"Curiosidade: para cada 3 jogos pornô japoneses, 2 incluem estupro, por que todo mundo está chocado com este? Tipo, eu entendo que hentai não é sua coisa, ou se você acha fetiche assim nojento, justo o suficiente, mas você viu um artigo ou vídeo do Youtube dizendo que este jogo era "controverso", então começou a jogar a porra de um jogo hentai com RAPE no título e ficou chocado com o conteúdo dentro dele, mesmo sem saber que era algo bem comum no gênero. O que você é, uma porra de ovelha sem cérebro?"

Fun Fact: for every 3 Japanese porn games, 2 include rape in it, why is everyone shocked by this one? Like I understand hentai not being your thing, or if you find fetish's like this disgusting, fair enough even, but you saw an article or Youtube video saying this game was "controversial", then proceeded to play a fucking hentai game with RAPE on the title and then got shocked by the content inside it, not even knowing it was pretty common thing in the genre. What are you, a fucking sheep with no brain?

Eh.

That's really the core of how I feel about this game: Eh.

Before I go ahead, I'll lay my cards on the table.

I am an AC fan, but I wouldn't call myself a passionate one. I gunned the series in 2011 in preparation for Armored Core V (second-hand hype from a friend, you see) and moved on. A few years later, I did it again and fell in love with both AC4 and For Answer. Despite this love, AC has always been a C-lister as far as franchises I care about go, so I don't have too much personal investment in it.

AC6 is alright in some areas. Mech options are great, AC vs AC fights are toptier, music is exceptional, and it's pretty. I liked the ending fights and some of the story beats, really. This is a decent AC game, sometimes.

Unfortunately, this game succumbs to death by a thousand cuts as far as annoyances go. Some are pretty significant and near-omnipresent, while others are minor but still irritating.

I will talk about this game as two separate titles: AC6 - The Armored Core sequel, and AC6 - the Souls game.

I know some of you will groan at that, perhaps due to astroturfing by AC fans insisting that this game will be 'pure', or the devs' own insistence that they didn't bother including any Souls stuff. I believed both of them until I played the game.

As an AC title, AC6 sometimes has moments where it feels like the developers just get it. You're plonked in front of a gauntlet of enemies and silently told 'time to run it, nerd'. In these moments, the developers remember that AC as a series is first and foremost a puzzle game, with your mech potentially being the solution. Early on, these sections are a bit droll since enemies can't really hurt you and you oneshot them, but the threat level amps up later on and leads to some really engaging missions. The final missions on the route I chose were the peak of this, and are some of the finest in the series.

Unfortunately, they had no faith in their own game design, it seems. I know some more hardcore AC fans hate Repair Kits, but I don't - in theory, they allow the game to hit you with longer missions than the older games without you getting worn down just by sheer attrition, and it removes the demand for perfect play.

The actual issue is that the game introduces Repair Kits on top of both checkpoints and free trips to the Assembly when you die.

Despite the game and its tutorials insisting you should be adaptable and flexible in your construction, there's simply no need to do this. You can just beat your head against an immediate threat, hit a checkpoint, and switch to a completely different AC to tackle the next one. Or, get a consequence-free resupply before a boss. It completely torpedoes the need to make versatile builds, and oftentimes it's better to simply veer into the extremes of the speedy-tanky spectrum.

Also, a minor aside that I have no idea where to insert: Turning speed is still a stat but it has no bearing on your actual camera turn speed, leading to cases where you're locked onto an enemy but can't fire because your AC is still turning. It's... Strange? I feel like it was a decision made to make some fights clearer, but the end result is more annoying than anything.

Anyway, that's the AC portion of AC6 done with. Let's talk about the Dark Souls portion.

It is painfully, agonizingly obvious that parts of this game were - intentionally or not - designed to mimic the Souls formula.

There are two types of bosses in this game. The first are enemy Armored Cores. These are great. They're where the game excels with no-catches. They're fast, frantic and intense, doing enough damage to make you sweat but not enough to do 15k of HP damage in one attack. Each AC fight is a wonderful back and forth, and even the harder ones never really bothered me. Once I got gud, they were just pure instinct; dodging, countering and trading like my controller was part of my nervous system. True to form, seeing another AC pop up in the pre-boss cutscene was a delight. If every boss was these, I would give this game an easy 5/5.

The second type are Souls bosses. I'm not saying this due to the bosses being hard - because they're not. They're frustrating more than anything. Logically, they make sense: If AC missions are puzzle-gauntlets, then it's only natural the bosses are puzzles too, right?

