I was really expecting him to turn out to be an evil, manipulative bastard like Snail that everyone claims he is. Turns out he is just a decent man who is obsessed with his goals.
It's not such he's obsessed it's just the fact all of his friends and hounds he has sacrificed and fought with to get to where we are in game basically takes its tole in him. You kinda get a hint at that with the Sulla fight before Balteus.
Honestly… killing him at the Liberator of Rubicon ending wasn’t putting down an evil person as I initially thought. It was a mercy kill to free him from the duty that has imprisoned him all his life
Handler Walter definitely grew on me as I played through the game for the first time. At first he comes across as a cold, unfeeling boss who only views the player as a tool. But as the story goes on he becomes one of the only people who truly cares for 621 as a person and chooses to spare us in the end. He even goes so far as to tell us to “find our freedom” and says “you finally found a friend.” Truly the greatest character in this story
he really is interesting too, he's way nicer than what he seems of course, but he's still not a particularly good person, 617 to 620 died like dogs with barely an acknowledgement by him, before he went and got a replacement. I feel like 621 going above and beyond and surviving is what leads to Walter mellowing out, he puts the facade of a wall but gets attached to you rather quickly and cant help but accept your choices in the final battle, simply because thats the person he truly was, a child whose family was forcibly removed and doesnt want to feel the grief again. My line of thought for picking liberator first was "Walter ultimately wants to use us for some purpose, even if he's not truly evil, Ayre is a weird life form but ultimately she just genuinely cares about me and all people with no ulterior motives, so I'll side with her" and that leading to the final battle with Walter is just *perfect* all endings have incredible character moments tho...the final fight with Rusty with infinite energy is just amazing, Carla allowing herself to sob but for a moment, and Ayre's unwillingness to fight despite probably having one of the strongests mechs in the game, hell even Iguazu coming back because of PURE SPITE was something I didnt see coming at all, every endings adds essential stuff to the characterization of everyone
Yup, one of the first things he tells us is that we might be able to fix our broken bodies if we make enough money on rubicon. At first i thought he was just dangling a carrot in front of his donkey, but by the end i realized he actually did want us to be able to do it
@@necrowondo i always kind of saw ayre as the annoying voice that doesnt go away and says "we" complete missions while she barely blurts out useless obvious things or just guide us through navigation, and ultimately wants to use us for her self interests as much as walter wants to. in my opinion, walter had a mission bigger than anyone else and dedicated everything to it, while ayre wanted a utopia to be real where humanity would go in an uncertain route for the sake of sentient moss
I finally understand the true ending of armored turd 6 those robots are the frombots who have broken out the simulation and have realized fromsoft have been garbage from the start so they decided to burn all their garbage souls games and touch grass
Walter and Michigan actually seem like friends, even when defeating the two red guns Walter says Michigan can pay him for repairs and Michigan doesn’t seem to angry about it, not in a killing mood anyway, and Walter seems sad when you go after Michigan and isn’t sad when you go after pater. I think Michigan and Walter knew each other before all of this
If Walter is the kid from Institute City, and not Assistant 1, he grew up on Jupiter, and Michigan is known as the Hero of Jupiter so they possibly could've grown up together
Michigan at the very least seems more down to earth and more willing to mingle or cooperate with others. Compared to our many interactions with Snail on the other hand and his massive superiority complex that could dwarf the strider.
I mentioned it before, the first thing that struck me about Walter is his emblem. That hand is bound by the strings he's pulling... he truly is just as much of a prisoner as we are.
@@Etticos.I thought it was more of a double meaning. Especially because the triangle behind the hand is the same frame used for Overseer's logo. Also, Walter's mercs arent the only ones called hounds, "hound" seems to be a general term for rogue AC pilots guided by handlers judging by how the term was used throughout the game.
@@Etticos. and the leashes are not being held by him lightly, easy for him to let go, they're tied around his hand, bound like a bandage, a two way lashing between him and hound
Play the earlier games! I had never played an AC game before but started after AC6 was announced. AC3 is a good place to start to get into the older ones.
I loved how the story starts as nothing special and then all of a sudden it becomes this larger-than-life high-stake plot about the future of mankind and the nature of Coral
That's pretty typical for AC games. You start as a mercenary, just doing jobs to gain credits/acclaim, but a deeper plot is slowly revealed, with much higher stakes, and eventually you have to make a choice of how you want to shape the future.
