Fyonn
did their best!
Here's my Assault Suits Appreciation Posts for Assault Suits games and games like Assault Suits games because I recently played a bunch of them. And I was inspired by Peklo's recent Shadow Tower post. And also I'm procrastinating on building an Assault Suits model kit. Stick around for (or just scroll to) the end of the post for some screenshots of non-trivial to access Leynos 2 stuff I haven't been able to find anywhere else.
If you're unfamiliar, Assault Suits is a very specific subgenre of 2D mecha action games. Honestly they're such a non-presence that calling it a subgenre is a stretch, but they've got a set of shared features uncommon to most 2D action games that they feel distinctive to me. Broadly, the elements that define them are a slow default movement speed combined with a "dash" mode with high speed and heavy momentum, a large number of aiming angles (at least 8, usually 16+) paired with a lock-aim-and-facing button, a lack of enemy contact damage, hard-to-handle zero gravity controls that respect the laws of inertia to varying degrees, character dialogue that doesn't interrupt gameplay, and enemy rosters that include similarly-capable enemy mecha with AI instead of more basic behaviors you'd see from even other action platformer enemies. Assault Suits games tend to be fairly short single-session affairs, so it's an example of a subgenre where it's not that much of an investment to have played every available example. Here's all of them I know of, from my favorite to least favorite.
#1) Assault Suits Valken (SNES, rerelease just came out on Switch)
The most kick ass of them all. Valken has long stages and dangerous enemies that encourage a very methodical and defensive play style, a play style that benefits heavily from the most busted shield mechanics in the subgenre. The only changes I would make to Valken if I could is just control streamlining - Valken introduces melee that deals more damage if you're dashing but it doesn't have the dedicated punch button that would really make that shine. While I'm at it, I would happily trade the 100% 360 degree immunity to damage that the V-Shield provides for allowing you to block in the air. If you've seen a whole pile of Gundam you're gonna be Leonardo DiCaprio-pointing at the screen for basically the entire game. As a note, the original English release of this game, Cybernator has a compromised story presentation for unknowable reasons (outside of one late-game scene), and the Switch release restores everything. If you've got a Switch, there's no real reason to play the SNES version anymore.
#2) Assault Suits Leynos 2 (Saturn)
An excellent game with initially incomprehensible design decisions. Being a Saturn game it does this neat thing where your view zooms in and out to reflect your weapons' maximum range. Unfortunately, unless you do spectacularly well in Mission 1 (hint: of your starting weapons, your punch deals a TON more damage than you think it probably would), some of your weapon classes will be stuck with bizarrely tiny ranges until you're halfway through the game. While Leynos 2 lets you turn it off and use the traditional manual aiming angles, it's pretty clearly built around a new lock-on system that will feel a little stifling up until you've learned most of the Tricks to it. Once you get a handle on it, the system facilitates you fighting the extremely high speed space battles while navigating solely via your radar. That might sound awful to be staring at a tiny radar while the majority of your view is detrimentally chaotic and insufficiently large, but if you've seen the scenes of Gunbuster this is evoking you already know this is in fact sick as hell. Biggest flaw here is that Leynos 2 rewards you with new equipment based on performance in missions, so if you do poorly early on that will probably continue. The second biggest flaw kind of justifies this - Leynos 2 is like 40 minutes long from start to finish, so it's not a huge burden to just keep trying. Leynos 2 has a SHMUP-esque second loop upon completing the game that locks the game's dynamic difficulty adjustment to the comically aggressive maximum level and also turns off further equipment unlocks. This seems bizarrely player hostile, but the end game loads you up with participation trophies that are so powerful that it's pretty much impossible to not completely outclass the second loop anyway.
