtue of being too powreful for mere mercenaries and may possibly break the existing status quo, for better or for worse. This is typically directed towards the player, often by other pilots who have been hired to kill them near the endgame.

P to Z

• Paper-Thin Disguise: Otsdarva as Thermidor. His AC, Unsung, uses almost the exact same weapon load-out as Stasis, Otsdarva's NEXT, including the Omer-made laser bazooka and PM missiles unique to his crafts. In the Japanese dub, he doesn't even bother to mask his voice, making his true identity quite easy to figure out.
• Passing the Torch:
  • Your character's operator (possibly mentor) in For Answer is Kasumi Sumika, a LYNX who first appeared in AC4.
  • In 4A, after defending Line Ark alongside the White Glint, Fiona Thanks you for helping them and says that she wishes to express her gratitude. You then acquire the Arms, Legs, Head and Core of the White Glint.
• Pile Bunker: Exists since Armored Core 3. Interestingly, their status have changed from the usual Joke Weapon (early pile bunkers were no more powerful than laser blades, take up your main arm weapon slot, and is finite) to a definitive Difficult, but Awesome weapon in its own right. Specifically, HEAT Piles in V are extremely powerful, capable of taking an AC out in one hit, and has a much forgiving hitbox than previous iterations. The fact that the titular mechs in that title aren't zipping around at Mach 2+ helps.
• Point Defenseless: Played straight, subverted, double subverted, averted, all over the spectrum. General rule of thumb is that any Close-In Weapons System designed to pick off incoming missiles mounted on your AC usually works, except when it doesn't (Playstation 1-era Armored Core titles' torso-mounted anti-missile systems were notoriously unreliable and you're better off manually avoiding it). Conversely, non-AC opponent's CIWS will usually not work, except when it does (a particularly strong CIWS, for example).
• Pre-Asskicking One-Liner
  Hustler One/Nine-Ball/Lana Nielsen: Target Verified. Commencing Hostilities.
• Private Military Contractors: Raven's Nest, Nerves Concord, Global Cortex, Raven's Ark, Vertex, and Line Ark. They bill themselves as "Dispute Resolution" firms, which is just a fancy name for "Mercenary Organization". Men of Honor in ‘‘V’’ do this in the more traditional sense non-story-wise by having players hire other players to help them out in missions.
  • SIGNS organization loans UNACs, which are unmanned versions of your mech.
  • You are usually a mercenary and in many of the games you switch sides faster than you switch parts on your AC. In fact, you are often hired because your performance against your target killed so many of their units that they now need to hire you. Basically you're making business for yourself by making it so that you're the only person left they can hire.
• Psycho for Hire: Stinger, Shamir, Do Su, Chief; most games have one.
• Psychopathic Manchild: The Foundation Man from Verdict Day. Doubles with Large Ham.
• Pun-Based Title: For Answer (the sequel to 4) and Verdict Day (the sequel to V).

• Punch-Clock Villain: Nearly every AC you fight is one of these, as they are usually just recruited by corporations you happen to be fighting, corporations which may later recruit you because you killed their employees. Sometimes subject to Lampshade Hanging, including an instance in Armored Core 3 where Nocturne tells you "We're both Ravens, just do what comes naturally, and don't think about it.", right before trying to kill you.
  • This was also lampshaded in Armored Core 2 by the Raven Bulk: "We are both Ravens. No hard feelings, right?” The pilot's accent makes it come off as kind of soulless, making the line extra creepy.
• Purposefully Overpowered: The OP-INTENSIFY Optional Part in Armored Core 3 and Silent Line replaces the Human-PLUS abilities, but you have to earn them individually through completing the game and then clearing various conditions like defeating optional AC foes in your missions while having the part equipped. The result is a Bragging Rights Reward of an immensely overpowered pilot who already has a cleared game in the first place, without needing to force a Non-Standard Game Over to reach it.
• Pyrrhic Victory: You can lose money even on successful missions if you take too much damage, waste ammo, or blow things up that your employer didn't want destroyed.
• Rank Scales with Asskicking: In For Answer, two of the CEOs of the mega corporations are also high-ranking LYNXes. You can even hire one of them (Takafumi Arisawa) to be your wingman; apparently he doesn't mind putting his life in constant danger in exchange for being a walking advertisement for his company's products.
