Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon should not exist. It's too perfect.

A series long forgotten by the masses and apart of a genre untouched for decades, it only makes sense that after Fromsoftware's third and biggest slam dunk in a row, Elden Ring, they would go off and make another Armored Core title.

If there is one thing that remains consistent with my favorite games, its giant robots. Metal Gear, Xenoblade Chronicles, and Titanfall, are all games that feature such. The issue, however, is that these giant robots are simply set pieces (sans Titanfall). Fires of Rubicon defies this, by letting you be the giant fucking robot, with total customization to boot.

Everything about this game bleeds pure action. Unlike the Souls genre, Armored Core does not ask you to sit and wait to I-Frame out of every move. Instead, you are pressing 6 buttons every frame, frantically dodging and weaving between intense storms of bullets and rockets, while returning your own fire, all at the same time. It's beyond exhilarating. In no other game would I have fathomed having my own personally customized gundam, fit with custom decals and it's own name. The number of builds are truly limitless and you can approach any boss any way you like, assuming you're good enough.

What makes Armored Core fun is that it is brutally hard. Not exactly soulsbourne hard, but it's tough. It's a bullethell with hitscan sized rounds, moving at a million miles an hour. It's a type of hard I haven't experienced in so long. I've become so used to Fromsofts formulaic "wait for it" difficulty that rides on making one perfectly timed hit that the idea of telling me to throw anything and everything at my enemy seems foreign. Boss's come at you with equally hectic attacks, from barrages of missiles to tracking laser drones to bullshit shielding. Losing is still fun, you always feel like you're engaging with the game, rather than waiting to get back to the point where you were.

So the combat is good. That's probably what most of you care about. If it is, stop now and go play it, no more words can describe how fun it is. It simply has to be experienced. But, there is more to AC6.

AC6 brings with it a fantastic and visually stunning story. Words do not express how good Rubicon-3 looks, and how equally cool it is to see your AC in all these exotic landscaping shots.

The narrative is branching, and it's good. The characters do everything the game needs you them to do, being very likeable or openly infuriating. Except, every character is equally likeable and dislikeable. It all works into this narrative about picking sides. As an independent mercenary, you end up seeing every side of the war, and are given the choice to pick based off your own true feelings. It's as engaging as it should be. You truly do start to feel like Raven, and the story feels like your own, rather than the same story everyone else witnessed.

However, this is where the one pain point comes from. AC6 has chosen to adapt NieR: Replicants way of storytelling, causing you to play through the campaign 3 times to see every ending. Though, it isn't as bad as it sounds. By the end of your first run, you barely get any time to play with your kitted out AC, and I found myself immediately jumping into NG+ to just play more. What's more exciting, is that with NG+ (and NG++) comes more content. New weapons, armor, missions, and a new ending become available to you in each run, leaving the experience to be refreshing. Despite replaying the same 20 some missions, they never get stale. The game is just that fun.

Never before have I played a game with such a comprehensive mecha system, and never before have I seen a non-human character creator this customizable. The game is outright fun, and the story is surprisingly meaningful. Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon might be the ultimate videogame, and I highly recommend you play it if you're even on the fence.

Fromsoftware yet again proves that only they can fly high enough.

The praise this game gets confuses me. Breath of the Wild itself was nothing particularly earthshattering, and this game is just Breath of the Wild again. The problem is that what made BOTW novel is not anymore. We've seen this type of expansive open world before. It's not impressive anymore.

Of course, more land was added, but what was added is half as much of what was worth exploring in BOTW. The skylands mostly exist for dungeons and chests, nothing more or less. There isn't enough landmass up there aside from the tutorial zone for it to feel like a whole new second map. The underground zone too is stagnant, introducing an annoying gimmick with an intense difficulty spike that makes exploring it a pain.

I understand that the new building system is technically impressive. I'm a game designer, I see this. However, just because something is impressive does not make it good. The fusing system itself does allow for a bunch of interesting puzzles, but it's the same gimmick reused for every single puzzle. Eventually, this mechanic too has its novelty wear off, and unless you have a degree in engineering or loved Banjo Kazooie Nuts 'n' Bolts too much, you won't be getting a lot out of it. Yes, it is impressive what it can do and that it functions at all, and the possibilities available to players is commendable. It is a feat in design that a lot of these puzzles have more than one solution. Yet the game does not force you to create anything super outside the box. While I said most puzzles have more than one solution, it is made very clear that there is 1 "right" way and every other solution is a player either a: intentionally breaking the game or b: not understanding the signs. Nowhere are you challenged to make an army of inter-continental strike drones. You can, and those who know how will, but this will never cross the mind of the average player. Had this game pushed the bounds of what this system could do perhaps I could find more praise for it. But they don't, it exists as simply a gimmick to justify the long development time and to show off a shiny new tech thing.

With this games announcement we were promised a much heavier story focus. We got slightly more story than BOTW. What we got was quite decent honestly, but it was the same egghunt from before to find all these things. This time, you just couldn't skip the intro story segment. What they gave us simply didn't carry the weight it should.

The intense amount of continuity errors are annoying too. The game hints to why this may be, but it simply does not make sense. This game likes the idea of being a direct sequel while also being too caught up in trying to rewrite it's own history. Where are the Divine Beasts? Where are the Guardians? Where is the fucking Shrine of Resurrection? Things vital to BOTW have vanished without a trace and the game refuses to explain itself. It should have, anyone who played BOTW would have noticed all of this immediately. There needs to be a reason for the sudden disappearance, and I sure would have liked to see it totally explained than just hoping I will take "time travel shenanigans" as an answer.

Tears of the Kingdom looks at what Breath of the Wild did well and misunderstands why it did well. The open world was good because it was so vast and nothing like any game had had before. Now, we have the same open world with minor variance, causing less desire to explore, and the marvel of such a vast world is now lost since it was done before. Of course, following up something like BOTW would prove to be a monolithic task regardless. Instead of improving the things BOTW did wrong, like the dungeons and puzzles, to try and succeed it's predecessor, it simply creates new things that solve nothing. Tears of the Kingdom prays its rehashed world with new zones will be enough to entice the player for the same hundreds of hours we all dumped into BOTW.

This game will forever be shadowed by it's predecessor. Not because the task was too big, but because they did not focus on the right things. Perhaps if Breath of the Wild never released, this game would be far better. Instead, it is a expansion in disguise as a $70 videogame. Shameless.

Just like Polyphia, just because something is hard to do does not immediately justify a perfect score. In a vacuum, the new system is very good, but the game simply does not allow for it to be as good as it can be, and in an attempt to perfect this feat in physics engineering and simulation, Nintendo seemingly forgot about the other aspects that make a Zelda game a Zelda game.