#3) Front Mission: Gun Hazard (SNES)
Every wanzer in Gun Hazard has triangles instead of legs. I can't unsee it and now you can't either. Gun Hazard trades hand-placed enemies and unique scenario design out for guys spawning off screen and, uh, roughly 80 more missions than this subgenre tends to have. There are only five playable wanzers, but there's a whole load of equipment and subweapons available so the Front Mission-style customization isn't entirely absent. Thanks to enemy wanzer explosions damaging you, their deep love of getting all up in your business in the process of flanking you, and their ability to spawn off-screen behind you, it definitely feels like there's a degree of unavoidable attrition built into Gun Hazard that the other games would balk at. That said, Gun Hazard also gives you access to repair items you can use mid-mission and a surprisingly large cast of AI back-up you can bring along with you. The AI's smart in sometimes surprising ways, too. For example, Clark in the light blue/green wanzer in the screenshot above wouldn't advance past Albert in the beige/red wanzer because Clark's AI knows he can use Albert's shield to protect himself from enemy fire. What Gun Hazard loses in comparison to Valken's excellent level design and Leynos 2's dedication to novelty, it gains in letting its storytelling and incredible soundtrack breathe. If you want to get into the subgenre, Gun Hazard is a good place to start - thanks to how long it is you'll have plenty of time to acclimate to the subgenre's strategies and control quirks.
#4) Hardcore Mecha (PS4, Switch, Steam)
Hardcore Mecha really ups the ante in terms of presentation with gorgeous in-engine cutscenes. The premise of the game's design is taking Super Robot Wars aesthetics and making that an action game you can play. The campaign sticks you with one particular Gundam-y mech, the Thunderbolt seen above, but completing the campaign unlocks a R-Type Final-esque mode where you can unlock and upgrade a whole pile of different revisions of all the mechs appearing the game's campaign and multiplayer. There's a storytelling focus here that's unlike the rest of the subgenre - it feels more like a Metal Gear Solid-style story than the broad-strokes war story angle of Masaya's Assault Suits or Gun Hazard's RPG-ier perspective. I'd rate this one higher but that would feel disingenuous at the moment since I've yet to complete its campaign due to my discomfort with its controls.
#5) Assault Suits Leynos (2016) (PS4, Steam)
Assault Suits Leynos (2016) is a remake of Assault Suit Leynos for the Sega Mega Drive, available on Genesis as Target Earth. It takes the missions from the original Leynos and expands on them using Valken's mechanics as a base. The mission structure does not appear to be changed in any way, but enemies are placed instead of streaming in nigh-infinitely, you can block (even in mid-air), etc. In my opinion it's the easiest of this style of game, but it's also using the weird and demanding reward unlock structure that all the Leynos games do, so there's a reason to retry mission to trounce them even more efficiently anyway. The game also features Classic Mode, which has AI and enemy patterns more like the original version of the game, you know, in case you hate yourself but not quite so much that you don't want a shield. I have an in-progress model kit of the AS-5E3 Leynos from this game sitting right next to me.
#6) Armored Hunter Gunhound EX (Steam but sadly delisted, non-EX version on PSP but not in English)
Armored Hunter Gunhound EX is a practically unchanged port of a PSP game of the same name. Unlike the rest of these, it has voice acting! Oh yeah, you also aren't allowed to buy it right now due to publishing issues. This game has some neat particularities - you've got a Gun button and a Punch button, but instead of a Hold-To-Shield button you've got a Hold-To-Heavy-Weapons button that replace your Gun and Punch with significantly heavier firepower. You've also got an Armor Purge button that gives you a completely fresh health bar, assuming you press it before your armor gives out. With stage time limits and no block button, this game feels like the one that demands the most aggressive and reckless play style, if only to punch through threats before they can kill you. Ultimately I think the game ends up being too hard to the point that despite the inclusion of checkpoints, it makes the checkpoint-less Valken feel like a much easier game. If this game were easier, the spectacle often on display as you race to tear through enemy formations would make me rate it higher. I haven't finished this one because Mission 5 has a lengthy series of high-threat encounters paired with a series of precision platforming between heavily damaging traps. It's so cool but I simply don't think I'm up to seeing it all the way through. Oh, the space combat mechanics in this one are a truly unorthodox, so there's that.
