This became my “character” pretty early on. I wanted to see how this specific build would do vs every challenge in the game. Now that I’m actually done I’m playing around with more weapons
The chapter 1 boss was the highlight of the game and felt like I could’ve played vs him endlessly. For some reason I didn’t have that same level of enthusiasm for the later bosses that had that same caliber of difficulty. I think I just found their respective super moves to be too suffocating
I think for me the ch1 boss may have arrived at the time where my understanding of the game vs my desperate use of the few tools I had reached a perfect friction
I guess he was kind of like Margit in that sense. I came out of the fight a little bit less naive than when I went in. The fight itself forces you to understand certain systems in such a way that you can never go back and the game from that point all becomes a little more procedural and systematic
Really enjoy the stages that look purposefully monochromatic and then your mech is a splash of color on the screen
as others have advised, if you want to destroy the chapter 1 boss in no time build a tank
i was stuck on the chapter 2 boss for about 3 days and finally took it out yesterday. fucking sea spider.
a thing that really helped was discovering that there is, in fact, an actual lock on feature in this game, but you can not, ever, touch the right stick once you’re locked on or it loses the lock on and gives you zero feedback that this has happened. trying to keep up with that boss while constantly spinning the camera around to try to find where the hell it went was too much
decided to give my mech some bee stripes
beat all the arena encounters… double shotguns are sooo swag give a girl a mech with 2 guns and she thinks shes god
im really enjoying playing with such a lightweight and fast build tho idk how good it would be in pvp… i think most people have not even unlocked all the parts so i hope they like let the pvp meta evolve on its own before deciding a bunch of shit needs nerfing!
ive also had luck using a stun needle launcher + slightly heavier mind beta reverse joint legs (and the heaviest generator 
) but the songbirds fulfill kind of a similar role for me while being lighter and less EN hungry
Beat chapter one with minimal changes in loadout and no changes in strategy. Basically I just replaced my shitty “second missiles available” with better missiles, and did OS upgrades for rapid turn around, armor, and repair kit efficacy. Then I came back to it fresh and beat it on my second or third try.
I laughed out loud when the name under the overpowered experimental mech was “student pilot”. “I can do this! … I’ve trained for this!”
I realized later it’s also a joke about the typical Gundam episode 1
When your lock on mode is active, your crosshairs get a series of straight lines at the middle corners of your screen. Once you lock on, they move to fill in the empty space on your circular reticle between the reload bars at the bottom left and right of it, and the target health at the center top.
It takes a bit to get used to picking them out IME, as there’s a lot of stuff going on on screen at once to take in.
And the machine in the pic for the curious:
Done with the true ending, they really went with the most amusing choices possible for the true last boss’ identity and the final line before the credits roll. The idea for NG+ cycles is wonderful on paper, in practice it doesn’t go far enough and there are long unchanged stretches which are a bit of a chore - if they tackle this structure again, I hope they set out to remix every mission in a more comprehensive way, new dialogue, changed enemy placements/player spawn, added enemies, altered environments (esp with all the reuse they’ve already got going on), there’s a lot of basic stuff they could tweak in simple ways that could pay off big time, probably refused to go further to refrain from overcomplicating the replay mission mode/S-rank collection. Still, everything they did tweak, I had a lot of fun with.
Feels weird to see the incredible disconnect between the people starting the game - spending hours on the bosses of the first chapters, grinding money in the Dafeng student mission and so on - and the ones who spent their time in the lab and discovered the game basically plays itself with certain setups (Zimmermans and Songbirds, laser and pilebunker setups), even in endgame, I was using the builds I discovered in the first 10 hours to keep killing new bosses before all of their lines played properly. I wonder how they’re going to approach rebalancing it, the game would definitely benefit from making the best options less braindead/more situational, but an aggressive use of the nerf stick would kill a lot of fun.
Hoshino’s music is great as expected, the sound design is amazing (love how everyone notices the heavy lifting it does in the Ice Worm mission, the brief vacuum before “I won’t miss” is pure perfection), but I do think he plays it a little too safe with compositions, I do wonder if it was his choice of the team’s. The moments he lets the music overpower the experience (Balteus boss fight, the second-to-last mission in the Liberator of Rubicon path) are the most memorable ones by far and definitely left me wanting more. (The final vocal theme is no Thinker, sadly).
