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spaceobloquy · 7 months

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All the Armored Core VI Endings Are Bad

There's been some debate online as to which ending to the game is good and which is bad, and why, and I'm here to tell you that they're all bad in different but more or less equally horrible ways and you're wasting your time defending one over the other. Before we start in on that, let's lay some groundwork. I'd like to credit this video by MadLuigi with helping hone my thoughts, although a lot of the below are my own observations.

Dune & Blade Runner

The first thing you need to know is that Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon (henceforth AC6) is extremely heavily based on the novel Dune and the movie Blade Runner.

The Dune connection is pretty obvious: Coral was originally named Mélange in the leaked information on the game, using the more technical name for the Spice which facilitates future-sight and thus enables FTL travel in the Dune books (among other things). That should tell you all you need to know, but it doesn't stop there. Of course, Rubicon 3 being the only known planet with Coral is just like how Arrakis in Dune is the only source of the Spice Mélange. The currency of all past Armored Core entries were the generically named credits, but in AC6, it's COAM. The big feudal megacorp of Dune, standing in as the space version of the Dutch East India Company, is CHOAM, Combine Honnete Ober Advancer Mercantiles. While the AC6 currency might either be an acronym or a contraction and its full meaning is unknown, this is more than a coincidence. The Rubicon Liberation Front styling themselves as "Coral Warriors", their use of Coral as a quasi-religious substance and object of worship, and their zealous dogmatism is an obvious reference to Dune's Fremen, and particularly the Fedaykin, or death commandos. Dosers and civilians are kind of like how the people of Arrakis are inadvertently exposed to Spice simply through ambient sources with the Dosers taking Coral recreationally like how Spice is used in coffee, and mealworms raised on Coral being the source of most food on Rubicon 3. All this will be very important to know for the Liberator of Rubicon ending.

The references to Blade Runner are more subtle. While human augmentation (Human PLUS) has a long history in the Armored Core franchise (going back to the first game) and in the cyberpunk genre as a whole (to which AC6 absolutely belongs), one of the progenitors of that genre is Blade Runner (1982), released in the same year as the manga Akira, and predating the genre's "literary" birth with Neuromancer in 1984. Blade Runner has an immense influence on AC6's visual and auditory style, as well as its treatment of augmented humans in a way similar to the Replicants (that is to say, as basically slaves). If you want to see this for yourself, all you have to do is compare AC6's Reveal Trailer with the opening of Blade Runner. You should be able to easily hear how heavily Kota Hoshino and company were influenced by Vangelis's score, as well as see how the visual framing was influenced.

These are not the only references AC6 has or makes, but they form the bedrock of understanding its genre and heritage as a thoroughly dystopian cyberpunk work.

Coral

AC6 revolves around Coral, and you need to understand that Coral is also a number of allusions wrapped up into one. While at heart an alien substance of biological origin (but not necessarily a lifeform unto itself) which mimics Dune's Spice Melange, it also evokes many other things:

Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury - Permet: Permet is a mineral which facilitates remote data connections and is used to enhance various technological products, as well as augmenting humans. In sufficient quantity, if activated correctly, it can also modify local spacetime conditions, and can even host conscious minds. Sound familiar? This is likely a case of simultaneous parallel evolution rather than direct reference, as G-Witch came out so near the end of the game's development, but the similarities with Coral are hard to ignore. I'm not the first to draw this connection.

The Andromeda Strain - Andromeda: The titular Andromeda is a biological organism from Earth's upper atmosphere which directly converts energy to matter and which is capable of rapid mutation; it goes from crystalizing blood upon initial landfall on the planet to eventually consuming rubber and plastic near the book's conclusion. Andromeda's ability to self-replicate using almost any source of energy and to mutate to fit its environment is obviously reflected in Coral being able to grow best in space and experiencing Mutation Waves.

Mythology - Red Mercury: A purely fictional substance, red mercury is supposedly involved in nuclear weapons manufacture or capable of being used as an extremely potent chemical explosive rivaling nuclear weapons in destructive ability depending on who one asks. Coral's combustibility and color is a fairly obvious allusion to this or something like it.

Real Life - Nuclear Weapons: It should probably come as no surprise to you that due to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and more recently the nuclear meltdown in Fukushima, that Japan has long had a fascination with and revulsion toward nuclear weapons. Coral is an explicit reference to nuclear weapons technology, taking the place of a sci-fi equivalent to them: a nuke greater than nukes. You can tell because the visual language of the Fires of Ibis directly references nuclear test footage:

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The destruction of the Grid system is visually a direct allusion to test examples of nuclear destruction.

