Armored Core VI: Possible Game of the Year
I've written a few times about my introduction to From Software and how despite playing Dark Souls way back in 2011, the company's trademark difficulty and cryptic narratives didn't grasp me until Elden Ring in 2022. I, like a lot of people in the zeitgeist know Fromsoft as the "Souls" guys, but therein lies a deeper origin, one that involves Armored Core.
I never was a Playstation kid, we had a way to play PS1 games on our Emac growing up, but it wasn't until Final Fantasy 7 Remake that I used my hard earned adult money to buy my first Playstation, a PS4. As a result I missed out on a lot of pivotal games and moments in the history of 3D gaming. One of these titles was the seminal cult classic mech franchise: Armored Core. Coincidentally outside of being really into Zoids as a wee lad and taking part in the Transformers media wave in the late 00's, I wasn't really into Mechs or Mech related media until I got into Code Geass in 2019. I knew that Japanese gaming, anime, and film loved the mecha genre but wasn't cognizant about the when's, where's, and why's. There were two names that stuck out through time and the aforementioned Armored Core was one of them, the other Zone of the Enders. Through conversation with my friends over time I learned about the importance of these two and how they diferred. Kojima's ZoE was balls to the wall action that utilized speed to create immersion, whereas Armored Core was the nerdy stat reliant customization game for those who were into the minutiae of mech creation. I decided that with the announcement of Armored Core VI, off the heels of From's insane post Dark Souls 2 run, that I should embark into the legendary mecha franchises. Earlier this year I sat down and hooked up my Xbox 360 to finally play ZoE and it was... alright, so I then set my eyes on Armored Core VI.
I watched quite literally one gameplay trailer before the game dropped and decided it would be something I was into, it was the one featuring the smelter demon, wait wrong game. It was the one featuring the Cleaner Robot with the furnace on top of it, acting like a Blowhole. The richly detailed factory landscape coupled with crisply quick movement was an immediate sell for me, and thus I anxiously waited for the release of Fires of Rubicon. What I got on release was the exact kind of game I'd wanted, Fromsoft's punishing combat with a richly customizable path through completion. I had a grand time comparing my progress with friends and family and how we approached each fight. While some of my buddies went with the grounded tank approach, others went with a speedy in and out build. I waxed poetic about the glory of the double Songbird (mounted Howitzer-esque cannons) and its ability to stagger bosses with ease. This approach to gameplay, where everybody has their own build that works for them is awesome and I heavily commend From for making a game that is so uniquely accessible in its player agency, because I'm all about player agency. The fights are hard, and the bosses are extremely punishing in places, but there are so many avenues for you the player to bypass them.
I struggled with one of the games first real bosses for anywhere from five to six hours (Balteus for the experienced,) because I wasn't respecting the multiple avenues of approach to defeat him. I was getting greedy, thinking I could brute force my way through the encounter like it was Dark Souls, but no I had to strip apart my oonga boonga playstyle and approach it with a Bloodborne attitude, dancing with the boss to learn and react to its every move. Once I got the patterns down on Balteus, I felt like I understood the game much better. You can create a build that allows you to take more hits, but ultimately you'll have to respect what the encounters do to you, and the limitations that ammunition and only having three repair kits has in store. With my double songbird, double gatling gun build with a heavier mech body, I created a mech that hit like a bruiser. I dealt heavy stagger damage with the cannons, and could melt damage during said stagger state with the barrage of gatling rounds. Creating a strategy that worked without the assistance of looking online through my own determination was greatly rewarding. I more or less used this with some slight variations all the way to the end game and again would like to shout out the devs for allowing this to work.
Fights in Armored Core VI were unique in the fact that they were so wildly different in terms of mechanics but generally the same degree of difficulty that prevented anything from being a cakewalk. From the first main boss to the ultimate encounter, I felt greatly engaged to study boss patterns and timings in my immediate introduction to each fight. Whether it was AC on AC action in which you were in a duel with an enemy that could heal and mimic your own actions like expansion and shoulder firing, set piece bosses in which you had to utilize a specific item to succeed, or just a good old fashion Fromsoft rumble in the jungle against a larger menacing foe, nothing came easy and battles could only be won through hard work. Outside of the one I mentioned above, I don't want to give anything away as to remain spoiler-free, but the boss at the end of chapter four was really dang cool and reminiscient of some of the fun I had in Dark Souls 3. Fittingly enough, the last boss of the game also felt like a callback to some of From's most glorious moments. Outside of bosses, the world fights were the exact right amount of difficulty. You are plopped into a world with a finite amount of ammo and often tasked to take out jobbers and tougher enemies alike, but rarely did I feel like it was unfair. Armored Core VI is checkpointed well enough that should you be stressing your limits on resource, you'll be reimbursed for your efforts upon completion of an area. There were occasionally moments where I felt like the standard zone enemies werew winning against me simply because of a war of attrition, particularly in a "protect the objective" battle near the end of the game, but everything felt manageable as I reassessed my strategies and approached with a new state of mind.