• Rank Inflation: Armored Core 3 through V. So far missions rank performance thus: S, A, B, C, D, E. S is practically flawless, E in 3 to Last Raven and D in 4 to V is total failure.
  • While nothing lower than C usually comes up in normal play, it is possible to get as low as rank E if you end the battle with less than 1% of your health remaining and a huge repair/ammo bill.
• Real Is Brown: Armored Core 4 has a graphics filter that will either make things: A. Brown B. Grey C. Too Bright D. Too Dark or E. Brown, said graphics filter was thankfully ditched in ''For Answer’’.
  • Subverted: Most of the Armored Cores themselves have bright, almost flamboyant color schemes.
  • Armored Core V's stages are bleak and war ravished using minor shades of brown and grey, the AC's are still as colorful as ever.
• Real Robot: The MTs and Normals are about as real a robot as it gets, outside of Patlabor. The more powerful ACs and NEXTs develop immunity to G-forces, but are still fairly 'real'.

• Recurring Element: Elements that are shared throughout more-or-less the entire franchise include the themes of War Is Hell (especially Corporate Warfare), Humans Are Bastards and the term "Raven". Other very common sights include spider-legged bioweapons, AI going rogue, and fake mission descriptions that are meant to lure the player into getting ambushed by an enemy AC or two.
  • Almost every game in the franchise always has some iteration of its two recurring weapons: the KARASAWA, a powerful energy rifle with the highest damage output at the cost of high energy consumption and 50-shot ammo; and the MOONLIGHT^note No, not that Moonlight..., a heavy arm-mounted laser blade with high damage output.
• Red Baron: Most pilots have a title but the best are usually labeled 'Ninebreakers.' In Verdict Day, the protagonist of V is labeled "The Dark Raven" by Maggie
• Revealing Cover Up: Crest Industries' sloppy attempt to deny that The Controller is malfunctioning in Armored Core 3 only stand to confirm the Union's theory that it is malfunctioning.
• Rocket-Powered Weapon: The Mass Blade.
• Rogue Protagonist: White Glint in For Answer, if you side against Line Ark. If you're siding with Line Ark, you fight alongside him instead.
• Scenery Gorn: The further you get in the franchise, the harder it shifts from advanced cities and industrial environments, to becoming more and more of a wasteland where everything is blatantly falling apart, sometimes even directly in the midst of ongoing warfare. And odds are if you're getting into a fight with another Raven or LYNX, the environment is about to get a bit more ruined in the process.
• Schematized Prop: And how. Every part has exact and in-depth specifications for any attribute the part applies to, even the ones no one in their right mind would use.
• Schiff One-Liner: Wynne D Fanchon from For Answer utters one to her defeated opponent in Ending A. As he sits in his destroyed mech, your opponent claims that your ideals will cause the downfall of humanity. Wynne replies: "Humanity? I don't see humanity anywhere, Otsdarva."
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: In For Answer, near the end of the story the top-ranked and corporate-affiliated LYNXes receive direct orders from The League and the heads of Collared to leave ORCA alone and cease their hostilities against them, due in part to the fact that the heads of the Corporations made a deal with ORCA to allow them to continue their activities in exchange for ORCA not directly targeting them. Wynne D. Fanchion splits from Collard after realizing that their leaders are essentially sacrificing the Cradles and millions of people in them just to save their own hides, and ignores her orders and promptly recruits several like-minded LYNXes (including you, on the League path) to confront and end the threat anyway.
• Secret A.I. Moves: Aside from enemy ACs occasionally having parts that simply don't exist, the higher-ranked Arena opponents in 3 and Silent line have ALL the optional parts equipped, including the OP-Intensify (which, by itself) takes up all the slots on a Core).
  • Proudly presents: Rai-Den, god of QB-chaining. QB, or Quick-Boosting, is basically a High-Speed Missile Dodge that can be used again and again, limited in consecutiveness only by your generator output/capacity and your reflexes. Because A.I.s get infinite energy and don't have to worry about the pesky limitations of fast-twitch muscles...
• Shmuck Bait: If a mission only pays an advance or if a mission only has a vague description and a big payment, it's guaranteed to be a trap.
• Shoot the Dog: One interpretation of For Answer Ending C. Sacrifice a hundred million innocents for a chance to save humanity? Tough choice.
