I revisited Armored Core recently for a bit of nostalgia, and after completing it, I realized I'd very much like to see a TAS of the game. There aren't any publications on this site for the game, but I did find a TAS on nicovideo.jp by JAX, split into 4 parts:
- https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm16482924
- https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm16590860
- https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm17077051
- https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm17273631
I think the TASer was having desync issues based on some terrible Google translations of the subtitles, which is why they had to do four movies, starting from a save file.
I was thinking about doing a TAS for this game too since I think there's a lot of potential, but I have some reservations about the game choice. The fastest possible route through the game involves repeatedly aborting missions as soon as they start to cause the game story to advance. Then you just finish 3 missions and you're done. That would be acceptable for a Vault submission, but it's pretty boring. An entertaining speedrun falls into the "No abort/fail" category, which means we're in Moon territory now.
What does everyone (anyone?) think about what would constitute an entertaining run of this game? The Japanese player linked above spends a lot of time changing his AC configuration and finishing missions in slow/non-optimal ways in the name of entertainment. He also chose some particularly slow missions to finish that he didn't have to. Before I discovered JAX's speedrun, I was thinking of trying to record a TAS that still aimed for being as fast as possible, but without using traditional speedrun loadouts, like the gatling gun arms, and instead use weapons that are much harder to use normally like rockets, mines, and laser blades. The gatling gun arms are so ludicrously powerful that even with perfect rocket aim, the gatling guns are still faster at killing in general, just not very interesting to watch.
After watching JAX's TAS though, I wonder if an AC TAS wouldn't be interesting enough without a lot of playing around like he did. Something else that concerns me about a TAS for the game is that it would be hard to determine what "optimal" actually is in this game since there's so much latitude in the approaches you can take to finish missions.
For reference, here's the world record (??) any% no fail speedrun of the game:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/246088235
Just to test the waters, I managed to finish the qualifier mission in under 10 seconds by using a lot of AI and luck manipulation to get the Storks to land right next to each other, and to get large critical multipliers on laser blade swings. It's not too unorthodox but it is certainly much faster than I've ever seen it done.