Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon story spoilers ahead. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
For all intents and purposes, Rubicon III – the setting of Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon – is a dead planet orbiting the star of a dead system. A half-century before we arrive and the events of the game proper start, a disaster called the “Fires of Ibis” engulfs the planet and spreads outward, killing almost everyone who happened to call the system home and forcing the various corporations fighting over Rubicon III’s primary resource – Coral – to leave. It is only after the last embers of this utterly consuming fire die down, leaving behind nothing but ruins of corporate megastructures, that anyone unlucky enough to have survived is able to survey the damage and attempt to rebuild a semblance of a life here.
Most of the Rubiconians we meet in Armored Core VI are either very old or very young, with no one – except maybe “Cinder” Carla – in between. While they may loosely try to come together in the form of the so-called Rubicon Liberation Front, they do not own the planet they exist on. The deed seems to firmly rest in the hands of the paragovernmental organization meant to keep other people, and especially corporations, away: the Planetary Closure Administration.
The PCA has declared Rubicon III a no-go zone, akin to something like the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone or the abandoned volcanic island of Montserrat. They have an impressive array of incomprehensibly powerful weapons floating in orbit above the planet, lying dormant until those stupid enough to try to breach the zone make their moves, and truly massive fleets of containment forces on the planet’s surface besides. Yet despite this overwhelming show of force, two corporations, Arquebus Group and Balam Industries, have managed to sneak into Rubicon III like teenagers sneaking into abandoned well sites.
These corporations both establish survey teams to sniff out the Coral. These teams are ostensibly staffed by engineers, surveyors, miners. We witness very little of their activity but can only assume that the corporations are run a bit like beehives in this fashion: everyone buzzing around, doing their jobs mostly unseen. Instead we are mostly drawn to their guard units: Arquebus’s biologically-enhanced, aloof Vespers and Balam’s rowdy and militaristic Redguns. Out of these separate corps of misanthropic hotshots, we only meet a select few: V.IV Rusty, G1 Michigan, V.II Snail, G5 Iguazu. And of course, we only meet them in the context of combat. There’s very little outside of fighting that we are present for.
Adjacent to the corporations, the RLF and the PCA are the “Dosers.” These are scientists and engineers who have in common one peculiar trait: they have evidently ingested and gotten high off of Coral. They run a company called Reuse and Development, led by “Cinder” Carla. RaD, along with BAWS (Belius Applied Weapons Systems) mostly provide weapons parts to the highest bidder, but sometimes participate in the factional struggle, seemingly for fun.
Bolstering all sides are the numerous independent mercenaries, Armored Core pilots who have made their way to the planet’s surface and survived long enough to register with ALLMIND, the AI-driven mercenary logistics and support service. They wander the planet, taking on jobs for anyone with the COAM to pay them, regardless of factional alignment. They either work alone, or with the support of a Handler or Operator. This is the level we operate at, and we are introduced to this world of constant internecine warfare and corporate extraction as smuggled goods, a Stalker making our foray into the planetary exclusion zone for the first time. We take on the role of Augmented Human C4-621, a mercenary known by a variety of monikers during our time on Rubicon III: Wallclimber, Wormkiller, Walter’s Hound, “Raven.” That last name, the callsign we steal off the mechanized corpse of another mercenary in our first sortie on Rubicon’s surface, holds a particularly significant meaning, but when we take it for our own all we care about – sorry, all Walter cares about – is finding a name we can do business under.
We are passive observers in Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon except in one vital sense: fighting. While other characters – Walter, Carla, the leaders of Arquebus and Balam, ALLMIND, Rusty, the RLF, and even a Coral-derived voice in our heads called Ayre – grapple with muddled ideals and play corporate hardball with each other at gunpoint, we barely exist in the space between sorties. While others are trying to foment revolution or prevent another massive disaster from happening, from the first mission to the last gasp in New Game Plus Plus, we are simply a gun they pick up and put down at will. And while we are a gun that never misses, we also never really fire of our own volition.
There are three endings to Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon. With each ending, the game resets to the moment that ALLMIND accepts our designation as “Raven.” The second time we play through the cycle of struggle, certain doors unlock and new pathways, new derivations, open up for us. For a fleeting second we feel a spark of life, a moment of freedom where we decide where to go. In the middle of a mission, for example, we can choose to do things as scripted or we can, when contacted by the RLF, take out our Redgun escorts instead. But these moments of decision-making are themselves illusory. All that changes by the time we reach the final mission is that we play whatever ending we didn’t get the last time, and then, once again, we wake up in the hangar, our callsign designation being accepted for the first time once more.