Rubiconians

When I refer here to Rubiconians, I refer explicitly to Coral-based intelligence like Ayre, not the human population of Rubicon 3. This is an important distinction. It's also important to understand that intelligences like Ayre are a relatively recent phenomenon. We know this because the game tells us so:

The Mutation Wave detected at Watchpoint Delta, which 621 liberates by destroying the regulator, is Ayre, who subsequently makes Contact with 621. We know this because ALLMIND will also refer to Ayre as a "C-pulse wave mutation—Ayre" in the Alea Iacta Est ending mission. In other words, Ayre is relatively new. Coral has not traditionally manifested sapient personalities on Rubicon 3, certainly not prior to the arrival of humanity. Ayre is a direct reaction to humanity's actions. Given Ayre is a Wave Mutation, although she (and ALLMIND) refer to other Coral as her siblings, it is not at all clear that they are self-aware in the same sense as she is. She seems to be unique among Coral, which is why she and 621 are the triggers for Coral Release in ALLMIND's ending—only they have properly made Contact.

This should immediately make you suspicious for two reasons.

Firstly, humans are the way they are because of a long evolutionary process which begat physical, corporeal bodies, eventually resulting in anatomically modern humans that think and express in the ways we are familiar with. Coral does not have any of these constraints, and therefore should not naturally produce anything resembling a human mind, and yet Ayre seems remarkably human without having any of the physical neurological structure or evolutionary history to support that human mentality. This is extremely unlikely to happen purely by random chance.

Secondly, we learn over the course of the game that Ayre is capable of hacking, cracking, searching, and understanding human communication and data systems to an impossibly advanced degree. This is proven in small ways over the course of the campaign where she helps 621 out with locked systems—often to Walter's surprise—but is most grandly demonstrated in the Fires of Raven ending, when she takes over the PCA's abandoned Closure System to try and shoot down the Xylem, a feat which Carla asserts would be impossible for the corporations to do—and Carla is the best and brightest survivor of the Rubicon Research Institute. In other words, Ayre is capable of breaking into any piece of human technology, and can also easily determine what ALLMIND is doing despite encryption and it covering its tracks.

Ayre also has access to another piece of technology which is outfitted with a Coral transceiver: 621. Ayre is most likely readily able to approximate a human in mindset and expression because she's hooked up to a human full of human memories.

This is not to say that Ayre is or isn't deceiving 621 as to what she is. It's not clear how sincere or not Ayre is. It's not clear how truthfully she is presenting herself and her agenda. She could be perfectly earnest and forthright, or she could absolutely be presenting 621 with what she thinks 621 needs to hear to do what is best for Coral and using 621 as a tool and means to an end, or anything in between. She could be benevolent and a true believer in symbiosis, or she could be using 621 to liberate Coral so that it may parasitize humanity. It's worth noting here that the easiest means of hacking systems is social engineering, and that 621 was specifically targeted for Contact.

What you're really presented with in AC6 is an Outside Context Problem: you are interfacing with an alien entity that certainly seems to be sapient, agreeable, helpful, and wanting only the best for you and humanity as a whole. But does it really? The game is essentially about who you decide to trust as you make a decision on an evolutionary question about the future of humanity.

Are human morality and ethics, and a willingness to be open and inclusive and welcoming, an evolutionarily adaptive trait? Or are they, in this case, maladaptive? Or... neither? Is trusting Ayre a good idea?Or Rusty? Or Walter and Carla? Or even ALLMIND? Or is the road to Hell paved with good intentions?

The truth is... all your choices are bad.

Ending: Fires of Raven

Walter and Carla's point—and that of Overseer and Professor Nagai of the Rubicon Research Institute—is fairly easy to understand. If nuclear bombs could self-replicate and were also sapient, would you allow them to do so just because they asked nicely? Or would you consider that to be a threat to not just humanity, but all life on Earth? They see the question of Coral as this hypothetical writ large, because Coral can replicate endlessly throughout space.

If one planet's worth of Coral can burn and contaminate an entire star system (or several; the game isn't quite clear on how many systems were affected), then what could a star system's worth of it do? How about several star systems? Or an entire galaxy? Coral is potentially a threat to the entire universe if it's allowed to get off of Rubicon 3. That Coral can also be ignited at any time by any sufficient explosion or natural phenomena; solar flares, supernova, nuclear bombs, even a sufficient chemical explosive or friction heating can ignite it. It could all go off for any reason at any time. Coral will present a threat as long as it exists, because there will always be those who seek to claim its power as their own for whatever ends: "Where there's Coral, there's blood."

