Back around the time of Armored Core 2, there were a fair few issues with the game not only in terms of its pretty awful frame rate but also in regards to the unbalanced parts list when it came to human versus. One part in particular, the Karasawa Mk2, was cheese incarnate. In the original Armored Core the Karasawa was a meaty laser rifle that fired needle like shots of immense power, to the extent that it could kill an enemy AC with around 10 shots (it had a total capacity of 50 in case you’re curious). In Armored Core 2 it kept the shot potency but also increased the shot velocity and also had an additional stun for each shot. This meant all you had to do was land the first shot and the Mk2 would take care of the rest.

Fast forward to today and the upcoming PSP port of Armored Core 3 Silent Line now features an almost identical inclusion of that dreadful weapon (though with a slightly reduced ammo capacity). The weird thing is that Silent Line already had it’s own Karasawa, so having another is a bit of an overkill. Whether this will unbalance the new port as much as it did with Armored Core 2 remains to be seen however.

Back in the 80’s when the early iterations of Battledroids (then later Battletech) surfaced, many of the designs had been not very surreptitiously lifted from various anime shows. Notably that of Dougram and Macross. FASA were suitably sued for their troubles. That said, over the years FASA did their best to throw several olive branches in the direction of the anime industry. Especially when they hired Shoji Kawamori to pen the designs for the Japanese edition of Battletech.

Fast forward to the recent trailer for the MechWarrior reboot featuring a Warhammer (or a destroid Tomahawk from Macross in case you’re wondering) and it seems that this has opened up the legal can of worms all over again. Considering the original case was with FASA it is interesting that the same designs can come under dispute when the rights are owned by another institution.

Personally, I don’t understand why they just didn’t get Hajime Katoki, Yutaka Izubuchi or Junji Okubo to pen new designs for the reboot and be done with it. At the very least they’d have had mecha that at least looked awesome.