Every human being, without exception, is divided into one of two broad categories: somebody who sees a sword and their pupils dilate, or somebody who sees a robot and their pupils dilate. There are obviously many overlaps within this rule (a robot with a sword, for example, or a sword with robotic parts), but in general I have found it to be an empirically and irrefutably accurate method of categorization. Unfortunately for Armored Core VI, I fall firmly into the former category. I see robots, and I wish they were swords instead.

That said, I’m also a dedicated Fromsoft fan, so I came into Armored Core VI certain that if anybody was going to sell me on mech combat, it would be them. In some ways, I would even say it did. The combat is fun, after all, a smooth experience from start to finish, everything intuitive and flexible. You’re encouraged, perhaps even forced, to constantly slap new bits and pieces onto your mech and try out different combinations of improbably large guns, shoulder-mounted rockets, and – thank god – laser swords. Jetting around with your little robot foot boosters is a joy. It all feels pretty good.

The mission hub at NERV Headquarters, where I literally always got in the robot

Unlike other Fromsoft games, however, Armored Core VI isn’t a game about wandering through a vast and harrowing derelict city full of people who speak primarily in half-laughed riddles and byzantine sequences of ladders that lead you conveniently back to your Home Base. It’s constructed instead around a mission hub – just a series of menus, really – where you can customize your mech, talk to your faceless handler on your robo-radio, and pick out what mission you want to embark on next. You experience an episodic story this way, and in an even greater departure from Fromsoft tradition, delve into Arena Battles.

When I first noticed the Arena Battles, my pupils dilated as if I had just seen a sword. Any time an RPG mentions an arena, I’m sold without any further explanation. It’s always the same, and it’s always what I want: whatever combat system the game has to offer laid bare, stripped of all the narrative trappings and restrictions of the game as a whole so you can experience it in its purest form. Once you beat a series of opponents who are participating for abstract and unexplained reasons, you get some kind of reward. What kind? Who cares.

I had to put a hook in the worm

In a game with combat as smooth and pleasing as Armored Core VI, the Arena Battles were enticing. I dove into them immediately, then tried to pace myself along with the story missions, switching back and forth periodically. They were generally pretty satisfying, one-on-one rehashes of named characters you fought in the story, and rather than the larger set-piece bosses with unique mechanics that marked pivotal points in the narrative, they focused entirely on single mech-on-mech combat, which is easily the most fluid and engaging type in the game. I zoomed around, shotguns in tow, and blasted those idiots. It was fun.

As I progressed through the Arena Battles, though, I began to notice something strange: I didn’t return to any I completed. They handed out rewards as expected – the OS upgrades you get to buff up all your robo-innards – but once I had the reward in hand, there wasn’t a reason to do it again. It’s not as if the game didn’t require any kind of back-tracking, as I was regularly in need of cash and had no real choice but to constantly replay one early story mission where you cruelly snuff out a rookie who only just got his mech learner’s permit, but the Arena Battles didn’t give you any cash. You completed them once and moved on.

These guns aren't free, you know?

The problem became even clearer in the moments where I got stuck in a story mission and had already completed the Arena Battles I had unlocked up to that point. If my usual techniques weren’t working, the obvious solution was to try new things, and the game is clearly designed around this thinking; the near-limitless supply of different weapons you can stick on your mech in different combinations beg you to experiment. But to experiment, you need to buy all those different weapons, and to buy them, you need cash, and again, you can’t get cash in the arena. I’m slogging back to that one mission, summarily executing that student driver again.

It felt like a waste, this whole Arena Battles mode put in place as what looks like a joyful playground where you might spend your downtime between missions, but instead playing out more like a series of secondary, stripped-down missions that you complete and ignore. All I could think was that a slight adjustment to provide any sense of progression would completely change the dynamic behind it, changing it from what feels like a Practice Mode – and who ever uses a Practice Mode, really? – to an infinite grind for incremental improvement. Hand out cash rewards on each victory, and you have a reason to continue. Or, for a reward with no hard cap, a series of new and barely significant OS upgrades, exponentially increasing in cost.

I could always use more OS upgrades

It’s not hard to imagine why Fromsoft didn’t want to do this. There’s a purity of gameplay in Armored Core VI that makes it feel more akin to Sekiro than any of the official Soulsborne titles. It wants to match you up, one-on-one, and prove your skill. If you can’t beat a boss in Sekiro, taking some time to level up and come back isn’t really an option the way it is in Dark Souls or Bloodborne. You can find some of the finite upgrade items scattered around the world, perhaps, but for the most part, you just have trust in your rotten zombie arm and figure it out. I’m sure that purity is a selling point for a lot of people. It’s the “git gud” mentality, center stage.

For me, it was a real loss. When you were stuck in Dark Souls or Bloodborne, there was always another option: go out and grind. That’s a dirty word for a lot of people – “grind” – but Fromsoft games have traditionally made use of it in artful ways. Basic leveling in the souls games is already a pleasing gamble of when to cash out and when to open one more door, and Bloodborne took it to an extreme with the randomly generated Chalice Dungeons. Then Elden Ring created a world that in many ways seems to cater entirely to this playstyle, offering a seemingly endless supply of side routes to wander down when your current task becomes frustrating. It turned “grind” into the central gameplay loop, the primary draw.

The primary draw in Armored Core is painting your mech

As I periodically returned to the Arena Battles hoping for some satisfaction, I felt confused by my own frustration. It seemed counterintuitive to be missing the Soulsborne leveling grind while simultaneously complaining about going back to stomp out that baby mech over and over again, slightly more efficient and quick every time. Maybe it was just the aesthetic, I thought, the love of Big Sword catching up with me after so many hours of trying to give Big Robot a chance. But as I thought about how simple it would be to bring me around on those Arena Battles – even just a bit of cash or some nearly-useless token OS upgrades – it became clear that it was because the grind in Armored Core VI was the dirty word version. It was a slog, repetitive and frustrating, part of the game not as a design choice, but because of the absence of a design choice.

I want to grind. When I spend time in something like Bloodborne’s Chalice Dungeons, it’s very clear to me: to grind is to feel joy, to experience consistent and predictable growth in a way that makes you feel almost in control of the horror of life for a fleeting moment, to be promised futurity in a world otherwise characterized by entropy and decay. Also it’s cool to make stats go up. But the grind only functions that way if it’s an intentional grind, one the designers set out to craft as part of the gameplay experience, rather than a series of mechanical accidents that funnel you into doing one thing and one thing only for the sole purpose of efficiency.

That was where Armored Core VI went wrong: the repetition was in the wrong place. The grind was a bug, not a feature, that was never meant to exist. There’s no love in that grind.