My first Armored Core game, and I definitely get it now. Demanding, dense, creative, relentless. As a Gunpla person, customising your little guy and making custom decals hit all the same good spots in my brain, and then actually putting your build through its paces and finding out the ways you like to play is another joyful process in itself. Storming through levels and dancing around bosses in an engine of death you’ve designed yourself gives you a sense of empowerment that other action games can only dream of - this is the product of a team at the peak of their craft. Every movement you make and attack you connect feels imbued with the perfect amount of weight, and it’s all in service of making you feel like the sickest cunt alive.

The rigour required from the player isn’t quite met by the game on all occasions - a few big encounters are a bit janky or feel inconsistent. In un-walled arenas, bosses will sometimes move out into areas outside of the combat zone where they can still act, while you’re left to wait around like a dipshit for them to come back so you can continue playing the video game. The camera will freak out a little bit in the more demanding fast paced encounters or against big foes, which is especially problematic if you’re playing with a close range build. After I took down the game’s first big skill check I needed to lay down because I was intensely motion sick - an experience I’ve only had playing Gravity Rush 2 in a darkened room. As such, few of the early bosses are maybe a little bit overtuned to require almost too much precision from the player - some definitely felt like they were designed to be tackled again with a late-game build for the S-Rank, and I honestly have no idea what the balancing solution for this is! It’s awesome to roll up on an old progress wall with a refined build and just completely melt them, but during my first run through the early game it often felt like every boss had way too much HP and meant you had to play the game with an athlete’s discipline to avoid a fuckup that would wipe out ten minutes of progress. Some of these early encounters where your vocabulary is a bit more limited than it will be later in the game sometimes felt like tests of patience rather than skill - you’re punished often maybe too harshly for sub-optimal play while you’re still learning the ropes. I also never really liked having to sell all my shit to afford a new toy to play with in the early chapters, as I feel the game truly shines when you have a couple of different ACs in the holster ready to tackle the unique demands of a new mission. The balance issues also skew wildly in the other direction from about the halfway point onwards, and a couple of fights that narratively should be push and pull battles are over before they can really show off what they’ve got to offer. There’s a few bosses and encounters in the closing chapters which absolutely rip and feel almost perfectly balanced - the final boss of the route I took was absolutely exhilarating even if it demanded a kind of mastery of camera control reserved only for true video game psychopaths.

As a newcomer to the series, I found it extremely interesting that the game chose to show no human faces or bodies at all outside of marketing materials - this is definitely in keeping with the game’s view that capitalism is dehumanising by design, but my personal favourite moments in mecha anime have always been when there is a show of contrast between the human body and the weapons made in their image. With From’s newly honed skills since the last Armored Core at depicting brutal human violence, I expected moments like the cockpit of the Kampfer riddled with bullets and blood, Noa emptying a shotgun into the runaway TYPE-0, Guld’s body caving in against the weight of g-forces - but in the world of Fires of Rubicon, bodies are unimportant, even unnecessary. There is no moment of clarity where the true cost of the violence you enact is weighed in blood. The game is more interested cultivating a creeping realisation that death is this world is devoid of heroics or tragedy - it’s just busywork. It’s a strikingly minimalist approach to the subject matter when all other parts of the game are about spectacle, and I don’t think it really works all of the time because said busywork of corporate murder is really fun! Every time the game took a moment to remind me that the things I were doing were ethically dubious, I didn’t really give a shit because I looked like a total baller doing it - I dismantled V.VII Swinburne in like thirty seconds and I’d do it all over again even if the magic woman who lives in my head tries to make me feel weird about it!

The core story of Coral and its supernatural abilities is less narratively compelling than the real world costs of conflicts over resources, and the notes sketched in Rubicon’s margins - of a skeleton being picked clean long after the real meat is gone - is much more fertile ground for expressing the gameplay’s themes of alienation and powerlessness than what we actually textually get by the game’s conclusion. The huge swings and setpieces were awe-inspiring, but are often morally uncomplicated in the ways most of the game is not. If Fires of Rubicon is to get a For Answer or Verdict Day equivalent, I’d really like to see it focused on a hyper-regional quagmire conflict where the largely absent non-corporate forces present in the world are maybe given a bit more to do. The world on show here is compelling enough that I’d like to see some more visible contrast between those who have skin in the game and those who order the impersonal deaths of thousands - the Rubicon Liberation front don’t really have any ideology to speak of, and we don’t get much of an indication of what they’re actually fighting for other than an amorphous idea of freedom from the corporations on the planet. Any conversation about what it means to actually live in the game’s capitalist dystopia takes a backseat to the dilemma of what humanity should do with Coral, which I believe is less interesting than unpacking the material circumstances of existing in a failed state at the whims of corporate interests. “What if fossil fuels were people” is a weird wrinkle to add to a world that’s so focused on the inherent inhumanity of capital, and I’m not sure it really works with the game’s suggestions that the mere act of survival in this unending circus of death requires you to be basically without ideology. The choice offered to you at the end of the game - allow Coral to continue to exist and maybe become something more, or burn it all to the ground - feels like too huge a shift in the setting to be offered to the player when everything else about the game has constantly stressed that the manmade systems of the world are designed on purpose to be so labyrinthine and contradictory in order to alienate the worker from the real consequences of their labor. The idea that the fate of the setting depends on the beliefs of one individual just doesn’t really make sense to me in the world that they set up in the early chapters, where the actions of lone heroes are impotent and meaningless.

Basically perfect otherwise, wake da dawg up‼️🥵🔥