- Alternative Character Interpretation: Was The Controller really malfunctioning, or was it deliberately provoking humanity to break free of its dependence to it and return to the surface? The Armored Core 10 Works Complete File reference book even brings up the later interpretation in a cheeky "Some people have suggested that..." way.
- Even Better Sequel: Armored Core 2 was already a solid start for the new generation, and 3 improves upon it with more polished gameplay and a smoother difficulty curve. Until Armored Core V, it was the best-selling installment and is often recommended as the first game any new fan should check out to see what Armored Core is all about.
- Game-Breaker: While Fromsoft did their best to rebalancing the game's old staple like the KARASAWA and some, including locking the Human Plus program behind the endgame, and making heat a little bit more dangerous compared to the previous game, there are still a few things that you can freely exploit to make the game easier.
- The first arena combatant you fought has the same equip load to your starting AC, and combined with the wonky A.I. you got yourself a free win. Beat him and retrieve the dual missile pod from the mail, sell all of the unnecessary parts (like the radar) including that missile pods, then get yourself the MWG-MG/1000 and KWG-HZL50 (along with a decent generator, booster, and alternative head unit), and you basically have enough to steamroll the entire game. The combo between the machine gun and howitzer will shred most arena combatants with relative ease, and only specific super tanky and/or mobile combatants like Royal Mist will pose a real challenge.
- The CWG-MG-500 is arguably one of the most practical, if not the most practical weapon in the game. It has a wide lockbox, highly manageable recoil, decent ammo capacity, strong damage, and you get it for a measly 29,000 credits right at the beginning of the game. Another practical gun is the MWG-RF/220, which trades fire rate and ammo capacity for extra raw damage, accuracy, and cheaper bullets. Just like the machine gun, this rifle is also available in the shop right from the get-go for the same price. In either case, both guns prove that reliability is all you need.
- The CROW extension. What it does is to basically jam your opponent's FCS and prevent them from locking on you temporarily when activated. It doesn't sound much, but for some reason the enemy AC will stop attacking you once it's active, meaning that you can just freely take potshots at your opponent when the jamming device is active.
- The Turn Extension lets you turn quickly at the press of a button, allowing even the slowest ACs to reliably aim at faster foes.
- The MLC-Trident is one of the most versatile legs in the game for its excellent cooling, great defenses, impressive load capacity, good boosting, and surprising mobility even for a Tank Leg. This allows AC players to create powerful builds without sacrificing bulk, energy, or cooling efficiency, and these legs are available right from the start.
- The Abandoned Factory map in Arena battles, for the reason that the enemy has serious difficulty when traversing because of the small layout. Your opponent will almost always trying to ram the wall facing the wall simply because they were able to lock you in your lockbox across the wall and will have a hard time trying to readjust away from it once you're no longer in their lockbox. You can simply stand around a little longer in your starting position, then swerve around to your opponent's back and take some cheap shot, if not running them down to 0 AP.
- Even worse than Abandoned Factory is Parking Lot, whose extremely low height completely neuters ACs that rely on flight or vertical missiles while the abundant number of pillars provide ample cover against missiles.
- Hover legs significantly reduce the difficulty of practically 90% of all Arena fights when fighting on wide-open terrain.
- Goddamned Boss:
- The Leviathan isn't exactly a hard boss, but the arena you fight it is deceptively small, and the boss had tendency to go out of bounds to areas where you can't go lest you instantly fail the mission. Due to the nature of the battlefield, touching water (besides of using hover legs) means instant death, and the boss loves to submerge down to avoid getting hit every now and then whilst poking you with missiles and respawnable orbital cores, makes an annoyingly tedious boss fight.
- The final arena opponent in the original PS2 version, Exile, is very fast and maneuverable, but he's neither durable nor is his damage output good. What he has going for him is his CROW extension which prevents you from locking onto him, which means he's beaten either by manually aiming down weapons or, more likely, by waiting at a range for him to use all of the charges on his CROW extension and finishing him off.
- Polished Port: 3, Silent Line and Last Raven were all ported to the Playstation Portable, where they suffer a bit from the lack of L2/R2 buttons and a second analog method (though dedicated fan VanLaser was able to mod in the functionality
), but are still fully playable with some effort. Extra parts and fights were also added to these versions, as was being able to import your AC from the first two games into Last Raven unlike the PS2 entries. While most fans would recommend the originals, they're absolutely playable and admirable porting work. - Sequel Difficulty Drop: The game is noticeably easier than the previous installment, thanks to somewhat smoother control feedback even before they start using right analog for camera control, plenty of easy-to-access game breakers that you can get as soon as you start the game, and several other features that you can exploit to your hearts content. Silent Line rectifies this by amping up the difficulty considerably, though still comparatively easier to the game they attempted to reboot off.
- That One Boss: Several.
- The Massive MT from the penultimate mission is one of the harder bosses in the game. It has three attacks; clusters of heat-inducing missiles that will fry your AC like a tomahawk ribeye, slower yet bigger missiles that are twice as devastating, and a rapid fire laser cannon when you're going up close. Worse yet, once you hurt it enough, it will split in two and adding another entity that will lob high-powered grenade rounds from the skies. One of the prerequisite of the extra part of this mission is that it requires player to destroy the MT without the help of a Consort, while the other part is obtained somewhere at the edge of the map. You also want to destroy the upper half of the MT first before the lower half if you want to unlock the "firing back-mounted weapons without kneeling" upgrade for OP-INTENSIFY. This extra condition makes the tedious task of obliterating the MT even more challenging.
- In the Arena:
- In general, any Arena opponent armed with the CWC-CNG-300 chaingun or grenade launchers is a major source of headache for novice players whose dodging skills and generators are not yet up to the task of reliably dodging them until the ammo runs out.
- Ranked up a notch further by Arena opponents packing support missile extensions, overwhelming even the best anti-missile extension parts in the game by sheer volume to ensure rapid overheating of whatever they're shooting at.
- Royal Mist's Kaiser is using a heavyweight leg setup, but he's deceptively fast and armed to teeth with parts that allows him to basically heat up your AC like a tandoor oven, not to mention really durable. If you've been steamrolling the arena with the Machine Gun + Howitzer combo, then Royal Mist will be a massive roadblock that you had to play around.
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