I think the ACs in VI are the cutest little bugs and creatures I've ever seen. In AC:4A they have this fragile, bloom-lit rigidity of a drunken dragonfly, careening into everything in sight with a completely inert metal frame causing unlimited deadly explosions to everything in on and around them. The level of detail in VI though makes them much more bug and toy-like when you observe them in motion. Somehow the scale makes everything look very pleasantly toy-like. Not fake, just small and cute. Being that robots are the only characters in the game you can observe moving and expressing themselves and FromSoft's affection for ancient fallen gods and beasts of quiet dignity, all the various guys in Armored Core have quite a lot of personality, and when you can project and anthropomorphize them they seem more like cute creatures than killing machines.
FromSoft is good at making horrifying medieval demons appear, if not "cute" exactly, gross, tragic, mad, broken, and flawed in ways that tend to evoke sympathy and more complex feelings than revulsion. When people were first talking about Demon's Souls seriously, the Adjudicator stuck out—what was with that funny little bird on his head? Bluepoint's remake is full of slavering Artstation demons that exist to make you feel good for wanting to kill them, which is one of the many reasons it was so against the spirit of From's oeuvre. Even the disgust they want from you is complex: Orphan of Kos, that gross screaming bald man baby with his placenta-mace, ultimately just wants his mom. The player is only ever in a position to say "damn that sucks, I can't really do anything about that. I can hit you with my car though."
Never is the monster purely loathsome; they are tragic, pathetic, disturbing, and if nothing else, at least too weird to feel only one strong emotion towards. Often they are broken and unfathomably old, clinging to a long-gone glory. They're ultimately doomed, too, and you're there to finish them off. Of course this lends itself quickly to readings about how you the player are kind of the real bad guy, but I think these games are a bit more nuanced than that, even in ACVI, where you KNOW you're the bad guy. The Strider in the first chapter of ACVI has all the traits of a doomed, tragic creature: it's lumbering and clumsy despite its overwhelming power, and is actually quite fragile. It represents the pride and helplessness of the rebels, but it still struggles to defeat the player. In cuteness lies a certain kind of aggression, doesn't there? Despite feeling bad for the creature, picking on it can be fun. Given how overwhelmingly powerful and vicious certain bosses can be, the ones that struggle to give you a challenge stand out all the more.
FromSoftware loves contrast and humanization in their otherwise bleak worlds. There are a few lines in Chromehounds that will forever stick with me, said by a grizzled mercenary turned security force soldier.
"Let's get this over with, I'm starving."
"We can't have them trampling all over our gardens."
This is a man who has lost everything, but has found something new in all the wreckage. He's poetic, thinks about food when he probably shouldn't. We only ever really see him in a mech and there's one picture of him buried in the glossary, but he's so human in this wartorn, broken world. Everyone in Chromehounds is like that.
All of this is why I never bought the argument AC as a series didn't care about storytelling or that FromSoftware only makes dark, depressing things. There is always levity somewhere and while they don't often give their characters massive amounts of screen time, there are few studios I see so consistently make an effort to make every second of the time a character is on screen matter.
