This review contains spoilers
Armored Core VI is a game about a lot of things and most of them are executed very well, but the theme that resonated with me the most was the relationship between the body and the self.
There are a lot of great and memorable characters in the game, but we never see a human body throughout it. The only thing we can identify the various characters by are their voice, their emblem, and their AC.
War is dehumanizing. Killing another person is difficult, but it becomes a lot easier when you stop seeing them as people. When they are just big mechs with a voice and an emblem.
That's what I thought for the first few hours. But seeing these charcters for long enough as nothing but ACs with voices and emblems ended up humanizing these traits, rather than dehumanizing the person. But it does always take a while for that effect to set in. Killing V.II Snail felt a lot more like killing a person than killing V.I Freud did, despite hating V.II Snail a lot more.
The player character (as well as some other pilots) has a body so heavily augmented that it is barely their own anymore. Ayre, Allmind (and Coral in general) as well as Chatty don't have bodies and G5 Iguazo is able to act beyond the existence of his body. All of them use ACs to interact with the world in ways their (lack of) bodies doesn't allow them to, and yet most of them seek to (re)gain control of their bodies.
I am trans, and while I very rarely actively hate my body, I often just do not really feel like it is mine, or at least like it's not more fundamentally a part of me than like, my shoes. My body becomes a thing I use to interact with the world, and little more.
These are only my surface thoughts about one of many themes of the game and the fact that a game that manages to make me think this much about so many things is also just incredibly fun to play easily makes this one of my favourite games of all times.
There are a lot of great and memorable characters in the game, but we never see a human body throughout it. The only thing we can identify the various characters by are their voice, their emblem, and their AC.
War is dehumanizing. Killing another person is difficult, but it becomes a lot easier when you stop seeing them as people. When they are just big mechs with a voice and an emblem.
That's what I thought for the first few hours. But seeing these charcters for long enough as nothing but ACs with voices and emblems ended up humanizing these traits, rather than dehumanizing the person. But it does always take a while for that effect to set in. Killing V.II Snail felt a lot more like killing a person than killing V.I Freud did, despite hating V.II Snail a lot more.
The player character (as well as some other pilots) has a body so heavily augmented that it is barely their own anymore. Ayre, Allmind (and Coral in general) as well as Chatty don't have bodies and G5 Iguazo is able to act beyond the existence of his body. All of them use ACs to interact with the world in ways their (lack of) bodies doesn't allow them to, and yet most of them seek to (re)gain control of their bodies.
I am trans, and while I very rarely actively hate my body, I often just do not really feel like it is mine, or at least like it's not more fundamentally a part of me than like, my shoes. My body becomes a thing I use to interact with the world, and little more.
These are only my surface thoughts about one of many themes of the game and the fact that a game that manages to make me think this much about so many things is also just incredibly fun to play easily makes this one of my favourite games of all times.