Now that I have unlocked everything in Armored Core VI, it’s time to share my thoughts on how the post-game content panned out and S Ranking every mission in the game.
Normally, I would power through an Armored Core and finish everything in a few days after release. However, we haven’t had any Armored Core games in a decade, so I took my time on this one in order to enjoy the whole process a bit more.
This is also going to be a spoiler heavy write-up and unless you have finished Armored Core VI in its entirety, I would advise averting your gaze until you have done everything in the game.
SPOILER ALERT
For many of the older Armored Core games, one of the big parts of finishing each one was S Ranking every mission. This normally resulted in extra parts and other trinkets, but Armored Core VI is a bit more minimalist in this regard.
This time around you just get a funky emblem, a trophy/achievement and that’s all. Personally, I would have liked to unlock some amazing new part for S Ranking the whole game, but like I said it was more minimalist this time around.
In previous Armored Core games S Ranks have also tended to be judged on three main criteria; how quickly you complete a mission as well as your repair and ammunition costs. This is broadly true for Armored Core VI, but you also have other hidden criteria. In that, some S Ranks require you to take down certain enemies, but mostly it’s about speed and keeping your costs low.
Obviously, restarting a mission at a checkpoint will lose you any chance of getting an S Rank. I also abstained from using the resupply setup and tried to not use repair kits either.
In the older games, saving on costs often meant switching over to a build that used energy weapons. This was because energy weapons did not incur ammunition costs. However, in Armored Core VI, energy weapons now have ammunition costs, which only leaves close combat weapons to help with keeping your costs down.
In most missions, you are fine with weapons that have low ammunition costs, but some can be very strict and that meant I had to switch over to laser blades and the like.
My end game build was a mid-weight biped rocking gatling guns and stun needles (shown above). The latter are insanely powerful on nullifying enemy AP once stunned, but this is purely a singleplayer build and not something I would recommend for multiplayer.
As for overall difficulty, the game turned out to be a lot easier than other entries in the series. However, most of that is down to how underpowered you start out. Once you max out the OS Tuning upgrades, you become a lot more potent in terms of your damage output and defensive capabilities. This bugs me a bit, but I get why the decision was made, as you can control the difficulty curve more accurately for newer players.
One thing that was a lot of fun in the end game was doing all the combat logs and finding all the hidden parts. Both were like a nice little treasure hunt, with you searching for specific enemies to take out or parts to uncover. The combat logs are also a new addition to the series and I thought these worked well in giving you more to do once the main campaign was finished.
In addition, it’s worth clarifying that NG+ and NG++ were basically like the older Armored Core games, rather than Souls. In that the game didn’t scale in difficulty on the next playthrough, but certain new missions were unlocked that could be more challenging.
This was also an interesting deviation on finishing the game. In previous Armored Core games you unlocked all the missions on a new playthrough. This time though, you had to play through each mission tree to unlock them as you go. I am not sure if I necessarily like that change, but it did extend the game nicely enough.
Overall, Armored Core VI is still a solid entry into the Armored Core series. There are still too many boss battles and they tend to end up becoming damage races, but it’s been at least a decade since I had an Armored Core game to S Rank and for that I am grateful.
Finally, here are my final mission playthroughs for the bad ending, good ending and true ending of Armored Core VI.
Armored Core VI is now available on PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One and PC. Feel free to also check out my review.
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