::: spoiler Mechposting So I finally beat AC2 last night. The game kicked my ass. It took me like 3 runs to figure out which weapons were worth using and building around. I basically tried everything and eventually settled on heavy biped since I hadn't tried it yet and thought it'd be fun.

Those failed attempts were really fun though, and I love how they narratively fit the game's story. For context, in AC2 the first dozen or so missions are pretty simple merc work like in AC1. But mission 13 has Earth special forces (Frighteners) arrive on Mars and then shit hits the fan for the next dozen missions. The major corporations are in an outright war against the puppet corp that's run by the Earth government and the Frighteners go around and fucking them up. And this is reflected by a big difficulty spike and several frightener ACs appearing in missions that are already long for the entire rest of the game. Which, for my ill-equipped early attempts, led to me dying. And I love that, it was great ludonarrative for me. It genuinely felt like this was something more difficult than regular merc work once everything went wrong and the Frighteners were, at least for the first few fights, genuinely threatening.

In general I really like 2's narrative. I do wish that there was a second 'route' of sorts like AC1 had where you could side with one corp over the other. I had played it assuming there'd be a corpo route and an Earth route but ultimately the game ends on an Earth victory no matter what with the major corps destroyed. But I can still respect the choice as a way to show how a single merc's choices are futile in the grander scheme, especially when one side had better skills and equipment.

I also really like Klein's character. He's imploed to be the protag of the previous game who became jaded after getting his revenge and seeing that, while Earth did get a government to keep corporations in check, Mars just recreated the old problems. Only on Mars they're more extreme due to the lack of a Hustler-One AI to keep them in a perpetual stalemate. (Another reason I like the war aspect). So he essentially becomes a fascist, wanting to become a replacement for Hustler-One to guide humanity. And he derides the main character's rebelliousness while acknowledging that it's something his younger self would have done. I should honestly do a proper political analysis of these games sometime since, while they're simple, I think it would be really fun.

So! Onto my silly little roleplays. This character was Nora, she's muscular with long red hair and is the absolute worst. I initially RPed her as though she were libertarian, and so I went the corpo route most of the game. By the end I shifted towards her narrative being that she's instead more concerned about Martian self-determination in the liberal way. I hate her and you should too, but she was fun to roleplay in my silly little head.

Her mech was Titan Mk.II, because Titan Mk.I got replaced midway through. This thing is heavy, so heavy I literally couldn't add anything else and my movement and turning was so fucked that I was better off shooting things behind me than trying to turn ever. It was very fun though, it uses a grenade launcher and a pursuit missile pod (literally a drone that shoots out a volley of missiles that I don't have to aim) so it had very high burst but would die in prolonged missions. But it would also take forever to die because it had so much defense. Also the hazard stripe emblem was a stroke of genius from me ngl.

Explaining to Kazuma Kiryu that you're transgender and what that means ASMR

@[email protected] OKAY im glad you were joking i was a little unsure LOL it was a good bit