  • Also, the Closed Plan ORCA wants to carry out involves Shoot the Dog. The Anti-Satellite Cannons would be used to shoot down the Assault Cells in space, autonomous weapons that fired on anything leaving the Earth's atmosphere. This would allow humanity to expand into space, and stop them from being trapped on the polluted planet. However, the anti-satellite cannons need energy to power them, the only energy source powerful enough to do so are the Arteria facilities keeping the Cradles afloat, and there millions of people within the Cradles that have never been exposed to the pollution on the surface and would die from sickness due to Kojima Exposure if the Cradles were forced to land on the ground. Unlike Ending C, where you kill everyone on the Cradles, even if the resulting death toll is large, executing the Closed Plan would not kill everyone on the Cradles, and might save everyone else.
• Shout-Out: Despite being 10 meters tall, Armored Cores have the the same feel as VOTOMS. They skid across the battlefield using a combination of boosters and feet and are highly customizable. And don't get started on Kojima Particles...
  • There's one to the Xanth novels, of all things. In the first book there's a character that uses three pseudonyms: Wynne, Dee & Fanchon. Then in this series there's the character Wynne D. Fanchon.
  • Every chapter in Armored Core 4 is named after a book by Agatha Christie.
  • The entire Stratford line in V/VD are named after characters from King Lear.
  • An Energy Blade that you can equip onto your core is the 02-DRAGONSLAYER.
• Sibling Rivalry: Rosary and Regan in V, and Castor and Pollux in 2
• Skippable Boss: In some cases you are not obligated to kill certain boss enemies you meet and are encouraged to evade them to continue the mission uninterrupted. The bosses are usually hard enough in AC that some of them are considered Hopeless Boss Fights the first time you try them, but can usually be beaten after acquiring better parts.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: As a rule, Armored Core games tend to have a cynical worldview. A recurring theme is a decaying world torn apart by conflict while civilians are forced to eke out a living under oppressive Corporations. However, some games have been more idealistic than others.
  • The first trilogy of the game (Armored Core, Project Phantasma, and Master of Arena) is not as cynical, but does not elaborate on the worldview. At least, the first game ends on a zero sum game, while PP has you successfully destroy Doomsday Organization, and Master of Arena culminates in destruction of Raven's Nest and Nine-Ball, which were manipulating events behind the scenes.
  • Both Armored Core 2 and Another Age were pretty upbeat, what with humanity successfully colonizing Mars. The threat of inter-Company conflict is present as ever, but 2 makes it pretty idealistic after defeating Leos Klein. Another Age is more ambiguous, however.
  • The Armored Core 3 series is definitely dark. First, 3 and Silent Line culminate with you freeing Humanity from the Controller's grasp and freeing the denizens of the other Layered. Then, Nexus and Last Raven slide back into cynicism with the Corporations gaining unrestrained freedom, and the world marches again to the brink of ruin as the cruel La Résistance leader's true goal of preventing further destruction of humanity by destroying the source of said misery.
    • This branches off with Ninebreaker/Formula Front in a what-if-Navis-was-never-formed and thus Nexus-never-happened? Ending the need of Ravens and turning AC combat into bloodless arena battles.
  • Armored Core 4 and For Answer hit an even farther end of cynicism. Not only has the world's government has been overrun by the Companies; the new Kojima Energy brought untold pollution to the already-resource-deprived world. In For Answer, the temporary solution was to evacuate Earth's citizens to the upper atmosphere, and the only solutions to the problem are to maintain the ultimately destructive status quo, or sacrifice millions of innocents to open up space, the last, albeit uncertain hope for mankind or to commit a cruel mercy killing.
  • Armored Core V is set in an already-scarred world with only pockets of civilization left. The Resistance aims to bring the despotic Father, ruler of the only Megapolis left in the world, down and to bring in a better reign. However, a group of enigmatic figures aid Father and actively hunt down the protagonist. After a massive debacle where no side won, the hard-earned stability of the City is gone forever, causing the land to become lawless, with roving Migrants and AC Pilots duking it out to become the best. So...more cynical then 4.
• Smug Snake: Omer Science's briefing guy, especially during the briefing for "Destroy Arms Fort Spirit of Motherwill" where he spends quite a large amount of it making sarcastic comments about the Bernard and Felix Foundation and the Arms Fort itself.
• Spell My Name With An S: "Zinovie" becoming Genobee, is likely a lost-in-translation error, as Zinovie is a legitimate Russian name. It was also possibly meant to be "Shinobi", but either way, Genobee'd still be wrong.
