At the time, most reviewers considered the series as a whole stale and unnecessarily obtuse. Fans of the series didn't really see the difficulty as an issue, and newcomers to the series had no way to consider it stale, so those still became fan favorites.

These are actually pretty high for the Armored Core series. Armored Core 3 has a 74/100 aggregated on Metacritic, For Answer has a 62, and Verdict Day has a 66, just to name a few of the fan favorites.