Well, no. The Souls bosses are too much like their namesake, boasting obscene hitboxes and overtuned damage. While the AC fights will whittle you down and occasionally hit you with something painful, Souls bosses will decimate your HP and ACS (stagger) gauge with impunity.
Up above, I said that it was better to pick one extreme of the fragile-tanky spectrum and commit to it. With Souls bosses, it sometimes feels as though going fast is the only option. Tanky builds are simply too slow to dodge the bullet hell many bosses dump on you. Fuck dude, even faster builds get clipped by a few missiles.

Yes, there are ways to dodge a lot of these attacks, but nearly every Souls boss I fought in this game had a nasty habit of vaulting to the opposite side of the arena and unleashing one. Assault Boost did nothing, and even building for Quick Boost (dodge) resulted in me losing 30% health regardless. At first, I assumed it was just me. That the bosses were fine and I simply sucked.

But fortunately you can just replay bosses rather than having to NG+. So I experimented, practiced, made new builds, got gud and... Yes, the Souls bosses are just badly designed. They're an attempt by FromSoft to capture the spectacle of their more recent titles but without adjustments for the kind of game Armored Core is. This is especially obvious with a certain lategame boss, who myself and all of my IRL friends coined "Robot Malenia" independently. They are miserable, and I am deeply happy that the final boss of each ending is an AC fight. I know some will refute this, because every 'hard game' has people insisting that there's no such thing as bad design and that detractors are just bad, but no. These bosses are terrible, even when they work. When they don't (BALTHEUS), they're even worse.

I wish the Souls influence ended at the bosses. Instead, it affects the levels too. Not all of them, mercifully, but a fair chunk of them.

An average AC level is, as described above, a puzzle gauntlet. You spawn into an area with clearly visible enemies and have to carve the best path through while avoiding overexpenditure of ammo or loss of health. Sometimes the formula deviates, like with an escort mission or a stealth mission, but the core (hehe) is the same.

AC6 adds Souls levels to the formula. They're 'open' levels wherein the only real threat is ambushes. Endless ambushes. Ambushes from above, below, behind, in front, ambushes. It is every meme about Scholar of the First Sin made manifest. The very first one is kind of cool, in part because it has the Souls geography but the AC encounter design. It soon goes to shit, though. Towards the end there's 3 of these levels back to back and they feel like Miyazaki taunting me for believing the people who said there'd be no Souls in my AC. They're not even hard, just annoying. I personally love it when I interact with a combat log and immediately take 2000 damage from enemies that spawned in and used their heavier attack before I could humanely react.

The sad part here is that while the Souls bosses are a decent recreation of their source material - down to the awful canyon wide hitboxes - the levels are not. Ambushes are all they have, and their open space is filled with nothing. Occasionally, very rarely, you'll find a data log or a part, but these are few in number. In the early levels, there basically aren't any, which is a good way to condition players to ignore exploration and in turn miss out on some great AC components.

You might find my fixation on the Souls elements exhausting, and truth be told I agree with you. But the simple fact of the matter is that the Souls elements are hamfistedly shoved into the game in ways that're deeply annoying, and the Armored Core elements are just okay. For FromSoft's big return to their niche mecha darling, I frankly expected more - and I tend not to expect things hands down.

I could talk about the story, but it's merely there. It's alright. It didn't evoke any strong feelings or thoughts. Truthfully it was fairly predictable; if you're familiar with common sci-fi tropes, have played Daemon x Machina or have a pattern-seeking brain, you'll probably figure it all out by Chapter 2. As early as Chapter 3, I called all four of the major plot twists - one of which is NG+ exclusive.

It's told to you through stiff cutscenes, scenes of two characters talking vaguely, radio calls and exposition. And... All of it sucks, because the voice acting sucks. It's stilted, half-hearted, utterly droll and oftentimes goes on too long. It feels like the Three Houses cast reading someone else's fanfiction, just utterly droll. You have fucking Patrick Seitz in a main role and waste him like this? Come on.

It pains me to rag on this game so hard, because I direly wanted a modern AC game. An AC game where FromSoft dumped their newfound expertise, technical prowess and fat stacks of cash into.

Instead, they just dumped Sekiro into AC and called it a day.

[Post-google docs edit; Hi, that last line was just me kvetching about the game design, but it turns out AC6 was directed by a guy that was a design lead on Sekiro, so. Hey.]