(I spoil the ending of the game in the last paragraph.)
This is the first Armored Core game I've played, though I'm a massive fan of FromSoft's Souls games, and I was looking forward to checking out their other major game series. I came away loving it, and it left me really wanting to explore the earlier games.
The action of the game is excellent, fun and impressive, though rarely very difficult. Like the Souls games, attacks are grounded in their animations, though most of the projectile weapons are near instant. The real limiting factor is that each of your four weapons, once it expends its ammunition, is sent into cooldown. The loop of the action is juggling these four cooldowns while looking for opportunities to get a hit in on the enemies, as well as managing your boosting and stagger bars. Each enemy has a stagger bar, though the vast majority of enemy types are one or two-hit fodder enemies, called MTs, which do more damage as the game goes on but never become harder to kill. There are two or three tiers of regular enemies, each requiring more damage as you go up the tier, then there are enemy AC/LC enemies, which are similar to your own ship. Fights against other style of human NPCs are always fun in the Souls games, and they're great here, and there's a lot of them, as well as arena fights which are one on one. There are only a few boss enemies, but they're all unique and fun to fight. There's the usual genre of FROM bosses—action/skill tests like Balteus; puzzle-y bosses like the helicopter, which can be trivialized by staying underneath it; and then finally the Stormruler style cinematic fight (Ice Worm) where you must use a specific weapon to take it down.
Your weapon choices are limited primarily by two stats--first, the encumbrance stat, which is determined by your legs. The heavier the leg part, the more you can carry, though you might be slower. The other limiting stat is your generator. Generally, generators with more energy are heavier, limiting your choices for your other parts. Certain weapons work better with certain AC designs—each part—head, arms, cores, legs, computer, and generator—has specific stats that make them better for fast weapons, slow weapons, energy weapons, melee weapons, long distance, medium distance, and so on. You're rewarded for building highly specialized ACs, and certain load-outs will work better in different situations.
The game is all about customizing; the tension between expression and optimization, as well as the extreme amount of possibilities, reminded me of playing God Hand. I felt different parts of my action game player tendencies butt up against each other. On the one hand I wanted to find the right solution for every fight or kind of fight, and on the other hand I wanted to choose one weapon set and stick to it, like I tend to do in Dark Souls games. So I did both. For most of the three play throughs I've done so far, I used a medium weight AC, plasma whip and Zimmerman shotgun, the SOUP missiles and the Songbirds, and I painted it like the Gundam Ez8. For certain bosses I swapped over to a heavy, fast Guntank style build, where it was beneficial to have the hard hitting, heavy weapons be able be fired while still maintaining your momentum.
This tension between builds towards ends and builds as an identity, towards a particular mastery, seems to be reflected in the reviews and comments you see about builds in this game. On the one hand, there's the group that embrace modifying your equipment towards whatever end (who mostly appear to be seasoned AC players), and on the other side, there are players who are searching for the best build for them. In most mecha stories, as a rule, changes to the fundamental composition of the robot is rare; practically speaking, designing a completely new kind of Gundam for one-off episodes is not practical, and in general, a characters identity is often wrapped up in whatever kind of mecha they pilot. Amuro Ray is, narratively and iconagraphically, the RX-78-2 Gundam (nu Gundam etc. notwithstanding). In Dia Lucina's Armored Core 6 review, she says "Armored Core VI isn’t about perfecting a build, it’s about understanding that the Core is the persistence of identity, everything else can and should be swapped to suit the needs of the job"--but this is generally only true for the player character. On Rubicon, with few exceptions, every NPC pilot we encounter is tied to a specific Armored Core. Those that do change Cores, into bigger and badder machines, are typically only pilots that are, narratively at least, like the player character in their pilot mastery. Maybe that ability to move between different Cores is the mark of the great Core pilot; and the game forcing you into different builds for different fight's is its way of shaping you into a great pilot.
The mission loop is highly addicting--every mission takes between five to fifteen minutes, but it's impossible not to want to jump right back into the next mission. If you want to see the full game you will replay these missions a lot—it takes two NG+ cycles to see every mission and all the story content, NieR style. After you beat a mission for the first time, you can replay it as often as you want in the replay mission section, and when you replay a mission from that menu you get a letter grading. I really would have liked if you automatically got grades for replaying missions in the NG+ cycles. On the other hand, after seeing all the story content the letter grading is a reason for me to keep playing, and trying a mission over and over with different builds until getting the S is sincerely satisfying. I don't tend to think of myself as a score chaser in video games, though I do love playing score based arcade games or character action games. I guess a prerequisite for score chasing for me is that the game feels good to play, and AC6 feels great to play.