#7) Metal Warriors (SNES)
Metal Warriors is often mistaken for having any relation to Cybernator, the English SNES release of Assault Suits Valken. No, just turns out that Lucas Arts thought that Char's Counter Attack and Cybernator both kicked ass, and hey - they were right. Lots of people have a ton of love for this game and it is undeniably gorgeous. For me, I don't like the pacing and level design, and in some cases the decadent animation of the Lucas Arts team gets in the way of the functionality of attacks. There's kind of an arcadier feeling going on with Metal Warriors that is by no means bad, but just not what I'm looking for out of the subgenre. The wide variety of mechs available is cool, but they're so different from one another that I end up only really liking Havoc and Nitro (in that order). I haven't finished Metal Warriors, but if I were going to see another one of these all the way to completion at this point, only Hardcore Mecha might be ahead of it. I've developed a penchant for revisiting games and coming to an understanding with them that is so reliable that it's practically a running gag, so give it 24 hours to a year from now and I'll be able to tell you why Metal Warriors is in fact the second best video game ever created, I'm sure.
#8) THE Soukou Kihei Gun Ground (Simple DS Vol. 18) (Nintendo DS)
Gun Ground is pretty much Gun Hazard as a literal budget game, if Gun Hazard traded out AI Support for full Front Mission-style customization. It's a ton slower than other games in the subgenre, feeling positively lethargic in terms of both movement and aiming speed. It's often a struggle to be able to aim up fast enough to hit bombers and other aerial harasser type units. Gun Ground gets a lot of use out of its customizable mech, as all the enemy mechs appear to use parts you could also be using. They tend to have more individually distinctive AI than Gun Hazard enemies, and between them display the full set of capabilities that you have access to. There's a thing you can do in Gun Hazard where you post up in one spot and kill the 50-90 enemies for EXP/cash before a mission will run completely out of spawns, but it seems like doing this is the primary structure of Gun Ground mission design. I only played this one for about an hour and I wouldn't really recommend it. The added complexity is a Big Ask given there isn't an English translation and how little it brings to the table. Still the pixel art on display for the game's 2D assets is very high-quality and charming. Reminds me a bit of Ninja Five-O.
<No screenshot, I'm not playing this.>
#9) Assault Suits Leynos / Target Earth (Mega Drive / Genesis)
This game is brutal and cruel. I don't wish it on anyone. Thank it for inventing the subgenre, but probably don't play it.
POST BONUS CONTENT: RARE Leynos 2 AS Sprites
Leynos 2 features 8 total Assault Suits, differentiated by base stats and available weapons, armor, and devices (in JRPG terms, think accessories). I couldn't find images of the vast majority of them online, so I went through the trouble of unlocking (almost*) every available Assault Suit. Here they are:
AS-541D Leynos EX, pictured with a Machine Gun: A revision of the AS from Assault Suits Leynos. You start with the Leynos EX, technically, but you can't select your AS until Mission 2. Like we'll see with another suit later, the Leynos is kind of a gimmick suit in that it is limited to equipping weapon types that were featured in Assault Suits Leynos. It's statistically worse than the Leynos 2 but it's not entirely without use: it has much better performance in space combat and it can equip Force-1, an armor type that performs well across the board but is limited to older AS. Incidentally, the other members of your elite squad each have a Leynos EX, so look for that sprite to find your most important allies.
AS-7ES Leynos 2, pictured with a Sniper Rifle: Leynos 2 is a bulkier version of the Leynos. You pilot a Leynos 2 in Mission 1. It can use heavier and more diverse weapons, and is sort of the game's default suit. It's a bit of a Full Armor sort of deal, with poorer performance in space. That said, it's a workhorse suit and you can absolutely play the entire game with just the Leynos 2.
ASX-099 Alpha Leynos, pictured with a Laser: Hey have you heard of the Gundam? The Alpha Leynos is unlockable in Mission 5, leaving it only available for Mission 6 and 7. It's a prototype for the next generation of suits and can equip virtually everything in the game. It also appears to have a pretty absurd auto-repair buff built-in because it recovers from damage far faster than other suits. It's far faster than other suits at pretty much everything, actually. Using just 2 of its 4 device slots, it's pretty trivial to get it to 999 HP and Energy.
VRS-19A Galliver, pictured with its unique weapon: I don't care for the Galliver much. It can be unlocked during Mission 5. It's an energy weapons-focused suit, but its real claim to fame is that prominent bit in the upper-left with the light blue accents. That's a bit/option/funnel/whatever you want to call it. You have to fight this suit once and it's super dangerous but I think it relies too much on energy and the funnels are simply not sustainable enough to make up for it. Also I don't like like how weird it looks.