The real unsung hero of this game was the environmental design and oh man was it absolutely incredible. From the moment you step foot on Rubicon, Fromsoft wasted no time in demonstrating the innate talent of their art teams and their ability to craft unforgettable and jawdropping vistas every chance they could. Numerous moments throughout my playthrough did I exclaim "this is really f* cool" to the friends I was streaming it to, stopping to stare at the great expanse of the delapidated world at large. Fromsoft have been the kings of ambience for quite some time now, with each title that I've enjoyed since DS1 in 2011 having that "Fromsoft Moment" where the landscape appears after entering an area and speaks volumes about the world and story at large without saying a single word. As chapter four wraps up and chapter five is introduced, there is a moment in which this happens that had my jaw near the floor, a significant factor in my remembrance of this game. Science Fiction often lives and dies upon the world it exists in, where effectively translating the nuances of the diverse locations is imperative to helping the titles stick out amongst the plethora of others within the genre. You remember the diverse locations of Star Wars, of Mass Effect, of Cowboy Bebop because of the way they are communicated to the audience. Armored Core VI with its Fromsoft DNA follows suit in offering enriching and memorable moments throughout the entire twenty hour runtime via optimal enemy placement, gorgeous vistas, and intricate cityscapes.
While Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon is surely not for everybody, it checked the fast paced and difficult action game box for me in the absolute best way possible. Engaging fights, a rewarding customization system, and incredible environmental design all are elements that make this one of the best new games I've played in recent memory, and a hallmark of the mecha genre. I strongly recommend Armored Core VI to anyone who is a fan of Fromsoft, science fiction, and/or action games that require intense focus from the player.
I've written a few times about my introduction to From Software and how despite playing Dark Souls way back in 2011, the company's trademark difficulty and cryptic narratives didn't grasp me until Elden Ring in 2022. I, like a lot of people in the zeitgeist know Fromsoft as the "Souls" guys, but therein lies a deeper origin, one that involves Armored Core.
I never was a Playstation kid, we had a way to play PS1 games on our Emac growing up, but it wasn't until Final Fantasy 7 Remake that I used my hard earned adult money to buy my first Playstation, a PS4. As a result I missed out on a lot of pivotal games and moments in the history of 3D gaming. One of these titles was the seminal cult classic mech franchise: Armored Core. Coincidentally outside of being really into Zoids as a wee lad and taking part in the Transformers media wave in the late 00's, I wasn't really into Mechs or Mech related media until I got into Code Geass in 2019. I knew that Japanese gaming, anime, and film loved the mecha genre but wasn't cognizant about the when's, where's, and why's. There were two names that stuck out through time and the aforementioned Armored Core was one of them, the other Zone of the Enders. Through conversation with my friends over time I learned about the importance of these two and how they diferred. Kojima's ZoE was balls to the wall action that utilized speed to create immersion, whereas Armored Core was the nerdy stat reliant customization game for those who were into the minutiae of mech creation. I decided that with the announcement of Armored Core VI, off the heels of From's insane post Dark Souls 2 run, that I should embark into the legendary mecha franchises. Earlier this year I sat down and hooked up my Xbox 360 to finally play ZoE and it was... alright, so I then set my eyes on Armored Core VI.
I watched quite literally one gameplay trailer before the game dropped and decided it would be something I was into, it was the one featuring the smelter demon, wait wrong game. It was the one featuring the Cleaner Robot with the furnace on top of it, acting like a Blowhole. The richly detailed factory landscape coupled with crisply quick movement was an immediate sell for me, and thus I anxiously waited for the release of Fires of Rubicon. What I got on release was the exact kind of game I'd wanted, Fromsoft's punishing combat with a richly customizable path through completion. I had a grand time comparing my progress with friends and family and how we approached each fight. While some of my buddies went with the grounded tank approach, others went with a speedy in and out build. I waxed poetic about the glory of the double Songbird (mounted Howitzer-esque cannons) and its ability to stagger bosses with ease. This approach to gameplay, where everybody has their own build that works for them is awesome and I heavily commend From for making a game that is so uniquely accessible in its player agency, because I'm all about player agency. The fights are hard, and the bosses are extremely punishing in places, but there are so many avenues for you the player to bypass them.