On the second restart, our third time through the cycle, those occasional unlocked doors and uncovered pathways to slightly new results make the shift into a different series of events entirely. The AI-driven mercenary logistics network, ALLMIND, begins to make contact with us concerning an event called the “Coral Release.” Eventually we start to take on missions for ALLMIND in pursuit of their goal of initiating Coral Release, over the increasingly weak objections of everyone else around us. Eventually, ALLMIND engineers our false “death,” puts us under our protection, and begins systematically wiping out everyone who poses a threat to Coral Release. This is the Answer, it has been decided for us: the way to end the fighting, to end capitalism, to end oppression itself, and usher the universe into a new evolutionary age.
We do what we’re told. We commandeer the massive city-ship Xylem and stop it from colliding into the colossal Vascular Plant, a building uncovered by Arquebus where all the planet’s remaining Coral has gathered. Instead of blowing the Plant up or destroying the Xylem once and for all, as in the previous cycles, here we – meaning 621 and Ayre, alone – are compelled to fight one last time. In order for Coral Release to take place, a sacrifice has to be made. ALLMIND has decided that we are that sacrifice. Ayre, a part of the Coral and a Rubiconian, decides differently. After the suitably intense final encounter with another ALLMIND pawn, G5 Iguazu, we trigger Coral Release.
The final monologue has become seared into my mind since playing through it for the first time. Like other endings in the game, we are shown the consequences of our actions. Coral has proliferated amongst the stars. Rubicon lives. The corporations, the Liberation Front, the PCA – all gone. Dormant, desiccated mechs on the surface slowly reactivate and begin moving around.
“Thank you, Raven,” Ayre says as we are engulfed in a Coral-generated wormhole. And then… “Raven, you’re finally awake. The Coral has carried us. Disseminated us amongst the stars. Now… We’re everywhere. Anywhere. Raven. Let’s meet this new age… together.” This is followed by a familiar refrain, heard before every sortie. Only now, it’s Ayre’s voice saying it. Maybe this line is meant to be hopeful. In the moment, I felt like I was playing through a nightmare you couldn’t wake up from. It was this moment that laid bare for me the sheer inhumanity on display and the unwavering, unbeatably alienating object position 621 – we – have been occupying in this game from start to end.
As the screen once again cuts to black, Ayre says: “Main System: Activating Combat Mode.”
Early in Armored Core VI‘s campaign, Handler Walter ends a pre-sortie briefing with us by saying “It’s just a job, 621. All of it.” Those words are especially resonant here at the end. We never see Augmented Human C4-621, callsign “Raven,” out of our AC during the game itself. This is largely fine; after all, we don’t see anyone throughout our playthrough. All we encounter are other machines, from the most garden-variety Muscle Tracers to the most exotic-looking, angular ACs. But 621 lacks even a voice to make their discontent heard, if indeed they feel any. A mark of the Generation 4 Augmented Humans is their malleability.
But it isn’t true that we never see the meatbag that houses 621 at all. We appear bandaged from head to toe, unresponsive to external stimuli, hooked up to a battery of life-support machines, in the hangar next to our AC during a story trailer for the game. In the trailer, three other of Walter’s “Hounds,” C4-617, C4-619 and C4-620, all struggle to take down a huge laser cannon much like the Eye that sits on top of the Strider unit we eventually take down. In the end, they accomplish their mission, but each Hound is destroyed in the process. What do we call these predecessors of ours? Siblings? Comrades? Do they deserve such a familial connection? Should we even bother thinking about them? One notable difference between these predecessors and us is that, unless I’m mistaken, these Hounds can speak. It’s a minuscule affordance, if it’s even an accurate read, but the Hounds that came before us had at least a vestige of personhood.
621 is not a person. They are an Augmented Human. They were produced on a factory line, like every other AC part we use. It is unclear if 621 is allowed to remain conscious in the downtime between sorties and mission briefings. They have no will beyond their Handlers’ will, no future beyond what others have envisioned for them, and no place in this world beyond their utility as an AC pilot. Walter says as much to them, in that story trailer: “I’ll give you a reason to exist.” In one of the endings you get before New Game++, a bereft Walter, piloting an ancient Institute AC, struggles to finally articulate what he really wants for 621: to regain their freedom and somehow undo the surgeries that made them the way they are now. But there is no path forward where that is allowed to happen. It’s just a job. All of it.
The horrifying beauty of that final ending in New Game++ is that, after the credits roll, it is immediately followed by another cyclical reset. We can replay the campaign once more, though no new pathways appear; begin to S-Rank all missions and collect what remain of the combat and environment logs that pepper the landscape. With enough COAM we can empty the parts store of its inventory and even begin to really get silly with our AC loadouts. We can start to focus test our builds against other players in the Nest. Everything plays out exactly as it did before, as it will again. The further away we as players get from that third and final ending, the less we tie ourselves to C4-621 and become more like the Handlers in their life. Their will is our will. Their future is what we have envisioned for them. They are simply a gun that never misses, and we now pull the trigger.