Hello, my friends and loved ones! Thank you for reading this open  letter. I have some news I’m very excited to share with you all, and I’m  sure you’ll be glad to hear it:

As your token autistic friend,  I’ve moved on to a new special interest, and it is an even more obscure  and impenetrable video game than the last! That’s right, the latest  media property to replace my entire personality is the entire Armored  Core series by FromSoftware.

Obviously  even those of you who don’t play video games will recognize that name  from one of my more “basic” fixations, Dark Souls, due to my habit of  conveying large amounts of information about it with little to no  prompting.

Just because the series is a main fixture of nearly every debate  about accessibility in video games and many of you shy away from action  games in general, let alone famously hard ones, doesn’t mean my  encyclopedic knowledge thereof has to go to waste.

Well, the good  news is that most of the Armored Core games are even more inflexibly  brutal, and all of them have even more intricate-yet-opaque RPG  elements, so we have years of unsolicited infodumping ahead of us.

I’m  sure you also remember my playing through Fire Emblem: Thracia 776  earlier this year and routinely initiating conversations with you,  people who have never played it and almost certainly will never  play it, about the most incomprehensibly minute details of its  mechanics. Really, I’d like to take this chance to say I appreciated  that you were all equally fascinated by my observations about why the  game’s notorious high difficulty is brilliant because it’s  malevolently unfair. It may be that none of you will ever need to know  the many levels on which the unique Capture mechanic informs the entire  game’s balance, but it was a joy to make sure you knew anyway. I look  forward to sounding similarly unhinged attempting to explain the  absurdly complex formulae behind Armored Core: Nexus’s overheating  mechanic.

And don’t worry that I’ll be distracted by my non-gaming interests,  because my very normal project of playing through all sixteen games in  the Armored Core series back-to-back dovetails nicely with relatively  accessible fandoms–even shared ones, with some of you– like Mobile Suit  Gundam. In fact, practically any conversation about Gundam can be easily  derailed when something in it inevitably reminds me of something in an  Armored Core game. Obviously I’m not talking about something as obvious,  pedestrian, and potentially relatable as simply pointing out the many  mecha designs in the games inspired by Gundam, such as the CEL-240 IBIS  boss from Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon clearly being a Qubeley from  Zeta or ZZ Gundam. I can spot references as painfully specific, yet  equally shallow, as the Japanese name for the Human Plus concept from  the first few games being the same as that for Cyber-Newtypes.

Hey,  I wasn’t counting them when I said sixteen earlier, but did you know  that there were multiple Armored Core Mobile games in Japan? In the mid-2000s? With full, high-complexity 3D combat, just like the PS2 games, but for fucking flip phones? Like, how, right? Why? I’m not even being ironic about finding that interesting enough to  share, it’s one of the most god damn bonkers pieces of gaming trivia  I’ve ever heard.

But don’t  worry, friends. Even if you somehow can’t get into my constant ranting  about this current hyperfixation, you can always hold out for next year,  when I get into fucking Etrian Odyssey just to teach you a lesson.

Sincerely, Raven. Actually crazy coincidence but did you know that’s what they call all the pilots in–