ASS-117A Valken, pictured with, uh, nothing for some reason: It's the Valken! You have to win this by winning the entire Mission 3 tournament. Yes, it is possible to damage the final opponent. I think this one is a mass-production type, not the type that Jake pilots in Assault Suits Valken. That said, the Valken is a tribute to ASV just like the Leynos EX was a tribute to ASL1. The Valken follows the rules for only being able to equip weapons that appear in ASV, but it makes up for it by being able to use high-end punches the Leynos 2 can't, being seemingly purpose-built for using the sustained laser weapons, and coming with the otherwise unavailable V-Shield. Unlike every other shield in the game, the V-Shield cannot be destroyed and provides 360 degree coverage despite being tiny. All that said... the Valken is still an antique and ends up not being very effective, especially since once you have the V-Shield you can strap it to any AS that can use physical shields.
AS-633A Zyrec, pictured with a Shotgun: The Zyrec is a more energy-focused version of the Leynos 2. It can be unlocked in Mission 2. Not much worth saying about it in my opinion. Unlike most other suits, the Zyrec can't use physical shields. Instead it has to make due with Screens, omni-directional energy shields that have a limited use time instead of durability. When you get it there aren't a ton of energy weapons available, so the main thing the Energy will be used for is recharging your Screen and the auto-repair function. Assuming you aren't taking too much damage in one go, I think this one will end up with more total HP available than the Leynos 2 thanks to the auto-repair system, but. Meh.
AS-625 Phantoma, pictured with a Gatling Gun: The Phantoma uses big guns. It can be unlocked in Mission 4 which is kind of annoying because it would be a really good choice for Mission 4. There are a number of weapons and armor that are just prohibitively heavy. Phantoma is here to let you use them, including its signature weapon, a micromissile launcher that has 2000 homing missiles that are launched 20 at a time. Welcome to the Itano Circus, baby! Except, uh, it doesn't do so hot in space. And also you unlock it via the, uh, final ground mission in the game. Whelp.
Gwain: Sir not appearing in my four play throughs. It can be unlocked in Mission 7. The rival ace pilot uses it against you a couple times. It has some really dangerous weapons but also I'm not sure if it would come with those. Your guess is as good as mine. Sorry!
If you're unfamiliar, Assault Suits is a very specific subgenre of 2D mecha action games. Honestly they're such a non-presence that calling it a subgenre is a stretch, but they've got a set of shared features uncommon to most 2D action games that they feel distinctive to me. Broadly, the elements that define them are a slow default movement speed combined with a "dash" mode with high speed and heavy momentum, a large number of aiming angles (at least 8, usually 16+) paired with a lock-aim-and-facing button, a lack of enemy contact damage, hard-to-handle zero gravity controls that respect the laws of inertia to varying degrees, character dialogue that doesn't interrupt gameplay, and enemy rosters that include similarly-capable enemy mecha with AI instead of more basic behaviors you'd see from even other action platformer enemies. Assault Suits games tend to be fairly short single-session affairs, so it's an example of a subgenre where it's not that much of an investment to have played every available example. Here's all of them I know of, from my favorite to least favorite.
#1) Assault Suits Valken (SNES, rerelease just came out on Switch)
The most kick ass of them all. Valken has long stages and dangerous enemies that encourage a very methodical and defensive play style, a play style that benefits heavily from the most busted shield mechanics in the subgenre. The only changes I would make to Valken if I could is just control streamlining - Valken introduces melee that deals more damage if you're dashing but it doesn't have the dedicated punch button that would really make that shine. While I'm at it, I would happily trade the 100% 360 degree immunity to damage that the V-Shield provides for allowing you to block in the air. If you've seen a whole pile of Gundam you're gonna be Leonardo DiCaprio-pointing at the screen for basically the entire game. As a note, the original English release of this game, Cybernator has a compromised story presentation for unknowable reasons (outside of one late-game scene), and the Switch release restores everything. If you've got a Switch, there's no real reason to play the SNES version anymore.
