In the first verse of “Tougher, Colder, Killer,” track six on his album Cancer 4 Cure, El-P sketches out the story of a man unmoored and eventually ruined by the aftermath of what his masters ask him to do in their name.
He delivers the verse in first person, inhabiting the character. The verse takes the form of a letter—it could be another type of message, but the most romantic option is a letter—to the mother of the deceased, describing how her son died and how it felt to kill him. El-P made the son dig his own grave at gunpoint, which implies that the son was unarmed and helpless. El-P describes the son as laughing to the gods as he dug, amused by his fate and his place in the wartime food chain. The son doesn’t fight his way to a valiant death. He doesn’t go out on his shield. He dies lost and exhausted, the victim of a particularly cruel war crime.
The son’s reaction, the fact that he died with no fear and full faith, utterly destroys El-P.
The laughter and grin combine with the son’s last words and transform into a lasting curse. You can feel El-P’s skin crawling now that he’s been forced to see the man’s humanity. You can feel the questions about what that means about El-P’s own humanity. El-P describes himself as “Pandemonium me,” a double reference to a state of utter confusion and the capital of Hell in John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Imagine Hell as a city-state. Pandemonium is the seat of government, to use human terms, and when El-P says he’s fucked by decree, he’s coming to the understanding that he’s become a demon at someone else’s request and for someone else’s benefit.
He is lost, consumed by the atrocity his job demands and pushed to extreme lengths to kill the voice of the son in his head. There’s no justice in making someone dig his own grave, no balancing of the scales or protecting anyone. There’s just cruelty. And this time, the cruelty reflects back on El-P. Before the son dies, he tells El-P that there’s a tougher, colder killer than him, and that in just one day, a mere twenty-four hours at some point in the future, El-P will also learn to crawl before his own tougher, colder killer.
Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon is my game of the year for 2023 and it’s not even close. I probably played Street Fighter 6, Final Fantasy XIV, and Apex Legends more frequently, but the most affecting, interesting, and melancholy experiences I had last year was playing Armored Core 6.
The game stars 621, a blank slate character who is an exceptional armored core pilot in my hands. I’m sent on missions by Handler Walter, serving an agenda that unveils itself over the course of the game. During that unveiling, I met the really fascinating and charismatic people that are fighting over the planet Rubicon and its mysterious energy source, folks like Cinder Carla, “Chatty” Stick, Ayre, G5 Iguazu, and V.IV Rusty. The cast is a mix of warriors, leaders, thralls, and those who seek to overcome every single one of their foes as a way of proving their self-worth.
The beauty of Armored Core 6 is that it imbues each of its characters with such life and perspective that I was constantly confronted by their own humanity while simultaneously trying to take it from them. It’s easy to see why the characters are the way they are, and that expectation of empathy is threaded throughout the game. Iguazu has been forced into a shape he cannot abide, fighting on behalf of another in order to clear unfair debts. Ayre would simply like her species to survive. Walter doesn’t want to repeat the mistakes of the past, and will go to extreme lengths to make it happen. “Chatty” Stick is an artificial intelligence that’s loyal to his boss, who has created as warm and welcoming an environment as you’ll find on Rubicon. I came to understand all of them.
At the same time, the characters frequently denigrate my reasons for being involved in the battle and almost never address me by name. I’m 621, I’m the merc, I’m a tourist. I’m a symbol of liberation or a divine punishment. I was repeatedly and explicitly defined as an outsider with no skin in the game, a nobody amongst titans and bloody warriors.
The meat of the narrative is delivered via dialogue, in the character’s own voices. I heard pilots mumbling as they struggled to eject before dying. I heard their surprise and shock at seeing 621 in action. I heard them hyping each other up before cutting them down like wheat. I heard sudden gasps when I betrayed them. I heard the supreme confidence in the voices of my friends when their gun turned in my direction. I heard friendly voices turn cold when our respective goals become incompatible.
Armored Core 6 asked me to commit to the bit, and then wanted me to sit with how I feel about that fact afterward.
When I was short on cash, the easiest mission to run for a quick but sizable check is against a student pilot from Dafeng Core Industry, one of many corporations in the game. The student pilot is assigned to transport a certain mech to another faction, Dafeng having modified, developed, or upgraded the gear attached to it. He dies easily, quickly transitioning from idealism (“I can’t die to a merc who only kills for credits!”) to regret as his dreams and machine are scattered to the wind (“I… I just… I just wanted a callsign of my own…”).
In my video, I paired El-P’s “Tougher, Colder Killer” with the death of the Dafeng student pilot. Replaying that mission and sitting with the vibe of it is a big part of what made Armored Core 6 open up to me and what made me open up to Armored Core 6. The student pilot is meat beneath tank treads in a war he’s trapped in but still cares deeply about. He’s not there for money. He wants the glory of having a call sign, of being an ace pilot. He wants to be a hero, and the only thing standing in his way is me and my desire for a hundred thousand credits.