The calculation as far as Overseer is concerned is simple: burn Rubicon 3, everyone on it, and everyone near it to save the rest of humanity and the universe at large. The casualties are collateral damage compared to the stakes. There are far, far more humans elsewhere than there are on Rubicon 3, and the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.

Is that right? Is it right to make Coral extinct, and genocide those on Rubicon 3, to save the rest of humanity, which apparently lives under an oppressively hypercapitalist megacorporate dystopia?

(It's worth noting at this point that the PCA is not the military of some grand government off to one side somewhere, like the UNSC Navy. It's its own entity and is effectively the Rubicon space police. This is reflected not only in its ship design, but in its ranks ("high-ranking officers" in the PCA are First Lieutenants and Captains, which are junior officers in an army or air force, but high ranks among police), in its language (the PCA treats resistance as a "declaration of war" upon itself, not any government it represents), in its ability to be banished from Rubicon 3 and an inability to reinforce from anywhere else, from the PCA's System AI being buried in the depths leading to Institute City, from the its terminology (Ekdromoi, CATAPHRACT, and NEPENTHES are all references to ancient Greece, notably dominated by city-states), and from the fact that in the Fires of Raven ending, despite being disgraced and shattered it's still in a position to negotiate, which would have been taken over by a higher authority above it after its dismal performance if any such authority existed. The PCA was most likely set up by the corporations (or perhaps planetary-level governments) as an independent actor after the Fires of Ibis. There is no grander government out there to save the day, and Armored Core as a franchise has never centered governments outside of Armored Core 2: Another Age.)

Some say yes, for the reasons Overseer gestures at. It's simply too dangerous to let it live, whether it's exploited by corporations or not, whether it achieves a Coral Collapse or not. It's also not talked about much, but an entity like Ayre also represents an infinitely more capable danger than one like ALLMIND; all she might need is time to gather resources.

Some say no, arguing that entities like Ayre have as much right to exist as humans, and that extinguishing them is not only repeating humanity's greatest crimes but denying its future improvement. It becomes tempting at this point to draw historical parallels, but the truth is that any such parallels are of dubious applicability considering human-on-human violence is not the same as interspecies violence against aliens, which humanity has (seemingly) never encountered, let alone aliens which are effectively weapons of mass destruction unto themselves. Some go even further and suggest humanity as it exists within AC6 is not worthy of survival, which is a much more suspect argument which frankly reeks of ecofascism.

The answer is: it depends on your risk assessment. Neither we the players, nor 621, know enough to actually make a truly informed choice. All the people who do and who aren't blinded by greed and power lust (that is to say, Walter, Carla, and Nagai) think it's the right thing to do. Do you trust them? It's ultimately your judgment call.

If you take the Fires of Raven ending, you (supposedly) destroy all the Coral, purge life from Rubicon 3 and its system, and cripple human civilization at large. Walter, Carla, Chatty, Rusty, Ayre, and everyone else all die. 621 is perhaps the sole survivor. It seems the Fires of Raven are grander than the Fires of Ibis, and the disgraced PCA and depleted remnants of Arquebus and Balam agree to abandon Rubicon 3 as they try to rebuild. 621, as Raven, goes down in history as the greatest monster of all time.

It is, however, entirely possible, given FROMSOFTWARE's Dark Souls series, that the Fires of Raven is merely the second in a never-ending line of humanity having to return to Rubicon 3 to ignite more Fires again and again, in a kind of grim echo of "linking the fire" in the first Dark Souls.

But what if I told you that the reason this ending is bad isn't necessarily because of the apparent extinction of Coral, or all the deaths both personal and statistical? Those are bad things, to be sure, but the real tragedy of the ending is you failed to actually engage with the problem Coral represents. You threw the baby out with the bathwater, and although you may or may not have prevented a Coral Collapse, you did nothing to change humanity's dystopian reality, and actually only made it worse by making it post-apocalyptic on top of everything else.

This fundamental issue—not really engaging with the problem—is true for the other endings as well. Each is an all-or-nothing solution to the problems at hand, and that is why they are all bad. Let's skip over to...