I struggled with one of the games first real bosses for anywhere from five to six hours (Balteus for the experienced,) because I wasn't respecting the multiple avenues of approach to defeat him. I was getting greedy, thinking I could brute force my way through the encounter like it was Dark Souls, but no I had to strip apart my oonga boonga playstyle and approach it with a Bloodborne attitude, dancing with the boss to learn and react to its every move. Once I got the patterns down on Balteus, I felt like I understood the game much better. You can create a build that allows you to take more hits, but ultimately you'll have to respect what the encounters do to you, and the limitations that ammunition and only having three repair kits has in store. With my double songbird, double gatling gun build with a heavier mech body, I created a mech that hit like a bruiser. I dealt heavy stagger damage with the cannons, and could melt damage during said stagger state with the barrage of gatling rounds. Creating a strategy that worked without the assistance of looking online through my own determination was greatly rewarding. I more or less used this with some slight variations all the way to the end game and again would like to shout out the devs for allowing this to work.
Fights in Armored Core VI were unique in the fact that they were so wildly different in terms of mechanics but generally the same degree of difficulty that prevented anything from being a cakewalk. From the first main boss to the ultimate encounter, I felt greatly engaged to study boss patterns and timings in my immediate introduction to each fight. Whether it was AC on AC action in which you were in a duel with an enemy that could heal and mimic your own actions like expansion and shoulder firing, set piece bosses in which you had to utilize a specific item to succeed, or just a good old fashion Fromsoft rumble in the jungle against a larger menacing foe, nothing came easy and battles could only be won through hard work. Outside of the one I mentioned above, I don't want to give anything away as to remain spoiler-free, but the boss at the end of chapter four was really dang cool and reminiscient of some of the fun I had in Dark Souls 3. Fittingly enough, the last boss of the game also felt like a callback to some of From's most glorious moments. Outside of bosses, the world fights were the exact right amount of difficulty. You are plopped into a world with a finite amount of ammo and often tasked to take out jobbers and tougher enemies alike, but rarely did I feel like it was unfair. Armored Core VI is checkpointed well enough that should you be stressing your limits on resource, you'll be reimbursed for your efforts upon completion of an area. There were occasionally moments where I felt like the standard zone enemies werew winning against me simply because of a war of attrition, particularly in a "protect the objective" battle near the end of the game, but everything felt manageable as I reassessed my strategies and approached with a new state of mind.
The real unsung hero of this game was the environmental design and oh man was it absolutely incredible. From the moment you step foot on Rubicon, Fromsoft wasted no time in demonstrating the innate talent of their art teams and their ability to craft unforgettable and jawdropping vistas every chance they could. Numerous moments throughout my playthrough did I exclaim "this is really f* cool" to the friends I was streaming it to, stopping to stare at the great expanse of the delapidated world at large. Fromsoft have been the kings of ambience for quite some time now, with each title that I've enjoyed since DS1 in 2011 having that "Fromsoft Moment" where the landscape appears after entering an area and speaks volumes about the world and story at large without saying a single word. As chapter four wraps up and chapter five is introduced, there is a moment in which this happens that had my jaw near the floor, a significant factor in my remembrance of this game. Science Fiction often lives and dies upon the world it exists in, where effectively translating the nuances of the diverse locations is imperative to helping the titles stick out amongst the plethora of others within the genre. You remember the diverse locations of Star Wars, of Mass Effect, of Cowboy Bebop because of the way they are communicated to the audience. Armored Core VI with its Fromsoft DNA follows suit in offering enriching and memorable moments throughout the entire twenty hour runtime via optimal enemy placement, gorgeous vistas, and intricate cityscapes.
While Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon is surely not for everybody, it checked the fast paced and difficult action game box for me in the absolute best way possible. Engaging fights, a rewarding customization system, and incredible environmental design all are elements that make this one of the best new games I've played in recent memory, and a hallmark of the mecha genre. I strongly recommend Armored Core VI to anyone who is a fan of Fromsoft, science fiction, and/or action games that require intense focus from the player.