When I killed him, over and over and over, I eradicated the Dafeng student pilot’s potential for my own benefit. I destroyed his future and I left with a little money in my pocket to upgrade my war machine. He’s not even a footnote. He’s a checked box on a spreadsheet. Something for the memo line on a check.
Each ending forced me to make decisions and align 621 with this faction or that faction. I was forced to choose between my friends and my cause, and even between my friends and their causes.
There is an all-time great older brother character in Armored Core 6. V.IV Rusty fights alongside the Vespers, an elite crew for the elite Arquebus Corporation. (He’s “vee four Rusty” when said aloud.) While fighting alongside him, I quickly realized that he’s like Kamina from Gurren Lagan in overdrive. It is a genuine delight to fight beside him. It’s the opposite of an escort mission, or maybe he’s the one escorting me. Either way, when he says, “We’re war buddies now” after one collaborative mission, I felt the honesty of it.
When the winds changed and I was forced into combat against him, he said something that reoriented me once again. I’d already accepted the cyberpunk evil corpo storyline, but Rusty added another layer when he said, “Hate to say it, but Rubicon still needs me. So, buddy… who needs you?”
I laughed in surprise when I first heard it, but felt it bone deep all the same. It was expert writing, the kind that sounds like one thing but then clenches your heart once you let it in. The line and scene have only grown on me since.
It’s not “Who needs you?” in the sense of me being worthless. It’s “Who needs you?” as in “Who do you fight for, and do you really think that your dedication measures up to mine?”
Who was I fighting for? At that point, I was making decisions based on however I felt in that moment. I didn’t have a position on the plot so much as I was content experiencing the story as it unfolded at my fingertips. By the time I found a way to beat the brakes off Rusty, I’d recommitted myself to the game and to being 621. 621 is the crux of the story, and the choices I make in 621’s name lead directly to each of the three endings.
Rusty made me want to believe in the path I was walking rather than just walking it. I knew I wanted to see all three endings, but Rusty reminded me to live them, not just see them. To chase them. To commit. I needed to show him who needs me, and the only way to do that was by fighting him with everything I had.
I realized I loved the game, that it had truly captured me, when a mission required me to kill a friend. The dream we shared had been torn asunder by our circumstances and choices. My friend said, “I know that you… You’ve made your choice. Then I must do my duty…” and the battle began.
Most good/evil systems in video games are tedious. The evil is cartoonish or the good is a fantasy or the actual system is just another meter to min/max for later reward. Armored Core 6 leaves the definition of good and evil up to you, and only asks that you respond to the situations with your whole heart.
621’s friend needed to die for my goals to be achieved. That means that our shared history and our dreams did not matter in that moment. There was 621, a friend, and a need to complete the mission or risk losing everything. The end results are what they are. The game does a good job of creating a dilemma that doesn’t have an easy good/bad/true ending setup. It has a series of situations and perspectives that are presented to the player for judgment and contemplation.
I fought the friend with a guilty conscience, knowing that it was the wrong thing to do but necessary for the mission I was on. When that friend said that we could have walked together, but now there’s no reason to hold back, I responded in kind. I met their determination with my own. I love you, but goodbye. I’m needed.
The difficulty of the fight only added to the impact of the story. I could feel the resolve of my friend, how important it was to them that I die and how much they didn’t want that to be reality. I had to close my heart and focus on the mechanics. 621 is an ace pilot. Everyone who raises a hand against our machine dies. My advantage is that I can do the fight a thousand times, learning and changing each time. I am inevitable.
I felt that fight more than anything else in games this year. I was surprised at how much I needed this friend to die, and then elated and ashamed when it actually happened. I achieved my goals, simultaneously saved and ended countless lives, and annihilated a friendship in the process.
The three endings build on each other in interesting ways. When I got the third, “Alea Iacta Est,” the satisfaction felt incredible, like finishing a good novel or draining movie. Armored Core 6 pulled me out of my self and showed me three perspectives on ending one conflict with wildly different outcomes. Each ending hurt in different ways, and each ending delivered moments of triumph at the same time. I wanted and regretted each ending as I got them, and really thought about it before I made my decisions, knowing that I would have to disappoint and maybe battle any of the characters I really liked.
The combat in this game, combined with the customization system, fit into my brain like a key in a lock. Playing it feels good, angling to pull off all the moves and tricks I’ve seen in robot anime. The story is great, but the gameplay is on point too. Glories abound. Thrust vectoring and an Itano circus are cool forever.
Armored Core 6 was a beautiful experience, and rare. There are games I play because I love the story or the gameplay, but rarely in equal proportions. Apex Legends has my favorite FPS combat (melee aside), but I’m not playing that one a few hours a week every week for the story.