Any fan of the (in)famous hit anime Neon Genesis Evangelion will have lots of different arguments evangelizing why they may love, hate, love/hate or get embarrassingly aroused by the befuddling and polarizing 26 episode series. Painting with broad brushstrokes, the arguments can generally be summarized and categorized as follows:

• “Ugh… Shinji, Asuka and just about every other character in this show are just the worst.”
• “Remember how awesome it was when that giant red robot wantonly hopscotched from ship to ship while fighting that aircraft carrier-sized monster?”

Think about it. Wouldn’t it be great to jump a mecha across a fleet of ships (or even a stadium-sized land-battleship), ripping them apart, turret by turret, with a laser sword? Wouldn’t it be great to do that without hours of depression-inducing, awkward teen dialogue?

Look no further than Armored Core: Master of Arena.

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The third in the famous Armored Core third-person, giant robot combat simulator series, Master of Arena is the last game in the series to feature on the PlayStation original console. Fittingly, this game represents the best the series has to offer on the console.

Like the first Armored Core game, Master of Arena encourages you to go through a campaign where various mercenary contracts are accepted to gain cash and parts for your expensive, building-sized murder-machine of a hobby (called an Armored Core, or AC). Like Evangelion at times though, the game’s dialogue is also groan-worthy.

The personalization in this game is incredible. For front-end, there are tons of pre-loaded color templates, the ability to paint your AC in staggering detail, and even a pixelated painter for creating a personally hand-made emblem to tote on your bot. For back-end, this game has 41,325 possible combinations in assembling a body structure alone (and that’s not counting boosters, generators, an arsenal of weapons, and more). The most impressive part of all this being that all these choices are presented simply in a tack-on-the-pieces-as-you-go style that you’re allowed to quickly test out in your very own combat garage, so you’re never too overwhelmed.

However, the most commendable aspect of this game is the fluidity with which your AC runs, glides and flies around open environments (Well, if you opted for putting together anything except your own land-battleship of an AC…). This fact is thrust on you as the missions go from simply destroying small opponents, to climbing on and tearing apart grand battle structures like fleets, land-battleships and sprawling defense towers and castles.

This surprising freedom of movement is further realized when campaign missions shift toward showdowns with mercenary AC pilots similarly working their nine-to-five for the “other guys”. Like the second Armored Core game, Master of Arena features a dueling arena where the fluid dodging and weaving become a captivating flow of one-on-one, high-adrenaline fencing. Unlike the second game, Master of Arena integrates the duels into the campaign, pushing you to realize the true potential of this game. Additionally, Master of Arena offers an entire second disk dedicated to extra dueling options and specialized leagues offering an astounding replay value for the dedicated adrenaline-junky fan base.

What will invariably be the greatest counterargument to the praise I have piled onto this game is that it unfortunately pre-dates standardized integration of analog stick controls in PlayStation games. This means that while you intuitively use the L1 and R1 buttons to strafe left and right, you have to get used to using the L2 and R2 for counter-intuitively looking up and down. Although you do not need these last two buttons to get well across the majority of the game’s campaign, you’ll never keep up with the flash-of-the-blade quick reflexes demanded of the final missions and higher level arena fighters.

It becomes second nature with a conscious investment in learning, but will often leave you cursing your controller when the already decent AI flawlessly homes in on you and tears your AC a new circuit board. While frustrating to those seeking a mindless time kill, I found this controller setup pushing me to hone my skills beyond the fourth wall, and keeping the game challenging and developmental well beyond the campaign and first arena.

Do you have what it takes to become the Master of Arena?