  • Malzel's name should have an umlaut, rendering it as Mälzel, which explains the pronunciation in the Japanese version.
• SNK Boss: One could consider Nine-Ball Seraph this since it uses parts you can't get.

• Super Drowning Skills: Played with in that it's less like you drown, and more like if your AC submerges entirely into a body of water, typically it's treated as leaving the mission zone immediately and a failure. Hover legs can passively float over water, negating the problem.
• Super Prototype: There are usually a few of them around in each game, whether it's a mech or just a weapon part. Subverted in For Answer where the player's operator comments that because they are sending out last generation Super Prototypes ORCA must be getting desperate.
• Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors: Y'see, the best way to counter the missile spam is usually machine gun fire which is then best followed up with grenade launchers or plasma weapons but this tends to not work well against skillful evasive maneuvers combined with a lightweight build. The best answer to the lightweight build tends to be missiles.
  • Played completely straight in Armored Core V. There are three types of defenses that correspond to three types of attack: Kinetic Energy (Bullets, fragmenting explosives; KE), Chemical Energy (Explosives; CE), Thermal Energy (Pure energy; TE). Any given mech has a defensive focus on one type, and a smaller defense focus on any other two. Likewise, while an AC may carry all types of weapons, concentrating on one is the most effective loadout most of the time. Thus, in matches, mechs with weapons that can exploit an enemy's glaring built-in weakness (carrying TE weapons against TE-weak opponent) usually wins the battle.
• Tank Goodness: Even if the player doesn't use a tank type AC, at least a couple opponents certainly will.
• Tank-Tread Mecha: The series offers players tank legs for building their ACs. They're slow but heavily armored and has more carry weight capacity compared to other leg types.
  • Armored Core 4 and Armored Core: For Answer allow tank legs to store oversized backup weapons like another set of chain guns or bazookas or damn near anything else in the game. Unfortunately, in a game where only speed matters (at least in Armored Core: For Answer), using tanks is usually a good way to get yourself killed.
  • Armored Core V has given this trope a hefty nod with its opening cinematic which shows a tank AC dropped from a transport chopper. It promptly gets shot by a real tank, shrugs off the attack and runs the regular tank over. From a gameplay perspective, tanks are the only weapons that can carry Ready Position weapons (heavy folding weapons that require other AC types to kneel first) and fire them at the same time, while moving. To make matters even better, there are your regular, ultra-heavy super tough and well-armed but slow defense tank builds, and the Fragile Speedster light tank builds, which strip your regular heavy tank of any defense, march into battle with high-maneuver tank tracks, and use exclusively autocannons, which enables them to actually pursue nimbler enemies, subverting the hell out of the "slow but deadly up close" tank image.
• Thanatos Gambit: The Union liaison in Armored Core 3 speculates that The Controller's "malfunctions" are actually an attempt to provoke humanity into defending itself and ultimately killing it. The people who worship The Controller as a god take it as a sign that it has decided humanity must die and gladly accept their fate.
• That's No Moon: In Armored Core 2, the Martian moon Phobos is actually a piece of Lost Technology
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: In your final fight against Zinaida from Last Raven, her AC shows signs of damage. However, all this "damage" does is gives her infinite energy and cooling, as well as the ability to travel over 550 miles per hour when boosting, which shouldn't even be possible given the weight and weapon load out.
  • In fact, most of the games are guilty of this, as many of the single player ACs you encounter have such idiot AI (such as attempting to boost through a 10 meter wide steel wall or conveniently relieving themselves of all their ammo, simply because you are on the other side of it) that FROM SOFTWARE gives them all of the aforementioned superpowers. This is most noticeable in Last Raven, of course. Depending on the story path you take, you can end up facing TWO such opponents in the SECOND mission, WITH NO WARNING WHATSOEVER. Given Last Raven's attempt at more realistic mechanics, this did not go over well.
  • It's not just Zinaida-virtually every enemy AC controlled by AI gets unlimited energy, superb aim when firing at your missiles from halfway across the map, and ignoring fog.
  • Invoked with A.I.s: why doesn't Nine-Ball need to crouch to fire his grenade launcher? Because he's an AI, and they get Human+ benefits as well.
  • Chief also does this too, using a fallen power line AS AN OVERED WEAPON.