#2) Assault Suits Leynos 2 (Saturn)
An excellent game with initially incomprehensible design decisions. Being a Saturn game it does this neat thing where your view zooms in and out to reflect your weapons' maximum range. Unfortunately, unless you do spectacularly well in Mission 1 (hint: of your starting weapons, your punch deals a TON more damage than you think it probably would), some of your weapon classes will be stuck with bizarrely tiny ranges until you're halfway through the game. While Leynos 2 lets you turn it off and use the traditional manual aiming angles, it's pretty clearly built around a new lock-on system that will feel a little stifling up until you've learned most of the Tricks to it. Once you get a handle on it, the system facilitates you fighting the extremely high speed space battles while navigating solely via your radar. That might sound awful to be staring at a tiny radar while the majority of your view is detrimentally chaotic and insufficiently large, but if you've seen the scenes of Gunbuster this is evoking you already know this is in fact sick as hell. Biggest flaw here is that Leynos 2 rewards you with new equipment based on performance in missions, so if you do poorly early on that will probably continue. The second biggest flaw kind of justifies this - Leynos 2 is like 40 minutes long from start to finish, so it's not a huge burden to just keep trying. Leynos 2 has a SHMUP-esque second loop upon completing the game that locks the game's dynamic difficulty adjustment to the comically aggressive maximum level and also turns off further equipment unlocks. This seems bizarrely player hostile, but the end game loads you up with participation trophies that are so powerful that it's pretty much impossible to not completely outclass the second loop anyway.
#3) Front Mission: Gun Hazard (SNES)
Every wanzer in Gun Hazard has triangles instead of legs. I can't unsee it and now you can't either. Gun Hazard trades hand-placed enemies and unique scenario design out for guys spawning off screen and, uh, roughly 80 more missions than this subgenre tends to have. There are only five playable wanzers, but there's a whole load of equipment and subweapons available so the Front Mission-style customization isn't entirely absent. Thanks to enemy wanzer explosions damaging you, their deep love of getting all up in your business in the process of flanking you, and their ability to spawn off-screen behind you, it definitely feels like there's a degree of unavoidable attrition built into Gun Hazard that the other games would balk at. That said, Gun Hazard also gives you access to repair items you can use mid-mission and a surprisingly large cast of AI back-up you can bring along with you. The AI's smart in sometimes surprising ways, too. For example, Clark in the light blue/green wanzer in the screenshot above wouldn't advance past Albert in the beige/red wanzer because Clark's AI knows he can use Albert's shield to protect himself from enemy fire. What Gun Hazard loses in comparison to Valken's excellent level design and Leynos 2's dedication to novelty, it gains in letting its storytelling and incredible soundtrack breathe. If you want to get into the subgenre, Gun Hazard is a good place to start - thanks to how long it is you'll have plenty of time to acclimate to the subgenre's strategies and control quirks.
#4) Hardcore Mecha (PS4, Switch, Steam)
Hardcore Mecha really ups the ante in terms of presentation with gorgeous in-engine cutscenes. The premise of the game's design is taking Super Robot Wars aesthetics and making that an action game you can play. The campaign sticks you with one particular Gundam-y mech, the Thunderbolt seen above, but completing the campaign unlocks a R-Type Final-esque mode where you can unlock and upgrade a whole pile of different revisions of all the mechs appearing the game's campaign and multiplayer. There's a storytelling focus here that's unlike the rest of the subgenre - it feels more like a Metal Gear Solid-style story than the broad-strokes war story angle of Masaya's Assault Suits or Gun Hazard's RPG-ier perspective. I'd rate this one higher but that would feel disingenuous at the moment since I've yet to complete its campaign due to my discomfort with its controls.
#5) Assault Suits Leynos (2016) (PS4, Steam)
Assault Suits Leynos (2016) is a remake of Assault Suit Leynos for the Sega Mega Drive, available on Genesis as Target Earth. It takes the missions from the original Leynos and expands on them using Valken's mechanics as a base. The mission structure does not appear to be changed in any way, but enemies are placed instead of streaming in nigh-infinitely, you can block (even in mid-air), etc. In my opinion it's the easiest of this style of game, but it's also using the weird and demanding reward unlock structure that all the Leynos games do, so there's a reason to retry mission to trounce them even more efficiently anyway. The game also features Classic Mode, which has AI and enemy patterns more like the original version of the game, you know, in case you hate yourself but not quite so much that you don't want a shield. I have an in-progress model kit of the AS-5E3 Leynos from this game sitting right next to me.