Ending: Alea Iacta Est

In this ending, Ayre lives, as does maybe Rusty, but you kill Chatty and ALLMIND kills Walter and Carla. ALLMIND betrays you, you fight the personality upload of G5 Iguazu, and finally defeat ALLMIND, but initiate ALLMIND's Coral Release program yourself.

What happens next is... unclear. Interpretations of it vary.

To me, it appears to be a kind of transcendent technological singularity wherein Coral, humanity, and humanity's technology in the form of Armored Cores, all unite together to create new kinds of beings beyond time and space, and beyond even death itself. The closest analogy to this is probably the Human Instrumentality Project in Neon Genesis Evangelion, or the "stargate sequence" in 2001: A Space Odyssey where Bowman is uploaded into the Monolith and becomes the Star Child. Or, to return to Dune once again, Leto II's symbiosis with the Sand Trout of Arrakis to become a human/Sandworm hybrid. Given the other ACs present in the ending, this appears to not be limited to 621, but likely extends to everyone on Rubicon 3, if not all of humanity. Another analogy might be the true ending of Bloodborne, but on a much grander scale.

This has the same problem as a sort of similar ending from the Mass Effect series, Mass Effect 3's Symbiosis ending. While in that game, BioWare attempted to make it the "correct" choice by showing everyone happy and satisfied with it in its ending cinematic, the truth is that nothing can possibly be a grander violation of the rights of sapient beings than forcing them into a new mode of existence which is discontinuous with their lives theretofore. It is not simply a violation of individual decision-making ability, it is a violation of bodily autonomy and control—it is rape, by the commonly understood definition, as rape is truly about bodily power over others and not sex, and it is the most egregious kind of rape imaginable: becoming something else entirely beyond human. This is effectively an eldritch body horror ending in which somewhere between Rubicon 3 and the entirety of humanity, if not the entire universe, appears to have been raped in an irrevocable fashion.

Whatever its exact nature, this ending has the same problems as the Fires of Raven: it does not actually engage with any extant problems at hand, it simply throws the baby out with the bathwater. In this case, rather than it being Coral that's disposed of, it's humanity itself, as V.III O'Keeffe feared when you were sent to eliminate him on the road to this ending. Humans aren't human anymore. None of humanity's issues were actually dealt with, they were simply disposed of wholesale with humanity having been deemed unworthy of any expenditure of effort, merely replacement through upgrading.

And here we come to...

Ending: Liberator of Rubicon

On the surface, this seems like the good ending, which is why most people call it that. Ayre lives, although 621 has to personally kill Walter, Carla, and Chatty, and it seems like Rusty is killed. The RLF takes control of Rubicon 3. 621 and Ayre look to the cosmos with hopeful optimism. What's not to like?

Except... remember Dune? This is the ending of Dune.

Do you know what happens after Paul Atreides and the Fremen defeat Emperor Shaddam Corrino IV and House Harkonnen on Arrakis, and Paul becomes Emperor himself? I'll tell you. His fanatical Fremen warriors spread his name throughout the rest of human space in Muad'Dib's Jihad, conservatively killing 61 billion people, mostly serfs and peasants and those who refused to forsake their faith.

Now you might say that Ayre and 621 don't want that to happen, but that's the point: it's not their choice to make, it's the RLF's. Paul didn't want it to happen in Dune either, he simply knew he couldn't stop it.

What exactly do you think is going to happen now that the faith of the Coral Warriors of the RLF is affirmed as righteous and true, now that they've defeated the PCA and corporations, now that they're in possession of all the Coral and all the Rubicon Research Institute's technology? What do you think Elcano is going to do with that research, alongside BAWS? Do you think they're going to just secure the system and be content?

Also, if Coral and humanity are to coexist together, doesn't that mean both growing in kind, together, as Ayre says? Doesn't that mean Coral augmentation surgery for everyone, with all the drawbacks that has? Or, at least, every human being a Doser to commune with Coral? What about all those who had Coral-replacement augmentation surgery, which negated the need for relying on Coral in the first place? Are they not automatically a threat to the new order, which must be destroyed to safeguard it?

Think that sounds too grim?

Don't you think it's odd that this ending comes with no narrated epilogue like Fires of Raven does, telling you what happened afterward? Instead you get Ayre telling you simply:

"Raven… One day, humanity and Coral will thrive together. You kept our potential safe. I know Walter feared a Collapse… but I promise you, there's another way. Raven… we'll find it. Together."

