Armored Core VI

2023-09-14

About

These are my notes on this game.. a recollection of thoughts and ideas that I ran into after playing this game. A quasi-review for my eyes only, more or less.

Initial Experience

First Playthrough

The first few days of playing the game .. were difficult.

I will note that the difficulty curve of the game is extremely .. jagged. The first chapter of the game felt rather easy, in fact, i was beating what initially seemed to be additional challenges thrown at me. (i.e at around mission 4, the game would give you a difficult enemy to kill, while also telling you to avoid it. I managed to kill [Lorn's Lure]said difficult enemy) The game felt like it was impressing on me that I was performing better than expected. All was well and good... until I got to the end of chapter one, to the BALTEUS fight.

It was about 3 or 4 hours of try-harding. I was not enjoying the experience. Here I was thinking that I was doing alright, but all of a sudden I wasn't. It took some serious sweating to get past the hurdle. I complained to my friends about it, and just got 'skill issue' in response. Ended up beating the boss almost purely out of spite. I genuinely considered dropping the game after the boss fight purely because it felt too annoying to beat, and I could probably expect more difficult encounters (and equally as much time spent sweating) in the future.

During the middle of this playthrough, I gained the skill and or knowledge of how to adapt a build for a specific mission. This aspect of the game actually felt fun and rewarding. It felt good to.. try some new idea that could possibly help me beat a mission better of faster.. or allow me to beat a very hard boss. and iterating upon said idea with new weapons or concepts and then finally be rewarded for your intuition.

And then, you realize that the knowledge you gained can be easily applied to other encounters, you gain the notion that specific weapons are useful against specific techniques that your opponents may employ. That specific movement styles (determined by what 'legs' you use) are better at dealing with specific targets. There is an immense satisfaction in the ability to lose a fight initially, but then come back with a tailor-made AC that can beat the encounter within the second try. That's why the game gives you the ability to re-spec your mech whenever you lose a fight.

One of the cooler aspects was that some parts of the lore were kept.. mysterious. There was this one mission where you get to fight the mercenary whose name you stole.. and then you realize that they're part of some odd group of people who are entirely unrelated to you. This is never elaborated upon. All you know is that they are going to let you keep using the name.

It was during this playthrough that I ended up developing two builds.

• One was for general-purpose melee and was more meant to be fun to play and use in low-effort scenarios

  • reverse joint legs (lightest),
  • Light-ish core
  • light-ish arms
  • pulse blade
  • pile bunker
  • machine gun

• The other was specifically designed to be brought out whenever I ran into a difficult singular target.. or a small set of hard targets i.e a boss fight or encounter I couldn't beat with build #1

  • middle-weight tank body
  • heavy core
  • heavy arms
  • two gatling guns
  • two songbirds

It was these two builds that carried me through to the end of my first playthrough, earning me the 'liberator of rubicon' ending.

However, both the final message from Ayre, and the various hints from youtube and other online sources hinted that I should play the game again.

Second playthrough

It was during this playthrough that things finally got interesting.

The initial notion was simple. The character that handles you (you are a mercenary dog kept on a leash) gets informed that the rebel faction (the Rubicon Liberation Front) is going to be more reliant on mercenaries.

Initially you play through the exact same missions but then... something changes.

You get new offers, you get to pick new paths, and there is a perfectly dosed IV drip of new missions and new challenges to keep you interested in what's to come.

You get to fight new ACs that you may have interacted with in your previous playthrough. You get to unlock new, exotic gear that you may not have seen before, you get to have new encounters in the arena gamemode.

During this playthrough, with the newly gained equipment, i made further improvements to both of the builds that I used, to the point where build #1 was able to carry me throughout most of the game, with the tank build reserved for only the most difficult encounters. The two builds that I've designed seem to compliment each other's weaknesses pretty well. If I couldn't beat an encounter with build #1, then build #2 happened to always be a build that counters whatever countered build #1.

And yet still.. the ending still feels like a dissapointment. I took the other route this time, which, from a moral standpoint was the worse choice, but still, it was interesting to see. The afromentioned drip feed of new content never stopped however, and the game continued to keep you hinted and hooked so that you would give it yet another go...

Third playthrough

This playthrough took all interesting encounters from the second playthrough and turned them all up to eleven.

Previous missions that you played through get replaced by choices that you can now make. Wheras an old mission would have an unusual encounter, this time you get to thwart said unusual encounter.

It feels like, over these two playthroughs, you really, truly, fall into the thing that your in-game callsign, 'raven', represents (in the in-game universe, at least). The ability to choose what you fight for. Instead of being a dog of the in-game corpos, you actually fight for the rebels. Instead of choosing between two shitty options, now you get to pick a third.

That drip feed of new content has now turned into a stream. All of a sudden you realize that there was a whole hidden third of the game that is now open to you. Entirely new components. Exotic parts and weapons. Brand new arena encounters of bosses you never thought you'd be able to fight in said arena. Characters you would've otherwise never met. Encounters are somehow a step in difficulty above the second playthrough.

And behind it all... a whole underlying plotline that was always there, just out of sight. New players in the game stepping in and turning encounters you've seen twice before on their heads, forcing you to gnaw on the game's content just to figure out what comes next. A third, hidden ending, while not on the 'having your cake and eating it' tier, still being the best possible outcome in the provided context, especially with the player's knowledge of the other two endings.

A realization of the future that Raven and Ayre wanted the most, through sheer brute force and repeated attempts.

And on your part, complete and total mastery of what the game as a whole has to offer. You cannot get this ending without learning the ins and outs of how this game works.

By the time I got here, I was able to beat chapter one boss consistently on my first try. Same with most other bosses. Only exception being the coral convergence boss and the final encounters for all endings. Looking back, all of the parts of the game that made me struggle before now felt rather easy, or, trivial. What's weird is that I cannot tell if it was my skill or my builds that have improved. I'm not sure how to feel about that.

Post-game thoughts

Other games tend to make a clean cut of this. It's either: your stats get better, which makes battles easier, OR, you yourself get better, which makes battles easier. What's weird is that AC VI does both at the same time.

A good set of examples would be:

• ULTRAKILL. In this game, the only real "upgrades" you get are just.. the tools that everyone is expected to have at their disposal. They are not indicators of your actual progress. Getting the rocket launcher won't make Minos Prime any easier. The game's perceived difficulty is determined entirely by player skill.
• On the other hand, in Terraria, the actual in-game combat mechanics are not complicated. You either repeatedly swing a sword, or, you click on your target to fire projectiles at it. However, you cannot really beat the hard bosses with your basic equipment. But, once you get the end-game stuff, you can beat the first bosses without breaking a sweat. So, the game's perceived difficulty in combat is determined almost entirely by player equipment.

There are plenty more examples where this distinction is maintained, and I'm pretty sure that games will trend towards these two categories, with Armored Core contiuning to be the rare hybrid that places completely equal focus on both.

I don't tend to play too many games these days, so I'm not entirely aware of other, similar examples. Perhaps this is only a theory that I made entirely in the dark, without being aware of other games where this balance is maintained as well. I'd be interested to learn about more games like this.

That being said, I can conclude with the notion that overall, despite the rough start, I enjoyed playing this game.