  • Essentially all enemy units have infinite ammo and energy in missions, even if the opponent is an AC. This means that, unlike Arena matches, waiting for them to deplete all their ammo is not a viable strategy:
    • Armored Core 2's Strung has an unlimited supply of vertical missiles, in an area with poor visibility to boot.
    • Another Age's Zaltehook spams missiles and sniper rifle fire when he should have run out already.
  • While the anti-FCS rockets, decoy dispensers and dummy/ECM makers work on human players, they only keep NPC ACs from locking on. They are still deadly accurate at aiming right at you with a non-missile weapon anyway.
• The Dog Bites Back: In Armored Core 2, the once-weak Martian Government gets a sudden taste of power and promptly abuses the heck out of it. This leads to many Ravens (including their own hired guns, the Frighteners) revolting to form a Raven's Republic when they are needed the most. For Answer had the ORCA Brigade, made up of dissatisfied LYNXes and most of all Old King.
  • Anatolia's Raven used to be a Lynx of unrivaled skill, fought against Rayleonard after the company went rogue and attacked the other Corporations, and more or less took down Rayleonard singlehandedly. But then the Corporations tried to kill him by blackmailing Joshua O'Brien into attacking Anatolia and razing it to the ground, just to draw him out. And they forced O'Brien to do it by threatening to destroy his colony and everyone in it if he refused. He ended up fighting all the Corporations as Line Ark's best fighter, piloting O'Brien's former NEXT, White Glint.
• Theme Naming: Omnipresent throughout the series. What am I talking about? The pilots are referred to by either LYNX (in 4 and 4A) or Ravens (every game prior to 4) as a codename. They may have actual names, but a generic pilot is called either a LYNX or a Raven in every game.
  • Most part names in later games have this. For example in 4/4A, Leonemeccanica/Melies/Interior Union names their parts after stars and star constellations while Eqbal names their parts after Islamic terms (or Arabic-sounding gibberish, depending on the version). Algebra later settles with flower names.
  • On the other hand, Rayleonard Company's Berlioz and Supplice refers to composer Hector Berlioz and Marche Au Supplice (also a mission name), a part of his Symphonie Fantastique. This is of course, after we get past the fact that Rayleonard names their NEXT models after R&B stars: AALIYAH and ALICIA (Keys). A renamed generator part was actually named 06-RIHANNA.
  • Rosary's real name, Cordelia, her sister Regan, and Regan's bodyguard Oswald are all taken from Shakespeare's play King Lear. In a good bit of Fauxshadow, this does not lead up anywhere.
    • And Verdict Day has the head of Sirius Gloucester Stratford, it's a theme for the whole Stratford family.
• Poor Man's Substitute: A low-ranked Raven in the Arena in Armored Core 2 goes by the moniker "Hustler Two" (AC: Eight Ball). He claims to be a descendant of Hustler One, which is kind of hard to take seriously seeing as how rogue AIs don't have kids. His AC is also hilariously inferior in comparison to Nine-Ball.
• The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized: ORCA and Vertex, who is borderline Darwinist in selecting rebels against the corporations.
• There Can Be Only One: One of the endings of Armored Core: Last Raven involves your protagonist ultimately killing every other Raven in existence. Why? Look at the title. The Rival Zinaida points out that she was ultimately trying to do the same, though in her case it was to prove her superiority to other Ravens (For you, it was just business), and begrudgingly admits you are better than her before her AC explodes spectacularly. And she also CHEATED, at that.
• Timed Mission: In AC4, you pay for your NEXT's operational costs, and you're charged according to mission time. While you don't fail outright if you take too long, you can easily burn more cash than you gain if you take too long. Some missions take longer to load than they do to beat if you're going for that coveted S-Rank.
• Time Skip: Outside of the unknown ones between most of the games, there are a few explicit time skips. There is a ten year gap from 4 to For Answer (or, rather, a ten year gap between the National Dismantlement War). V has a one year gap between the prologue mission and the first mission, as well as a two year gap between the end of the story missions and the start of the order missions (which is a Guide Dang It! outside of the artbook and the official Armored Core Facebook page). Verdict Day ups the gap by having a hundred years pass between it and V, to say nothing of the unknown gap between Verdict Day and For Answer. Prior to the AC4 and ACV games, AC2 specified its time jump at 67 years from the timeframe of Master of Arena, and Another Age had a five year skip.
• Title Drop: Partial. In For Answer, Ending A, Kasumi Sumika/Serene Haze addresses the player, referring to their choices and decision to let humanity live in the Cradles as the "Answer".