#6) Armored Hunter Gunhound EX (Steam but sadly delisted, non-EX version on PSP but not in English)
Armored Hunter Gunhound EX is a practically unchanged port of a PSP game of the same name. Unlike the rest of these, it has voice acting! Oh yeah, you also aren't allowed to buy it right now due to publishing issues. This game has some neat particularities - you've got a Gun button and a Punch button, but instead of a Hold-To-Shield button you've got a Hold-To-Heavy-Weapons button that replace your Gun and Punch with significantly heavier firepower. You've also got an Armor Purge button that gives you a completely fresh health bar, assuming you press it before your armor gives out. With stage time limits and no block button, this game feels like the one that demands the most aggressive and reckless play style, if only to punch through threats before they can kill you. Ultimately I think the game ends up being too hard to the point that despite the inclusion of checkpoints, it makes the checkpoint-less Valken feel like a much easier game. If this game were easier, the spectacle often on display as you race to tear through enemy formations would make me rate it higher. I haven't finished this one because Mission 5 has a lengthy series of high-threat encounters paired with a series of precision platforming between heavily damaging traps. It's so cool but I simply don't think I'm up to seeing it all the way through. Oh, the space combat mechanics in this one are a truly unorthodox, so there's that.
#7) Metal Warriors (SNES)
Metal Warriors is often mistaken for having any relation to Cybernator, the English SNES release of Assault Suits Valken. No, just turns out that Lucas Arts thought that Char's Counter Attack and Cybernator both kicked ass, and hey - they were right. Lots of people have a ton of love for this game and it is undeniably gorgeous. For me, I don't like the pacing and level design, and in some cases the decadent animation of the Lucas Arts team gets in the way of the functionality of attacks. There's kind of an arcadier feeling going on with Metal Warriors that is by no means bad, but just not what I'm looking for out of the subgenre. The wide variety of mechs available is cool, but they're so different from one another that I end up only really liking Havoc and Nitro (in that order). I haven't finished Metal Warriors, but if I were going to see another one of these all the way to completion at this point, only Hardcore Mecha might be ahead of it. I've developed a penchant for revisiting games and coming to an understanding with them that is so reliable that it's practically a running gag, so give it 24 hours to a year from now and I'll be able to tell you why Metal Warriors is in fact the second best video game ever created, I'm sure.
#8) THE Soukou Kihei Gun Ground (Simple DS Vol. 18) (Nintendo DS)
Gun Ground is pretty much Gun Hazard as a literal budget game, if Gun Hazard traded out AI Support for full Front Mission-style customization. It's a ton slower than other games in the subgenre, feeling positively lethargic in terms of both movement and aiming speed. It's often a struggle to be able to aim up fast enough to hit bombers and other aerial harasser type units. Gun Ground gets a lot of use out of its customizable mech, as all the enemy mechs appear to use parts you could also be using. They tend to have more individually distinctive AI than Gun Hazard enemies, and between them display the full set of capabilities that you have access to. There's a thing you can do in Gun Hazard where you post up in one spot and kill the 50-90 enemies for EXP/cash before a mission will run completely out of spawns, but it seems like doing this is the primary structure of Gun Ground mission design. I only played this one for about an hour and I wouldn't really recommend it. The added complexity is a Big Ask given there isn't an English translation and how little it brings to the table. Still the pixel art on display for the game's 2D assets is very high-quality and charming. Reminds me a bit of Ninja Five-O.
<No screenshot, I'm not playing this.>
#9) Assault Suits Leynos / Target Earth (Mega Drive / Genesis)
This game is brutal and cruel. I don't wish it on anyone. Thank it for inventing the subgenre, but probably don't play it.
