ngl, i've always been enamored with the idea of armored core. it's a sick-looking game that preys on the same parasite that made me so fascinated with virtual on, front mission, zone of the enders, and, hell, EXO Squad as a kid, but i never really had visible access to the games.
6 is the first game to be released in a time where i had my own income, and like wow do i need to retrain my brain and also damn it's great.
right now, i'm LARGELY playing the game the way I did Sekiro: get in quick, do a lot of damage, pop out. of course, sekiro didn't provide you with machine guns and missile launchers, so i've moderately modified my approach from those days. i'm running a glass mid-range build, which is REALLY FUN, because speed and reflexes are my favorite thing in these sorts of games, even considering how my most successful runs in games have been straight strength and grappler builds. i'm good at 'em, but it's rare i find them half as fun as being a squirrelly little shit.
then comes Bauteus. up to this point, i was rocking the lightest build with a machine gun, a blade, and a missile launcher -- fuck the shield because I was moving too much to make use of it at the time -- and, lemme tell ya: bauteus will put the glass in a glass build. i wound up going with a guntank, just overwhelming him (and everything else) with laser cannons, machine gun fire, and several tons of fuck-off armor and health.
and, while i find the tank builds to be sluggish and uncomfortable, the win was no less satisfying. i think that's what really got me, and made AC "click" for me: i don't have to be married to one style of play, and being a jack of all trades and trying out different parts allows me to get good at the game via a form of adaptability that i have not experienced much, if at all, from other games.
i'm very wired towards "you make a build, you stick with it, and only diverge if you plan on sticking to that branch." it's how a lot of games work for me, especially other fromsoft games (though I did switch a dex build in elden ring into a strength build, which is far easier than you'd think). knowing i can ram my head into a mission a dozen times and then go, "y'know what, i need to pull out a different back of tricks," and then i pop out, maybe get a little extra cash, grab some combat logs, and pop back in to reign fiery terror, is pretty freeing.
it's one of those experiences that's gonna make the inflexibility of other titles all the more frustrating for me from here on, i think.
This is absolutely the part of Armored Core games that I love most of all. Like, recognizing I only ever played the AC3 series of games before AC6, the most important part of my Armored Core experience is experimenting with new builds until I figure out one that can get me through the mission. What's also fun is that this doesn't even have to be the same build as other people's builds; I might be able to make a high-flying mech work in a fight when other folks wrote it off as impossible, and other folks can use an energy blade to get a kill when I decided playing the close-range game wasn't worth the risk. It's really good!