The “Dune with junkyard megastructures” aesthetic was perfect from the beginning to the end. The writing is a tiny bit too anime for my taste, but ultimately, I did enjoy how the story is about a mastermind trying to fool everyone into believing they’re special until they cross someone who actually is - you, a person who has been given every tool to understand the entirety of the situation/everyone involved and reach enlightenment. And in understated ways, it plays nicely into how the presentation never truly lets you know what is “real” and what is a simulation, who is an AI and who is human, how the different timelines and Ravens interact with each other, because in the end, is it really what matters and why not let you decide for yourself?
Which AC VI pilot who died screaming do you feel worst for?
I’m not sure whether it’s convergent evolution but AC6 reminds me a lot of Bungie games.
Like Destiny, there’s ~6 cooldowns to keep track of, elemental weaknesses, critical time windows where you can deal damage, and build customization. There’s something common in the aesthetic too, with no human face ever shown and your comms link talking to you in various corporate/mystical jargons at a cool distance from the violence.
The core move-and-aim loop winds up surprisingly similar too, because AC6’s semi-mandatory autoaim struggles in some of the same situations it would be hard to manual aim, like distant or fast-moving objects. The really interesting thing about this is that by partially decoupling aim from player hand/eye coordination, AC6 makes it into another aspect you can customize as part of your build.
So a weapon like Linear Rifle would, in most other games, wind up primarily getting used for sniping. But in AC6 you can only use it that way if you otherwise build your mech to emphasize long-distance engagements. If you use it as part of a conventional build, its high-stagger-impact charged shots is its key feature instead.
I’m glad armored core is finally getting some love from a wider audience, but I do find most of the commentary surrounding the game overly positive. It is a good armored core game, but aside from the technological improvements not significantly better than the others. I haven’t finished the game yet, but as of now For Answer is still my favorite.
The over use of cooldowns is one of my criticisms. Combined with the stagger meter there is now just too much to keep track of. There are the long reload times compared to previous games and now stagger meters (both your own and your opponents’) to keep track of. And the repair kits. Just one more thing you need to worry about in the heat of battle.
Perhaps these changes are there to increase the skill ceiling, but in practice I think they’ll just limit the viable play styles. You really need a high dps weapon to take advantage of the stagger and it better not be in cooldown when you need it. I like dual rifle builds in AC but with the long reload times I can never actually stagger most ACs with rifles alone. Dual machine guns, on the other hand can cause stagger pretty quickly. So what use are rifles then if they aren’t good for stagger or dps?
I hope this doesn’t sound too harsh, because I do like the game. It is just odd seeing the near universal praise for a game in a series no one cared about before. Like every game in the series it does some things better and some things worse than its predecessors.
i’m sure there will be a widespread reappraisal once people (like me) who started with 6 start looking at the back catalog
it would be so swag if they put ac4 and for answer on something other than rpcs3
There’s also still time for me to change my mind. Lots of folks have already finished the game, so I am a bit behind. Either way, still one of the year’s best.
I feel what AC6 brought to the table is above all a kind of dramatic flair. When I tried AC5 a few years back I remember it starting with a bunch of low-risk/low-reward missions. Whereas AC6 opens with your mech’s illegal entry capsule accelerating to dodge an orbital defense laser and crash-landing as hard as possible. Your first task then is to steal the identity of a dead pilot, and when the boss appears, the reason to destroy it is that it was observing you.
The cooldowns and stagger meter also create a natural dramatic arc within each battle. You fight in anticipation of the key moment, and then take risks in an all-or-nothing push to unload all your weapons at once.
the issue i have with that dramatic arc is that it plays out pretty much the same every time in the bigger boss battles.
im loving most of the general level design in this one, but the boss fights are a definite low point for me.
the writing is also not quite clicking, there’s some good stuff and i like what it’s doing, it just feels a bit overwrought or self aware at points.
sounds like AC6 is having the same moment as Elden Ring where suddenly a wider audience is going “whoa this series/Fromsoft actually whips ass???” and the former niche audience is like “yes and we have been telling you this for years, glad you’re onboard now but come on”