That sounds quite hopeful, but personally I key in on two particular phrases: one day, and we'll find it together. They remind me of something from another franchise:

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Palpatine seduces Anakin to the Dark Side of the Force by dangling the prospect of cheating death in front of him, preying on Anakin's fear of visions of Padmé dying. After Anakain has committed to betraying his allies and helped kill Mace Windu, Palpatine admits:

"To cheat death is a power only one has achieved, but if we work together I know we can discover the secret."

I find Ayre's very similar speech after 621 has betrayed and killed Carla, Chatty, and Walter to be... uninspiring... personally.

Now, I'm not telling you that Ayre is Darth Sidious or a Sith Lord, although it sure is interesting Coral is red.

What I am telling you is to remember that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, and where there's Coral, there's blood. You shouldn't naïvely assume that the story so heavily influenced by Dune, which is at this point directly referencing Dune, will stray very far from it, no matter how good Ayre's intentions might actually be. Because if Ayre is genuine, then she's exceptionally naïve herself, as we see from her reactions to ALLMIND's plans in Alea Iacta Est.

Even if no Dune-like Jihad sweeps AC6's universe, all the problems posed by Coral detonations and Wave Mutations and Coral Collapse still remain.

This ending, too, throws the baby out with the bathwater: instead of losing Coral, or overtly losing humanity, we have instead decided to discard the grim hypercapitalist megacorporate dystopia for a grim ultrafanatical cult religion dystopia which will also probably be even worse and/or the omnipresent threat of total mass destruction. In The Devil's Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce gave the following definition:

Conservative (n.) A statesman who is enamoured of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.

If the Fires of Raven is conservative, preserving the status quo and its existing evils and making them worse, then both Alea Iacta Est and Liberator of Rubicon are liberal, ushering in different horrors which are only refreshing in so far as they are different than the ones that came before.

If Balam and Arquebus stand in for, oh, say, Amazon and Apple, then the RLF stands in for ISIS or Al Qaeda or the Shining Path. This is not a happy and uplifting ending, it's simply different and arranged to feel good in the moment to those who don't know what the game is drawing upon so it can pull the rug out from under them later.

Avatar

Since Dune has featured so prominently in this essay, I want to take a moment to talk about James Cameron's Avatar (2009), which has over time variously been derided as a rip-off of Dune, or Dances With Wolves or FernGully: The Last Rainforest in space, among other things. You might be asking why, so I'll cut to the chase.

The problem with Avatar is that nothing is actually resolved. Although Jake Sully's defection to the Na'vi results in the human Resources Development Administration being driven from Pandora, their hunger for unobtanium isn't quenched. Earth's resource crisis isn't solved. The shadowy elites ruling over humanity are still in charge. Nothing actually changes, problems are merely kicked down the road. The reason for this is simple: individual actions cannot solve systemic problems, whatever that systemic problem might be, be it classism, racism, environmental degradation, or so on.

In AC6, we observe systemic problems in the form of humanity's capture by corporations and bureaucracies that serve profits or power and not the common good, and the persistent problem of Coral which must be managed somehow. We do not actually resolve either of those issues as 621. We simply upset the balance one way or another and let the chips fall where they may, invoking this or that abhorrent deus ex machina.

Conclusion

While Fires of Raven represents the status quo (and stagnation and decay), Liberator of Rubicon represents the chaos of change (and likely war and fire) and Alea Iacta Est represents a fundamental rejection of humanity.

621 never actually lives up to the reputation of Raven in choosing a path of their own making. All the endings simply involve 621 choosing to trust one party or another, be it Walter and Carla and Nagai, or Ayre, or ALLMIND, rather than truly coming to their own decisions and directly addressing the actual problems at hand. This is represented in how the player is always held back until they have to deal with Xylem about to hit the Vascular Plant one way or another.

While I said that individual actions cannot solve systemic problems, they can begin to show the way toward systematic approaches to systemic problems. This is what we're told Raven represents when they're introduced properly, and also seems to be what Branch as a faction stand for. (It's notable here that when we meet Branch in NG+/NG++, they're working against the RLF, despite having previously fought the PCA.) It's also a video game, and thus is really about a power fantasy, but there's no power fantasy here. The game is never actually about your choice, it's only about who you choose to side with...

... And all the options they present you with are bad.

If there was to be an expansion, as with so many other FROMSOFTWARE games, I would hope it would be one focused around actually resolving the situation in a way of our own choosing, because that option is sorely lacking in an otherwise fantastic game.

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