Armored Core VI and the Mech Roots of FromSoftware

2026-10-24 · 8 min read · Demon's Souls, Sekiro, Elden Ring

A lot of people who arrived at FromSoftware through Elden Ring were surprised, in August 2023, to see the studio release a game about giant robots. It looked like a detour. It was the opposite. Armored Core is older than Demon's Souls by more than a decade, it carried the studio through the 2000s, and it is the series where Hidetaka Miyazaki first got to direct. Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon was not FromSoftware stepping away from the Souls formula. It was the studio going home and bringing what it had learned with it.

This is a short history of that home, and an argument that you cannot fully understand the Souls games without it.

Before the bonfires

FromSoftware was founded in Tokyo in 1986 as a developer of business software. Its first game was King's Field in 1994, a slow first-person dungeon crawler on the original PlayStation that already contained an astonishing amount of what would become Demon's Souls: a hostile world, minimal explanation, punishing combat, and a sword called the Moonlight Sword. Three years later, in 1997, came the first Armored Core.

Armored Core was a mercenary game. You pilot a customisable mech, an AC, and take contracts from corporations that are all, in their own ways, terrible. You are paid per mission, you pay for your own repairs and ammunition, and the story is told through mission briefings from people who are mostly lying to you. The series grew through a long run of releases on PlayStation and PlayStation 2 - Armored Core 2, Armored Core 3, Nexus, Last Raven - and then Armored Core 4 and For Answer on the next generation, followed by Armored Core V and Verdict Day in the early 2010s.

It was not the studio's only mech project either. Metal Wolf Chaos, an absurd Xbox game about the President of the United States fighting a coup in a mech suit, came out of FromSoftware in 2004 and got a remaster fifteen years later. Chromehounds, published by Sega, was an online squad mech game with a devoted following. For most of the 2000s, if you knew FromSoftware at all, you knew it as the robot people.

Miyazaki's first chair

Hidetaka Miyazaki joined FromSoftware in 2004, after leaving a job in an unrelated industry, and his first work there was on Armored Core. He started as a planner on Armored Core: Last Raven and then directed Armored Core 4 and Armored Core: For Answer. Only after that did he take over a struggling internal project that became Demon's Souls.

That order matters. The man who built the Souls games learned to direct on a series about systems: weight limits, energy budgets, part combinations, enemy compositions designed to break specific builds. When people talk about how Souls bosses are designed to test a particular skill, or how a build can trivialise or ruin a fight, they are describing a habit of thinking that comes straight from mech customisation.

What the Souls games inherited

The DNA shows up in places that are easy to miss once you are used to them.

Equip load. Souls characters slow down as they carry more weight, and the decision between a heavy shield and a fast roll is the same decision as choosing tank legs or reverse-joint legs on an AC.
Build identity over character identity. In both series, who you are is mostly what you are carrying. The player character is a frame for a loadout.
Mission briefings as storytelling. Armored Core tells its story through people with agendas talking to you over a radio. Souls NPCs do the same thing in person, and they are just as unreliable.
The Moonlight blade. The Moonlight Sword of King’s Field reappears as a laser blade across Armored Core and as the Moonlight Greatsword in Dark Souls. FromSoftware has been passing the same weapon between its series for thirty years.
Corporations, kingdoms, and the collapse of both. Armored Core is about corporations fighting over a ruined world. Dark Souls is about gods fighting over a ruined age. The tone is closer than the settings suggest.

Fires of Rubicon

Armored Core VI came out on 25 August 2023, nearly ten years after the last entry, and was directed by Masaru Yamamura, who had been one of the lead designers on Sekiro. That one detail explains most of the game. Fires of Rubicon is an Armored Core game whose combat was rebuilt by someone who spent years thinking about posture.

You play as C4-621, an augmented human mercenary sent to the planet Rubicon 3 by a handler named Walter. Half a century before the game, a catastrophe called the Fires of Ibis burned across the region, triggered by a substance called Coral, which is both an extraordinary energy source and something considerably stranger. Now the corporations Arquebus and Balam are back to strip what is left, the local Rubicon Liberation Front is fighting them, and you are being paid by whoever is paying today. A voice in your head named Ayre, who appears to be connected to the Coral itself, begins to have opinions about what you are doing.

It is a story about being a weapon that slowly realises it might be a person, and the game has three endings - one of them only reachable on a third playthrough - that each give a different answer to what that person should do with Rubicon. Rusty, the friendly rival mercenary who keeps showing up at the right moment, is the character most players remember, for reasons it would be a shame to spoil.

Stagger, and the Sekiro connection

Every AC and most enemies in Fires of Rubicon have a stagger gauge, tied to a system the game calls ACS. Sustained pressure and heavy hits fill it. When it fills, the target is stunned for a few seconds and takes greatly increased damage, and that window is where fights are won. Weapons are tuned not just for damage but for how much stagger they apply.

Anyone who has played Sekiro recognises the shape immediately. Sekiro's posture bar does the same job: you do not win by draining health, you win by breaking the opponent's composure and then punishing the opening. Fires of Rubicon took that idea, translated it into ranged mech combat, and turned the old Armored Core habit of outlasting an enemy into something much more aggressive. It is the clearest case of an idea moving from the Souls side of the studio back into the series that started it.

Balteus, and boss design from the other direction

Older Armored Core games were never built around bosses the way the Souls games are. Fires of Rubicon is. Its bosses are huge set-pieces - a giant spider-legged war machine, a burrowing Ice Worm that cannot be beaten without a specific weapon and some outside help, rival ACs piloted by named mercenaries - and they are designed with the same philosophy as a Souls boss: a readable moveset, phases, and a specific skill they are testing.

Balteus, near the end of the first chapter, became the game's Margit. It is a heavily armoured AC wrapped in a pulse shield, covered in missile launchers, and it hits hard enough that a build which handled the earlier missions simply falls apart against it. Players stalled for hours. The answer, like Margit, is partly practice and partly realising that the game wants you to change your loadout - weapons that strip shields, a frame that can dodge missiles - rather than keep throwing yourself at it with what you have. In a Souls game that lesson is optional. In Armored Core it is the whole point.

In Elden Ring, you respec when you are stuck. In Armored Core VI, you are expected to rebuild between every attempt, and the game is better for it.

Fires of Rubicon also borrowed something from the Souls games that the old Armored Core never had: generosity on retry. Missions have checkpoints, and when you die at a boss you restart at the fight with the option to change your build first, instead of replaying the whole mission. That is a bonfire in everything but name.

Why it matters if you only play Souls games

You do not need to play Armored Core to enjoy Dark Souls, but it is worth knowing it is there. FromSoftware is not a studio that made one great series and kept repeating it. It is a studio with two lineages that have been trading ideas back and forth for thirty years: the King's Field line that became Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, Bloodborne and Elden Ring, and the Armored Core line that kept the lights on and trained the people who would make them.

Fires of Rubicon is where those two lines met again. Sekiro's posture system, Elden Ring's boss philosophy, Armored Core's mercenary storytelling and its love of builds. If the next Souls-like game from FromSoftware makes you change your loadout between boss attempts more than usual, you will know where it came from.

Back to the bosses

Soulsdle sticks to the soulslike side of the family - Demon's Souls through Nightreign - so there is no Balteus in the pool, unfortunately. But if the idea of bosses that test a build rather than a reflex appeals to you, Classic mode's weakness column is the closest thing the site has to an Armored Core loadout screen. Read it carefully: a boss with no listed weaknesses at all is a strong hint toward Demon's Souls, Sekiro or Nightreign, while a Lightning weakness leans toward the Dark Souls trilogy, which accounts for most of the bosses carrying it.