“You Are Not a Dog; You Are Vermin!” – How Armored Core VI Conveys Character Through Gameplay by J. Alexandria

(warning: this article contains heavy spoilers for Armored Core VI’s ‘Liberator’ route)

The V. II Snail boss fight in 2023’s Armored Core VI: The Fires of Rubicon is one of the more interesting boss fights I’ve encountered. It employs game design to directly communicate character growth, an idea I find both fascinating and highly effective. I’ve seen a lot of criticism of this game that claims the story is thin and the characters are poorly sketched, but I would disagree, and instead argue that ACVI communicates its story in very innovative ways through its mechanics. The player character, ‘621’, is a silent, faceless protagonist, but this fight gives her an arc that I am nonetheless invested in.

Working with blank slates as player characters is nothing new for a FromSoft game, of course. The company made its name with the Dark Souls series, sword-and-sorcery fantasy RPGs where silent protagonists battle through the ruins of dead worlds. Before the developer hit it big with these titles, however, they produced the Armored Core series, a mission-based mecha action franchise focused on detailed customisation and resource management, also featuring silent protagonists battling through the ruins of dead worlds. The gameplay is different, but the tone is remarkably similar. There is a curiously circular relationship between Dark Souls and Armored Core, where newcomers to Armored Core VI, including me, were reminded of the bleak worlds and quiet characters of Dark Souls, despite the fact that these elements of the company’s design philosophy arguably originated in the older Armored Core games, which predate the first Dark Souls by over a decade. Armored Core VI highlights how skilful the developers at FromSoft have become at using gameplay to reveal the world and characters to the player. 

The first boss fight in ACVI beats into the player’s head that in this world, 621 is disposable trash. The boss, a colossal PCA Assault Helicopter, ambushes the player at the end of what is otherwise a fairly straightforward tutorial mission, where no enemies have posed much of a challenge, shocking the player out of their seat with a sudden difficulty spike. The player is only able to win after they embrace that the path to victory is borderline suicidal, charging right at the Assault Helicopter and mauling it at close range with your Pulse Blade even as it hammers you with rockets and machine gun fire. It puts the player into the mindset that someone as dehumanised as 621 would have; ‘I have no worth beyond my ability to kill. My own safety is irrelevant’. To win, the player has to rewire their own brain to match where someone like 621 would be in this moment.

This persists through most of the campaign; Armored Core VI presents a string of boss fights that must be tackled head-on. A slow, careful approach will almost always get you killed, and so as the player you must embrace your role as little more than a dehumanised attack dog for the various private military corporations, paramilitaries, and criminal gangs who pay you a pittance to risk your life advancing their interests in the multi-factional war for control of Rubicon’s vital Coral resources. All of this while you continue to pursue the agenda of your Handler, Walter, whose motivations and intentions are almost wholly opaque to you. If you’re paying attention, you can more or less follow the story, but it’s easy to lose track of why you’re even shooting at the people in your crosshairs, or who you’re being gunned down and blown up to benefit. 

This shifts dramatically once you complete Chapter 5. After Handler Walter is removed from the picture, you are presented with your first meaningful choice since the game began. Do you go through with Walter’s original plan, revealed to you by your new ally, ‘Cinder’ Carla, to annihilate the Coral once and for all? This will scorch the ruins of this war-torn world once and for all, as well as murdering the sentient Coral, but it will at least keep this powerful resource out of the hands of the malevolent megacorporations. Or do you betray and kill Carla, preserving the Coral, and gambling on your ability to deny the corporations access to it through force?

The second option, the ‘Liberator of Rubicon’ route, is where Armored Core VI’s incredible character work really shines. In this version of the story, 621 makes an active decision to take the much riskier option, based on nothing but the hope that it can lead to something better than the safe option of sticking by Walter and Carla’s plan, and burning the innocent Coral. By allying with Ayre, a sentient who is part of the Coral network, and the Rubicon Liberation Front, the paramilitary group who are trying to free the planet from the grip of the corporations, 621 embraces some degree of hope in the future, that the world beyond these scorched skies will be one where she is a person, not a hound. This is underscored by the fact that 621’s bond with V. IV Rusty, a frequent ally up to this point, graduates into a real comradeship in the opening of the mission, while the level’s soundtrack, ‘Rusted Pride’, is the first time the game’s music has sounded bombastic, veering dangerously close to triumphant.

