Once again taking aim at the latest From Soft hit, @wingblade critiques Armored Core VI's individualistic ideas of revolution as it moves away from grueling mecha simulation toward pure power fantasy.
Such a strong lack of the human element casts a shadow of the absurd over Fires of Rubicon. Much of the game’s moral compass making is propped up by favor gained with a wimpy and characterless liberation group and a general motivation to free the people from the tyranny of corporations and the government. Yet, people directly responsible for the global conflict constantly take the stage to speak in broad strokes. A many months long, costly factional war is skipped over in seconds as the game ramps up to its third act, making it clear how much the game wants its triumphant military fantasy without any of the pesky realities of the rank-and-file or general masses.
and another person who interprets some of the core components of plot, character, and diegesis differently than I did. I think there's room for plenty of readings of AC6 and that's one of the things that I like most about it. There's a lot of cool ideas in @wingblade's piece, but also some things that I think are a bit confusing. Mostly, my confusion pops up around the "shoulds." Stuff like,
There is no way in the system of the game to explore the world of your own will, to express the alleged autonomy a freelancing pilot should have.
What is the alleged autonomy a freelancing pilot should have in the context of AC6? In the game, I understood 621/Raven to have some difficulty with autonomy and free will. I don't think it's a stretch, based on what the game supplies, to think that the player character doesn't have much going on beyond piloting and maintaining a mech. They don't even necessarily have the character of other mech pilots or the stable signifiers of those other character's mechs. I interpreted this to mean that there's something empty about the player character. One thing that I'm really intrigued by is that it's not a simple emptiness, a total blank for the player to inscribe, but that there are hints about the pilot that emerge as the game goes on and the player sees and hears other characters as they interact with the 621/Raven.
Dramatic scenes occur outside of the view of Raven, engineered to clue the player in on who the scheming actors are and to curry sympathy for Walter, who would otherwise be just a man who has warped our body for war. These happen in the completely non-diegetic garage UI, visible to us but not our character,
I might have missed something about this, too, because I didn't assume that scenes in which 621/Raven is not directly addressed were meant to take place outside of their awareness. I'm thinking Binondo is writing about the conversations that take place in the garage, usually with a backdrop of an industrial hallway instead of the player's mech. To me, these conversations seemed like ones in which either the speakers acted as though 621/Raven might as well not be present, or ones in which 621/Raven was eavesdropping. I think this could be read in a way that suggests that 621/Raven isn't treated as a completely autonomous person, in that other characters think they can speak in their presence without much consequence. While it would have been interesting to see this read confirmed with a little more detail - something describing more of the nature of Walter's hold over 621 as their handler, for example - it's not necessary. I may even prefer the game without that detail as the ambiguity permits both reads like Binondo's and mine.
These two become the primary voices of the pilot, a standard cycle of the game culminating in you choosing whose will to follow towards diverging endings.
Might just be a phrasing thing, but I don't think Walter or Ayre are voices of the pilot. The player character can respond to them when the game provides the option to make a choice. That choice is closer to the expression or "voice" of the player character. I think there's some interesting things going on with a voiceless protagonist in AC6 (more on that in a piece that will hopefully go up this week or next), but I don't think that 621/Raven is strictly in accordance with Walter or Ayre at any point.
Except it should fucking suck to be in this line of work!
It does suck, doesn't it? I get that Binondo uses this line to introduce a criticism of AC6 as power fantasy. I agree that there is more fantasy and less friction than in previous Armored Cores. But I think there's a reading that cuts against the fantasy, which is the one I'm after: the pilot in AC6 seems to me to have a void, an emptiness in which other characters have contents or significance. One the one hand, this is convenient so that the player can insert themselves into the story. On the other, the other characters in AC6 treat 621/Raven as though there's something or someone there, even if those other characters are most aware of that in what 621/Raven does with their mech and what missions they take. In some ways, I think this emptiness might be more interesting than a didactic alternative in which there's more overt character to 621/Raven that shows that they think this work fucking sucks.
Binondo's point at this part of the piece does seem to be a lot less about the character of 621/Raven, though, and more about how easy the mechanics of AC6 are for the player. That's consonant with their reading of the game, a reading in which the player has a tight identification with the player character. I read Binondo's criticism here along the lines that it shouldn't be so easy, so smooth, so effortless, and so fun to play AC6. But as someone who didn't identify with 621/Raven (and someone who doesn't want to, especially from the way they're spoken to by Walter and other characters), I think there's plenty of room for a divide between the player's experience and the player character. With that said, I can buy the criticism that AC6 doesn't do much in its mechanics to communicate the suck of being a hollowed-out pilot of a death machine. Then again, that same empty character may be just what it takes to pilot a mech so effortlessly.
