Armored Core 6 hides a lot of its best story beats behind your third playthrough, and it turns out one of the funniest moments in FromSoftware's entire history is hiding in plain sight in a relatively early mission.
(Minor mission spoilers ahead for Armored Core 6.)
YouTube user Niasal shared a short clip of the mission where the Rubicon Liberation Front hires you to assassinate V.VII Swinburne, a squad leader of an opposing paramilitary group. After a vaguely stealth-adjacent intro, you quickly sneak up on Swinburne and start blasting. Once you get his mech to about half health, he'll start begging for his life, assuring you that he "holds the purse strings" for the Vesper's seventh squad and can make it worth your while if you spare him.
- Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 sees Skyrim's iconic guards and raises them a guy with an arrow in his head: "To the knee? That's nothing. You could go dancing the next day with a scratch like that"
- The rarest Avowed ending has only been seen by 0.2% of all the RPG's players, but to get it you'll have to commit to a path of death and destruction
Assuming you actually stop firing to give Swinburne time to finish his pleading – which I never did across three playthroughs, hence why I'm only just learning about this stuff – you'll actually get a proper "decision point" prompt.
"Let me go, and you'll still come out on top... understand?" Swinburne offers. You can accept or refuse his deal, and as Niasal shows, accepting it leads to a bit of new dialogue. "You're quick on the uptake, aren't you?" Swinburne adds. "Splendid. I'm sure Snail will see you're properly honored for this... You're not like those savages. Keep up the good work."
That's not the good part. See, the mission doesn't immediately end after you accept Swinburne's offer. Your weapons aren't disabled, either. You can probably see where this is going.
Niasal pumps another round into Swinburne's mech – which had just been healed back to near-full health – and it goes down with just a few bullets, which would normally barely scratch an AC. I choose to believe that this unique interaction is the result of Swinburne having some sort of backstabbing damage multiplier like the orcs from Shadow of Mordor. Whatever the case, it turns out Raven is, in fact, a lot like "those savages."
"Y-You cur!" the rapidly exploding Swinburne stammers, just barely getting out "who taught you to-" before getting acquainted with the fires of Rubicon with a shriek.
The best part of this exchange is the response from your disembodied companion, Ayre. "I have a question," she probes after a considered pause. "The way you dealt with him – did Walter teach you that?"
There's just something about Ayre's tone that gets me. 'Damn Raven, that was ice cold,' she seems to say. FromSoftware has openly admitted to making dark and depressing games because that's how they like it, so its releases aren't exactly full of jokes, but this got a good laugh out of me. If there was a FromSoftware comedy tier list, the ol' Swinburne double-cross would go straight to S tier alongside the long-running Patches gag in the Souls games.
Armored Core 6 fan art has gotten so extreme that the series' biggest subreddit had to ask people to please stop posting lewd art.
