FromSoftware is best known for its genre-defining Dark Souls series, which itself was preceded by Demon’s Souls and led eventually to the groundbreaking Bloodborne and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. That legacy has continued nearly unbroken since, with the next flagship game from the studio being Elden Ring, a game assumed to be in the same vein. But before FromSoft was known for making these third-person, combat-heavy action RPGs, they had a bigger claim to fame: the mecha action series Armored Core. And it’s been far too long since Armored Core has made an appearance.
While FromSoftware today has become inseparably linked with their “Soulsborne” games (and with the legacy of the now so-called “Soulslike” genre), their most prolific franchise - prior to Dark Souls pushing them into the larger popular consciousness - was Armored Core. The series did so well for them that it saw a release almost every year from its first entry in 1997 all the way to the 15th release in the series, 2013’s Armored Core: Verdict Day.
But after the success of Demon’s Souls for the PS3 in 2009, everything changed for FromSoftware. This new evolution of the formula they’d set out to create with King’s Field took an unsuspecting audience by total surprise. An underground sensation, word began to spread rapidly around both press and popular gaming circles, and FromSoftware would capitalize on their sleeper hit with spiritual successor Dark Souls in 2011. While 2013 would see the release of a last entry into the Armored Core series, the juggernaut that Dark Souls became meant there would be plenty of swords and sorcery in FromSoftware’s future, but nary a mech in sight.
Armored Core’s Mech Combat Needs To Return
Yet Armored Core is the series that really brought FromSoftware their development chops. From a small software company that initially made office software in the mid-eighties, their earliest forays into video games came with the first King’s Field in 1994, one of the first RPGs available for Sony’s then-new PlayStation. Though several games in the series would go down in history as cult classics, FromSoftware would truly find their stride under the design skills of Shoji Kawamori with Armored Core.
The first several games would become breakout hits that put FromSoftware on the map. A success in both their native Japan and in the West, Armored Core stood apart from its competition with speedy combat, tons of customization, and a deeply satisfying gameplay loop of combat and upgrading. Hidetaka Miyazaki, the game design celebrity who would become a household name after Dark Souls and eventually become president of FromSoftware, even worked as a director on several Armored Core titles, beginning with Armored Core 4 in 2006. The infamous Patches of the Souls games even got his start there.
Despite their long devotion to a franchise that spawned so many sequels, there really hasn’t been a return since Dark Souls. As they grew from a scrappy studio trying out different ideas across a spectrum of games (including adventure and survival horror) to an industry titan that’s dominated their particular action-RPG niche, their mecha action hits like Metal Wolf Chaos and Chromehounds seem to have fallen out of the popular zeitgeist, and it won’t be long before Armored Core must necessarily follow suit.
Yet with the kind of talent and capital that they now command, there’s no doubt that a new Armored Core game would feature a whole new scope of production and gameplay ideas. This alone would make it something to anticipate, but FromSoftware has learned a lot about gameplay, world-building, and crafting a compelling narrative in the eight years since its last entry in the series, making it impossible to resist imagining what a mecha action saga from the studio could be like today.
If nothing else, it’s at least certain that they haven’t totally forgotten about the franchise, as despite losing some of the people who worked on the series prior, producer Masanori Takeuchi discussed Armored Core and the possible future of the franchise in an interview with Destructoid in 2019, and while it may not be enough for true fans of the franchise, it does at least provide some assurance that a return to earlier hits could be on FromSoft’s radar after they finally finish Elden Ring.
Source: Destructoid