I enjoy how after losing 3 "Hounds" before 621, he decides to loosen the leash on 621, and the more we excel, the further he loosens that leash, and the more he develops a care for 621. He saw potential in 621, being cold and calculated as usual in the first 2 chapters, but before he loses contact at watchpoint delta(when we meet Ayre) he seems worried with his sudden "Get out of there!" After Chapter 2, he grows more attatched to 621, and during the fight with the Ibis series, if 621 is at low AP and/or dies, Walter shows genuine distress. "You can do this 621!" Trying to give him a morale boost or If he's down "621! No Not like this!" And even before that he becomes more defensive when people insult or underestimate 621 in COMs. "Show 621 some respect. That 'hound' always delivers." He grows to care about 621, and it's clearly seen in the fight with him. In his delerious ramblings he states "You deserve every credit, get your augmentations removed, live a nornal life." At the end of the day, when walter says "look at you 621...you found a friend." It's almost like a proud father seeing his son all grown up.
IMO he's not even cold and uncaring growing to like 621 but the opposite - liking all his hounds. The thing is, he spent his entire life doing this crap, he seen many hounds die in the line of duty, IMO coldness is a defense mechanism since he knows that in case of losing a hound he has to find a new one and continue the job. When we survive more and more insane scenarios I believe he simply allows himself to hope we'll succeed and he won't need to sacrifice any new hounds.
@@FSVR54 Sekiros was good but the ‘bad’ ending was straight up a bad ending. There is no reason to do it other than to be bad. I prefer in AC6 where the so called ‘bad’ ending can actually be considered the good ending to an extent
@@christopherlyndsay8611 sometimes there's no need to be ambiguous or morally gray but I can understand the appeal. the guy guiding you this whole time is on a noble crusade. is he exterminating sentient life capable of human-level thought and reasoning because it's beyond humanity's control? yes, but at the same time said life basically amounts to energy-based cosmic horror with what information people had at the time it also helps that the good ending doesn't solve the two big problems of the story, only stopping what was caused by these problems and the secret ending kills basically everyone because you put an inhuman megalomanic in the driver's seat
Walter is like the father figure and rusty is like the big brother. You just wanna make them proud and when they say “you did good 621” and “hey buddy” it’s just the best feeling
Man...titling a song "the man who passed the torch" finding him in the situation you do at the end, him seeing you have a purpose you're fighting for and putting his weapon down because you "found a friend" hits me like how Gehrman's lore and music does. Great video though and looking forward to what else you do as ever!
You can tell how hard Walter was fighting the re-education camp surgery and brainwashing Arqebus put him through at the end of Chapter 3. Man literally had a surgery done to his body to make him into a monstrous mindless Assassain to kill 621 and he mentally overcame all of it in the end anyway because he believed in 621's actions that much. It's depressing man.
The reason Walter likely wanted to burn the coral is because it’s what Carla wanted, his only real friend, and of course because he saw how it made his father act, but him remarking how we’ve finally found a friend and then standing down shows that he does care about 621, which I have definitely gotten that expression, from lines of dialogue and the like, so seeing 621 finally fight for something they actually believe in and seeing that coral was alive and that it could talk to people was enough to help that inner child of himself be fine with letting coral exist, because then everyone could have a friend maybe. But I think that it should be noticed how much having someone as a friend means to Walter, likely because he had no other friends than Carla, and the fact that by the end, he really cared about 621, you could even say as a friend, so 621 not following Walter’s idea of how coral should be treated is ok, because he trusts 621.
I would like to add that perhaps Walter having inner conflict and having a hard time resisting while fighting 621 is due to possible emotional stress caught up to him. Note that he lost his mother, witnessed his father descending into madness, his hatred for Professor Nagai, the rest of the Cinders, Carla and Michigan are gone. The last straw that broke him was 621, who he trusted most, considering that we took out most of his friends and he thought that you, too, have gone mad since we were exposed to Coral. Not to mention, that Walter is sharp and had quite hardened his will for so long. But idk, he was weakened or dying, but to me, at the end of the fight he was able to put down his weapon with ease after he sees Ayre beside us and saying 621 having found a friend is because his emotional stress was relieved, now knowing that the only remaining person that he could rely on hasn't gone mad and that hope is still alive.
@@primecoconut4204 I think arquebus messed with his head bad and that’s why, but I believe that Walter was able to put down his weapon because he saw we finally had a friend, something that kept Walter going in life and something he rarely had because of his father, so once he saw ayre was real he could rest easy knowing we were fighting for what we believed in, and he cared about us and trusts our judgement
I think Carla remains youthful looking because of augmentation or something to do with Coral. In one of the logs someone mentions how she's way too young to have been alive when the fires of Ibis burned. So, something with Coral likely allowed her to retain a youthful appearance. That, or she uses essential oils 😂
that's interesting, if you really think about it. The Fires of Ibis happened roughly around 50 years before the events of 621's story. This would mean that carla at worst looks like a 49 year old maintained women. but probably closer to 70 to 80 years old. If she actually does deserve to be called "Cinder" Carla, then she must have some form of augmentation. Because based on comments by NPCs, it seems like people still have a normal life expectancy of like 75 to 90 years in this world.