POST BONUS CONTENT: RARE Leynos 2 AS Sprites
Leynos 2 features 8 total Assault Suits, differentiated by base stats and available weapons, armor, and devices (in JRPG terms, think accessories). I couldn't find images of the vast majority of them online, so I went through the trouble of unlocking (almost*) every available Assault Suit. Here they are:
AS-541D Leynos EX, pictured with a Machine Gun: A revision of the AS from Assault Suits Leynos. You start with the Leynos EX, technically, but you can't select your AS until Mission 2. Like we'll see with another suit later, the Leynos is kind of a gimmick suit in that it is limited to equipping weapon types that were featured in Assault Suits Leynos. It's statistically worse than the Leynos 2 but it's not entirely without use: it has much better performance in space combat and it can equip Force-1, an armor type that performs well across the board but is limited to older AS. Incidentally, the other members of your elite squad each have a Leynos EX, so look for that sprite to find your most important allies.
AS-7ES Leynos 2, pictured with a Sniper Rifle: Leynos 2 is a bulkier version of the Leynos. You pilot a Leynos 2 in Mission 1. It can use heavier and more diverse weapons, and is sort of the game's default suit. It's a bit of a Full Armor sort of deal, with poorer performance in space. That said, it's a workhorse suit and you can absolutely play the entire game with just the Leynos 2.
ASX-099 Alpha Leynos, pictured with a Laser: Hey have you heard of the Gundam? The Alpha Leynos is unlockable in Mission 5, leaving it only available for Mission 6 and 7. It's a prototype for the next generation of suits and can equip virtually everything in the game. It also appears to have a pretty absurd auto-repair buff built-in because it recovers from damage far faster than other suits. It's far faster than other suits at pretty much everything, actually. Using just 2 of its 4 device slots, it's pretty trivial to get it to 999 HP and Energy.
VRS-19A Galliver, pictured with its unique weapon: I don't care for the Galliver much. It can be unlocked during Mission 5. It's an energy weapons-focused suit, but its real claim to fame is that prominent bit in the upper-left with the light blue accents. That's a bit/option/funnel/whatever you want to call it. You have to fight this suit once and it's super dangerous but I think it relies too much on energy and the funnels are simply not sustainable enough to make up for it. Also I don't like like how weird it looks.
ASS-117A Valken, pictured with, uh, nothing for some reason: It's the Valken! You have to win this by winning the entire Mission 3 tournament. Yes, it is possible to damage the final opponent. I think this one is a mass-production type, not the type that Jake pilots in Assault Suits Valken. That said, the Valken is a tribute to ASV just like the Leynos EX was a tribute to ASL1. The Valken follows the rules for only being able to equip weapons that appear in ASV, but it makes up for it by being able to use high-end punches the Leynos 2 can't, being seemingly purpose-built for using the sustained laser weapons, and coming with the otherwise unavailable V-Shield. Unlike every other shield in the game, the V-Shield cannot be destroyed and provides 360 degree coverage despite being tiny. All that said... the Valken is still an antique and ends up not being very effective, especially since once you have the V-Shield you can strap it to any AS that can use physical shields.
AS-633A Zyrec, pictured with a Shotgun: The Zyrec is a more energy-focused version of the Leynos 2. It can be unlocked in Mission 2. Not much worth saying about it in my opinion. Unlike most other suits, the Zyrec can't use physical shields. Instead it has to make due with Screens, omni-directional energy shields that have a limited use time instead of durability. When you get it there aren't a ton of energy weapons available, so the main thing the Energy will be used for is recharging your Screen and the auto-repair function. Assuming you aren't taking too much damage in one go, I think this one will end up with more total HP available than the Leynos 2 thanks to the auto-repair system, but. Meh.
AS-625 Phantoma, pictured with a Gatling Gun: The Phantoma uses big guns. It can be unlocked in Mission 4 which is kind of annoying because it would be a really good choice for Mission 4. There are a number of weapons and armor that are just prohibitively heavy. Phantoma is here to let you use them, including its signature weapon, a micromissile launcher that has 2000 homing missiles that are launched 20 at a time. Welcome to the Itano Circus, baby! Except, uh, it doesn't do so hot in space. And also you unlock it via the, uh, final ground mission in the game. Whelp.
Gwain: Sir not appearing in my four play throughs. It can be unlocked in Mission 7. The rival ace pilot uses it against you a couple times. It has some really dangerous weapons but also I'm not sure if it would come with those. Your guess is as good as mine. Sorry!