The games narrative structure is somewhat of a departure from the Souls games, though I understand its par for the course for AC games. As you get into chapter 3, where you learn that Raven is a name used by AC pilots that make choices, you are given a handful of choices for what mission to take, and one or two in-mission choices about how to complete certain missions. These choices unlock future possible choices, ultimately unlocking a choice in which ending to pursue. In NG+ you see more missions and more dialogue, and in NG++ you see even more changes and a new ending possibility. This felt a lot like NieR Replicant to me, since the narrative is designed with these new game cycles in mind (though, to be clear, playing through the NGs is 100x more fun here). Each NG puts not only the information you have from the prior NGs in new light, but recasts a lot of the main characters dialogue. When a new game cycle starts, the introductory dialogue hits different emotionally.
The narrative is classic Gundam/mecha anime stuff—not only is the mecha a weapon, crucially, piloting the mecha reduces a human being into a weapon. In AC6 this is taken to a dystopian extreme. Your character exists inside the mecha only—the vehicle is your body. As a player playing the character, you only exist during combat or when outfitting your Core for combat. The narrative is satisfying and well written, though a lot of it is delivered in that classic FROM way—sparse cut scenes, menu descriptions. The narrative feels implied. At a certain point in the game, you get connected with the Coral, one part of it named Ayre, who functions somewhat as a ghost haunting you, influencing you; Walter, your handler, constantly talks about his own "friend," though you learn he is not connected by the same way. Instead, he's haunted by the death of an old friend, haunted by a ghost in his own way. The character writing is sparse, but effective. In NG++, you have the option to work for Allmind—ultimately dispersing Coral into AC shells, and the very last line of the game implies that they are waging some kind of war. The Coral then get embodied as ACs, and immediately turn into weapons for some kind of vague war. The final line of the game is Ayre repeating the "engaging combat mode" dialogue spoken at the start of every mission. The Coral's dispersement into bodies is doomed, for themselves and for everyone, because of the particular bodies that they land in.
This is the first Armored Core game I've played, though I'm a massive fan of FromSoft's Souls games, and I was looking forward to checking out their other major game series. I came away loving it, and it left me really wanting to explore the earlier games.
The action of the game is excellent, fun and impressive, though rarely very difficult. Like the Souls games, attacks are grounded in their animations, though most of the projectile weapons are near instant. The real limiting factor is that each of your four weapons, once it expends its ammunition, is sent into cooldown. The loop of the action is juggling these four cooldowns while looking for opportunities to get a hit in on the enemies, as well as managing your boosting and stagger bars. Each enemy has a stagger bar, though the vast majority of enemy types are one or two-hit fodder enemies, called MTs, which do more damage as the game goes on but never become harder to kill. There are two or three tiers of regular enemies, each requiring more damage as you go up the tier, then there are enemy AC/LC enemies, which are similar to your own ship. Fights against other style of human NPCs are always fun in the Souls games, and they're great here, and there's a lot of them, as well as arena fights which are one on one. There are only a few boss enemies, but they're all unique and fun to fight. There's the usual genre of FROM bosses—action/skill tests like Balteus; puzzle-y bosses like the helicopter, which can be trivialized by staying underneath it; and then finally the Stormruler style cinematic fight (Ice Worm) where you must use a specific weapon to take it down.
Your weapon choices are limited primarily by two stats--first, the encumbrance stat, which is determined by your legs. The heavier the leg part, the more you can carry, though you might be slower. The other limiting stat is your generator. Generally, generators with more energy are heavier, limiting your choices for your other parts. Certain weapons work better with certain AC designs—each part—head, arms, cores, legs, computer, and generator—has specific stats that make them better for fast weapons, slow weapons, energy weapons, melee weapons, long distance, medium distance, and so on. You're rewarded for building highly specialized ACs, and certain load-outs will work better in different situations.
