Armored Core: Last Raven

Armored Core: Last Raven closes out the line of entries FromSoftware released for PlayStation 2 since Another Age, and it does so in the darkest tone of the entire series. The world is devastated by years of wars between corporations, resources are running out, and the player, as an independent AC pilot, finds themselves in the middle of a final reckoning over who will extract whatever remains from the ruins of civilization. The tone is rawer and more hopeless than in previous entries, which is reflected in the mission design, the enemies, and the visual style of the game itself, where rusted structures, abandoned cities, and crumbling factories dominate over the clean corporate halls of earlier entries.

In terms of gameplay, Last Raven tightened its demands on the player – enemies are more aggressive and precise, boss fights require precise AC tuning against a specific threat, and the game offers several different endings depending on which faction the player sides with during the campaign. The robot-building system received its final polish for the whole PlayStation 2 era, with a huge number of parts accumulated across the entire generation of previous titles, so the possible combinations reached their peak and the player finally had truly free choice of playstyle. This is exactly why Last Raven is often called the most demanding and mechanically most mature entry of the entire PS2 era of the series. A player who came from previous entries with a favorite build often finds it's no longer enough here and has to rebuild it from scratch just to stand a chance against the campaign's final battles.

As the last major entry before the series moved to PlayStation 3, Last Raven also serves as a summary of everything tried out in the series on PlayStation 2, and at the same time as the difficulty benchmark the series kept even in the following console generations.

Why play it: For seasoned Armored Core players looking for the toughest and most balanced battles of the entire PlayStation 2 era, with a story that offers no easy victories or reconciliation.