The design of the V. II Snail boss fight, which takes place in the same mission, reflects this. To win, the player must rewire their brain again. Almost every boss fight in ACVI is to some degree built around the ACS strain mechanic. This is essentially a stun meter, where enough high-damage attacks (particularly melee attacks) in quick succession will leave the enemy temporarily immobile with disabled defence systems, encouraging the player to be extremely aggressive to keep their opponent off-balance, especially because granting any reprieve will reset the enemy ACS strain to zero. V. II Snail’s Armored Core,, Arquebus Balteus, by contrast, uses a combination of pulse shielding and forward directional attacks that encourage precisely the opposite. Arquebus Balteus’ pulse shielding works like a conventional sci-fi energy shield, draining slowly as it’s attacked, and, unlike ACS strain, not resetting if the player backs off, allowing for a more conservative approach. This allowance becomes a requirement when taking into account Snail’s weaponry, which includes an enormous energy blade capable of killing 621 in a single hit, a devastating rifle shot with a several seconds long wind-up, and slow-moving explosive projectiles. These are tricky, but not impossible, for the player to dodge at medium to long-range; at close quarters, it’s a death sentence. Backing off and chipping away at the thick shielding from mid-range is the best way to expose the hull of Snail’s AC to damage, and what I love about this is that it encourages the player, for the first time, to play as if they value their own life.

This is such a smart design decision on a number of levels. First, on a very basic gameplay level, encouraging such a different playstyle is a nice change of pace from the other boss fights. From a storytelling perspective, it’s a great way of demonstrating 621’s character growth. She could not have beaten V. II Snail at the start of the game because she didn’t value her own life enough to win. Only by earning the Power of Self-Respect does 621 have what it takes to bring down Snail, and that only happened because she chose to do the crazy, hopeful, optimistic thing alongside people like Rusty, Ayre, and the RLF who actually view her as human. It’s especially impactful that during this fight, V. II screeches at 621 over the radio about how rather than being, as she’s been called all game, a dog, she’s in fact ‘vermin’. He’s attempting to further dehumanise her, downgrading her from an animal that’s at least useful to a pest, right at the moment where 621 is ready to reclaim her humanity.

Just like that first fight with the helicopter, the game is asking the player to align their own perspective to where the events of the story would logically place 621. Rather than just being shown a character arc (as you would be in a non-interactive medium) part of the test of the V. II Snail fight is in understanding 621’s arc, and demonstrating that understanding by performing part of it in order to progress. In a way no other medium can, Armored Core VI directly involves the player in this pivotal moment for 621, which is why I feel so attached to her despite her anonymity. The player feels involved because the story doesn’t just depend on them moving a character model from point A to point B so that the next cutscene will play. In a very real way, the story is able to program the behaviour of the player, making them a critical component in conveying its narrative emotionally as well as functionally.

This is such a fascinating storytelling device, and I’m not aware of any other games that use gameplay to force the player into adopting the character’s in-universe perspective quite like this. Obviously, the gameplay of any game is going to get in the player’s head a little, and when done well this can even be done in ways that tell you things about the player character, for example, the way that Disco Elysium encourages the player to have Harry constantly jog to get around, hinting at his background as a gym teacher, or the transparently meaningless dialogue choices in 1000xResist’s early chapters being used to illustrate how closed-minded Watcher is. The masterstroke in Armored Core VI is in the way that FromSoft’s design philosophy ties these traits to an explicitly skill-gated challenge, utilising ferociously difficult boss fights to turn these gameplay touches from incidental detail into a complete character arc over the course of Fires of Rubicon’s campaign, so that the player takes an active role in performing that arc, for a protagonist who is otherwise voiceless. Contrary to some criticisms of Armored Core VI having a thin story, this approach shows that FromSoft has a command of the medium in a way many studios and developers do not, fully exploiting the potential for player interactivity to make them participate in, rather than simply read, the game’s text. Much like 621, the player cannot remain a passive participant; they must make their own decisions, they must change, if they wish to reach the world beyond Rubicon’s scorched skies.