Last year, I watched Neon Genesis Evangelion—the series and all the films. I was so moved by Hideaka Anno’s mecha anime that I went out and got a tattoo of EVA Unit-01 going berserk. It hurt like hell, but it’s my favorite piece now. Despite my love for the series, I never wanted an Evangelion video game. It’s not a story I thought would translate well to the interactive medium. Simply watching Shinji’s journey as a spectator was more than enough for me. But then I played Armored Core 6, the best Evangelion game a mecha fan could have asked for.
The stories share a lot of similarities. Both protagonists, young Shinji Ikari and augmented human C4-621, also known as Raven, are skilled pilots and unwilling pawns in a game larger than they can comprehend. Shinji is used by his father, Gendo, and 621 is used by his handler, Walter. Both these men throw those in their care to the meat grinder to further their secret goals.
While Walter is less of a father and more of a boss, and 621 is silent, unlike Shinji, I felt a kinship between the two as I played. As with all silent protagonists, you project onto them, so maybe that’s all I was doing here—but despite how brutal Raven can be, it never felt like they wanted to be on Rubicon, or in the AC. Walter constantly reminds them it’s all just a job, telling them to quash any moral or ethical concerns they have with what they’re being tasked to do. Gendo also dismisses all of Shinji’s concerns with piloting the EVAs, often bullying his own child into traumatic battles with gigantic and deadly otherworldly angels.
Much like in Evangelion, there’s also a tension between how fucking cool the Armored Cores and fights are and how utterly despairing the whole situation is. Anno supposedly designed the EVAs to be monstrous and grotesque so it would be harder to sell action figures, something he abhorred about the state of mecha anime, but there’s no denying how striking the designs are. There’s a similar eeriness to the ACs.
For starters, we really don’t know how the pilots operate them. They undergo life-altering surgery to better adapt to the steel mechs, but with at least 10 generations of augmentation surgery, there could be just as many methods of driving the hulking machines. We don’t even know how human the pilots really are anymore. Do they use physical controls, or do their ACs respond directly to their thoughts? Do they feel pain if their AC gets damaged like an EVA pilot does? We have no idea.
With the EVAs, the connection is known—and terrible. Each robot is imbued with the soul of the pilot’s mother, allowing them to sync brainwaves and also the reason behind the EVA’s more autonomous berserk mode. Mothers will do anything to protect their kids. It’s unlikely the ACs are quite as monstrous, but their pilots also lose a piece of their humanity.
Despite all this, watching huge mechs and monsters duking it out is thrilling, and gains added emotional depth given what we know about what it takes just to pilot the machines. In Evangelion, people are fighting against an angel invasion. These aren’t saviors, but beings hellbent on destroying humanity. The only thing powerful enough to take them down is an EVA, themselves angels, repurposed to fight against their own kind. In Armored Core, the only thing big and bad enough to take down an AC is another AC.
What makes the fights in Armored Core feel so similar to those in Evangelion isn’t just the scale, but the tragedy. Many of Evangelion’s battles are punctuated by the tortured screams of Shinji and his teenage friends as they fight for their lives. But the haunting orchestral score and constant chatter of ally and foe over the radio hammers home how human the stakes are in Armored Core. FromSoftware could have opted for a thumping techno soundtrack and really ratcheted up the awesome nature of the duels, but it went for the more restrained approach, and that gives the game heart.
And even though Raven isn’t destined by birth to take up arms, like Shinji, they similarly earn their seat by the end of the journey. And, like Shinji, they ultimately decide the fate of the world. The Coral on Rubicon has mystical properties, seeming to contain the spirits of fallen Rubiconians. It’s impossible to not see the similarities to Evangelion’s Human Instrumentality Project, Gendo’s ultimate goal, to unite everyone. Coral also has a reddish hue, just like LCL. Raven, like Shinji, has the final say on what will become of this substance, and how it will be used to reshape life as we know it.
I didn’t expect to be so moved by Armored Core 6, and I doubt I would have been were it not for my recent love of Neon Genesis Evangelion. Even though I couldn’t see the pilots in their ACs, imagining Shinji, Rei, and Asuka, and what they went through in their EVAs made me connect with all the disembodied voices enclosed in their steel tombs. Armored Core 6 may not technically be an Evangelion game, but a rose by any other name smells just as sweet.