The game is all about customizing; the tension between expression and optimization, as well as the extreme amount of possibilities, reminded me of playing God Hand. I felt different parts of my action game player tendencies butt up against each other. On the one hand I wanted to find the right solution for every fight or kind of fight, and on the other hand I wanted to choose one weapon set and stick to it, like I tend to do in Dark Souls games. So I did both. For most of the three play throughs I've done so far, I used a medium weight AC, plasma whip and Zimmerman shotgun, the SOUP missiles and the Songbirds, and I painted it like the Gundam Ez8. For certain bosses I swapped over to a heavy, fast Guntank style build, where it was beneficial to have the hard hitting, heavy weapons be able be fired while still maintaining your momentum.
This tension between builds towards ends and builds as an identity, towards a particular mastery, seems to be reflected in the reviews and comments you see about builds in this game. On the one hand, there's the group that embrace modifying your equipment towards whatever end (who mostly appear to be seasoned AC players), and on the other side, there are players who are searching for the best build for them. In most mecha stories, as a rule, changes to the fundamental composition of the robot is rare; practically speaking, designing a completely new kind of Gundam for one-off episodes is not practical, and in general, a characters identity is often wrapped up in whatever kind of mecha they pilot. Amuro Ray is, narratively and iconagraphically, the RX-78-2 Gundam (nu Gundam etc. notwithstanding). In Dia Lucina's Armored Core 6 review, she says "Armored Core VI isn’t about perfecting a build, it’s about understanding that the Core is the persistence of identity, everything else can and should be swapped to suit the needs of the job"--but this is generally only true for the player character. On Rubicon, with few exceptions, every NPC pilot we encounter is tied to a specific Armored Core. Those that do change Cores, into bigger and badder machines, are typically only pilots that are, narratively at least, like the player character in their pilot mastery. Maybe that ability to move between different Cores is the mark of the great Core pilot; and the game forcing you into different builds for different fight's is its way of shaping you into a great pilot.
The mission loop is highly addicting--every mission takes between five to fifteen minutes, but it's impossible not to want to jump right back into the next mission. If you want to see the full game you will replay these missions a lot—it takes two NG+ cycles to see every mission and all the story content, NieR style. After you beat a mission for the first time, you can replay it as often as you want in the replay mission section, and when you replay a mission from that menu you get a letter grading. I really would have liked if you automatically got grades for replaying missions in the NG+ cycles. On the other hand, after seeing all the story content the letter grading is a reason for me to keep playing, and trying a mission over and over with different builds until getting the S is sincerely satisfying. I don't tend to think of myself as a score chaser in video games, though I do love playing score based arcade games or character action games. I guess a prerequisite for score chasing for me is that the game feels good to play, and AC6 feels great to play.
The games narrative structure is somewhat of a departure from the Souls games, though I understand its par for the course for AC games. As you get into chapter 3, where you learn that Raven is a name used by AC pilots that make choices, you are given a handful of choices for what mission to take, and one or two in-mission choices about how to complete certain missions. These choices unlock future possible choices, ultimately unlocking a choice in which ending to pursue. In NG+ you see more missions and more dialogue, and in NG++ you see even more changes and a new ending possibility. This felt a lot like NieR Replicant to me, since the narrative is designed with these new game cycles in mind (though, to be clear, playing through the NGs is 100x more fun here). Each NG puts not only the information you have from the prior NGs in new light, but recasts a lot of the main characters dialogue. When a new game cycle starts, the introductory dialogue hits different emotionally.
The narrative is classic Gundam/mecha anime stuff—not only is the mecha a weapon, crucially, piloting the mecha reduces a human being into a weapon. In AC6 this is taken to a dystopian extreme. Your character exists inside the mecha only—the vehicle is your body. As a player playing the character, you only exist during combat or when outfitting your Core for combat. The narrative is satisfying and well written, though a lot of it is delivered in that classic FROM way—sparse cut scenes, menu descriptions. The narrative feels implied. At a certain point in the game, you get connected with the Coral, one part of it named Ayre, who functions somewhat as a ghost haunting you, influencing you; Walter, your handler, constantly talks about his own "friend," though you learn he is not connected by the same way. Instead, he's haunted by the death of an old friend, haunted by a ghost in his own way. The character writing is sparse, but effective. In NG++, you have the option to work for Allmind—ultimately dispersing Coral into AC shells, and the very last line of the game implies that they are waging some kind of war. The Coral then get embodied as ACs, and immediately turn into weapons for some kind of vague war. The final line of the game is Ayre repeating the "engaging combat mode" dialogue spoken at the start of every mission. The Coral's dispersement into bodies is doomed, for themselves and for everyone, because of the particular bodies that they land in.