  • Happens in Ending B as well. In the final mission for that route, as you begin the mission, your operator says "You've chosen your answer. Now see it through."
    • Also in Ending A, should you be defeated and the final hit was made by Thermidor, he remarks to you "Sorry, but I won't let you take this from us. But I'll be sure to remember... your Answer." Lots of talk of the elusive Answer in the ending, huh?
  • Complete: The gigantic flying fortress "Arms Fort Answerer"
  • The 'Verdict War.'
• Tomato Surprise: Somewhat rare in the fairly straightforward series, but the end of Silent Line reveals that Sara Cross of the Artificial Intelligence Office is actually IBIS, the counterpart to The Controller known as DOVE from Armored Core 3. The revelation is foreshadowed by Sara’s increasing reservations about the player's actions, and the sound of her voice shifting slowly from that of a middle-aged female to an artificial-sounding male as you explore IBIS' domain. To drive the point home, the voice starts shifting back once you destroy IBIS' defenses.
  • Also happens in Master of Arena: Your operator, Lana Nielsen, begins actively working against your best interests and eventually it's not only revealed that she's an AI, but she's actually Nine-Ball and she's merely been stringing you along this whole time and planned to kill you from the very start.
• Toxic Phlebotinum: Kojima Particles in 4/For Answer. They've been described as "radioactive" and "polluting" (the latter probably means "hard to get rid of"). A major part of the plot in For Answer is how humanity copes with the high levels of Kojima pollution due to the constant use of NEXT's.
• Transforming Mecha: Nine-Ball Seraph can legitimately transform into a plane mode. Something no other AC has replicated before, until...
  • White Glint in ''For Answer’’, though only if you don't use parts that conflict with its transformation.
    • White Glint's transformation is only seen in the intro movie and in the model kits-the only part of the transformation that happens in game play is the Overboost wings opening up.
• Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay: An overarching trend throughout most of the series, even when Armored Core 4 streamlined a couple things to make it just a smidge more accessible. The titular ACs are not only incredibly clunky and usually have poor mobility without special leg systems or their boosters, but micromanaging ammunition supplies, the damages you take, your weight, the energy systems and overheating, all have to be taken into account to survive on top of repairs and ammo costs after each mission.
  • The best example is boosting: when moving side-to-side along the ground, your energy gauge will deplete slowly (depending on a number of factors), but the moment you try to take into the air, it plummets if you don't have a good generator and/or don't take your weight into account, as it should with trying to lift a giant hunk of metal death. 4 and For Answer eased this by making the NEXTs widely capable of flight and fast movement all around as boosting is practically your standard movement; it's the micro-adjusting smaller boosts that spike your energy gauge, and flight doing a steady drain of energy, that you have to manage.
  • Weapons fire also takes into account your machine's momentum. Lock-on missiles are not smart enough as is to evade ramming into the environment, but if you're running to the side or even boosting, entire piles of ammunition can veer wildly off-target unless you take into account your positioning to better drive your shots in the enemy's direction, which then produces a higher risk of taking return fire because you're likely not dodging their gunfire as sharply as you should be.
  • There are no mid-mission ammo refills or ways to replenish your armor points unless the mission itself is a multi-part affair with loading screens in-between, and even then that isn't assured. While 4 and beyond made it so that arm weapons can reload whether by running empty to force it or not using the weapon for several seconds, everything you take into a mission is what you have to use for the rest of it. Went into a Marathon Level with a dueling build that has weapons with too few shots to last all mission long? Better load your save and spec for the mission properly.
  • Critical Existence Failure may be in effect for your Armor Points, or AP, but not for the parts of your AC; take too much damage to the limbs and mobility can be crippled, weapons can be destroyed, and your systems may end up worthless from too many shots to the head or core. It's entirely possible to end up scrounging yourself to the end of a mission as an almost-worthless pile of scrap, or fail another because an enemy AC hit you so hard that you lost a vital piece of equipment and cost you the chance of a turnaround.
• Unstable Equilibrium: Nabeshima discussed this in an interview over V. Specifically, he noted that most battles are "centered on how well you could dodge your opponent's attacks while firing away and gradually whittling down his AP... That's fun, of course, but once one side has an AP advantage over the other, it became difficult to come back from that. Overed Weapons are intended to dramatically change that battle balance."
• Updated Re-release: Armored Core 3, Silent Line and Last Raven (but no Nexus for some reason) were re-released for the PSP with the title Portable tacked onto the end. All three games featured brand new parts and arena fights not found in the PS2 versions of the games.
• Useless Useful Spell: Assault Armor does a nice little chunk of damage and can erase an opponent's PA. However, it also erases your PA even if you miss, its range is quite short, and it's utterly useless against Arms Forts and mobile fortresses. It is however, useful against blade-build NEXTs.
• Villain Protagonist: For Answer, Ending C, is the full extent of this. Numerous missions throughout the series are a lesser degree, though, as a Raven or Lynx pilot is generally in it for the pay, and will commonly take jobs that may even involve things like slaughtering a worker protest because a corporation doesn't feel like capitulating.
• Wake-Up Call Boss: The arena in most games tends to be relatively easy until you run into one enemy specifically designed to stop you cold.
  • Cube in 4A. Piloting the fastest AC in the game and equipped with Primal Armor eating machine guns. It doesn't help he is capable of quick boosting so rapidly that just keeping him in front of you long enough to take a shot with most weapons is hard, to say nothing of actually landing a hit. You would never expect such an infuriating enemy to be ranked 18th out of 30.
• Walking Wasteland: Any NEXT is this due to the ubiquitous use of Kojima Particles in their Primal Armor and possibly weapons.
• Wall Jump: Added in V.
• Was Once a Man: The Foundation leader, which might be "Forgotten Day's" Isaac, and the mercenaries of Reaper Squad, including Maggie when she does her Face–Heel Turn in VD.

• Weaksauce Weakness: The Spirit of Motherwill is beaten by destroying its weapons (because the explosions cause uncontrollable internal fires, a rather glaring engineering fault for a weapons platform), Stigro has absolutely no resistance to energy blades (which generally do a huge amount of damage when they land).
  • Arguably, BFF probably didn't think anything would be able to get close enough to Spirit of Motherwill to destroy its weapons in the first place, considering it can precisely hit a relatively small NEXT moving at least Mach 2 (You can hit as high as 2600kmph with the Vanguard Overed Boost.)
  • Pretty much any Arms Fort can be destroyed in one motion by any AC that has two energy blades and has a four-legged chassis.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Line Ark is an aversion. While they were branded revolutionaries by the League, they're actually very democratic and accept people from all walks of life. This approach however has led them into a massive Motive Decay. Line Ark's successor of sorts, ORCA in ''For Answer’’, is this.
• We Will Spend Credits in the Future: Interestingly, only stateside editions use "Credits". Japanese versions use COAM instead; short for Company Assured Money^note An Engrishy translation of 企業報酬通貨 (Kigyou Houshu Tsuuka).
  • Credits are called "Au" in 5, implying gold is being directly traded but it still follows the trope.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Your operator, who has stood by you through countless missions in For Answer can't help but register her disgust at the choices your pilot makes that lead to Ending C. The enemies who appear to kill you and your accomplice after the fated mission also lash out at you with the following, starting with your Operator herself.
  "Please accept my apologies. That briefing you saw was manufactured. This is the end of the road for you. I think you understand why."
  "Your actions were clearly deliberate, there's no point in trying to reason with you."
  "Maybe it's just an animal. Can it even understand what we're saying?"
  "You think you're some kind of one man army? You think it's your right to choose who lives and dies?" ^note Though this line is spoken by your co-conspirator, Old King, which implies that he's accusing the other five of being no different from you at this point.
  "You kill too many."
  "To end up facing you like this... Too bad. You walked right into my trap. Stand still so I can cut you down."- This includes Kasumi Sumika, your operator, who joins in on the attempt to kill you on Hard Mode.
  • Your operator in For Answer also expresses disapproval over other actions, as she is obviously less than happy if you destroy Megalis, the sole power source of Line Ark.
• Wolverine Publicity: Nine-Ball is the series’ unofficial mascot despite appearing in only four out of fifteen games. and his cameo boss appearance in Another Century's Episode R, and any Armored Core fan worth their salt will recognize him. To a lesser extent, White Glint has taken this role as well.
• Word Salad Title: Even in context some of the games titles are just weird. By way of example, the thirteenth game's full name is "Armored Core 4: For Answer". Say that out loud and see how it sounds.

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Mission objective achieved. Systems switched to normal mode.

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