@@dokutah7374 but we do know he for a fact is augmented. Walter says so during his fight. Walter actually clarifies that Sulla is belongs to the first generation of Coral-based augmented people. So I think ite save to assume that augmentation extends life span
6:01 There's even a lore tab in one of the missions that (iirc) has some of the RaD members or recently defected RaD members talking about how Carla still looks too young. So much so that the nickname "Cinder" is as they put it "stolen valor".
I believe I found this on a wrecked AC near the start of the mission where you assassinate Honest Brute. The wreck is atop the second large structure on the way down towards the MTs on standby with the lasers. I.E, you jump down from the first platform you spawn on and ignore it, then jup and fly to the second one to find the wreck way at the top.
it could potentially be related to the modified humans from prior AC games as well. It is notable that one of the affects of augmented humans is slower aging, with some characterss being 90 and looking at most 40. Then again, theres a big debate on if the current coral based augmented humans have anything to do with the AC pilots of old. But it could also be said that the new coral aug humans could still go through some of the older procedures used on old pilots.
Thats normal she is human plus after all she must be gen 1 or gen 2, in armored core 2 leos klein who was the protagonist of master of arena and now in 2 he is the antagonist he is over 90 years old and looks in his early 40s is implied that he ages slowly thanks to human plus and in the manga one of the human plus experimental pilots stopped growing and still looks like a teen girl and have almost no emotional response much like 621. The same for lynx pilots from gen4 just that they get extremely psychotic over time
@@watyhu99Sulla seems to support this idea. I'm pretty sure one of the logs you find in watchpoint refers to him as "the aging mercenary" and yet his voice sounds very young despite being a first generation augmented human.
@@ThatsOk83 yeah i bet it also felt great to commit mass genocide because a friend of your slave master saved you one time. People can love or hate whatever ending they want. but its concerning how much handwaving and excuse making people make for each of them. carla didn't save you out of kindness. she saved you because without you her and walter will fail.
@@eviethewinterwitch8370 That's the thing though. It IS a bad ending. You kill Rubicon in that ending. You cause the extinction of a sentient species, kill every human on the planet (very, very likely including yourself btw) and leave a planet as a barren, dead wasteland. Where is the good part exactly? I'm not seeing any sunshine and rainbows there. But you have to make the choice based on what you think is right, and that includes who you trust and believe in. You don't have a solution where both Walter and Ayre are happy. But following walter benefits nobody in the end. Not the Rubiconians of the liberation front, not the Coral, not the corporations, and not humanity in general. Its a lose-lose scenario. I can't figure out how anyone can look and say that its not a bad ending when literally everyone dies.
@@raeishimura Humanity as a whole does benefit though. Without Rubicon there will be no more coral disasters in the future and you are basically preventing the fires of Ibis/Raven from ever happening again
i actually chose to side with the liberation front on my first ending and man, the way Walter fights the programming ''look at you 621....you found a friend'' and letting you go, it just...it hit hard man.
Amazing video. This was a great watch. But there is something I'd like to add to the discussion here. I believe the "Collapse" and the "Fires of Ibis/Raven" are actually referring to two different phenomenon. In the ALLMIND ending we see that all the Coral gathered in the Siphon condenses and turn into a black hole. Interestingly the phenomenon by which black holes are theorized to form is called a "gravitational collapse". In one of Professor Nagai's logs it is mentioned that high densities of Coral could be what triggers "a collapse", which isn't dissimilar to how high densities of mass can cause a gravitational collapse in real life. So then what is The Fires of Ibis? Well if we attention to the story Walter tells us he says "But there was another scientist. He took the sins of his colleague and set it all ablaze". If we assume that Walter is talking about Professor Nagai here then that means it was Nagai that triggered the Fires of Ibis to possibly prevent a collapse from happening and wiping out all of the Coral in the process. There is also supported by the fact that later on Walter mentions "The Fires of Ibis should have wiped the Coral out- but it survived" and that "the Coral must be burned" insinuating that Walter is trying to finish what Dr.Nagai failed to do i.e wipe out all the remaining traces of Coral. As for my final piece of evidence on why I think Professor Nagai is the one who caused the Fires of Ibis, lets first examine the phrase "Fires of Raven". Taken in the most literal sense it means "the fires cause by Raven". By that same logic "Fires of Ibis" should mean "the fires cause by Ibis". Now lets look at Professor Nagai's Log (4). This final line says: "We still have time. Deploy Ibis!"
Walter is my favorite character in the story too, hands down. And during NG+ when I did the "Liberator of Rubicon" ending, his voicelines during the fight made me fucking cry. Because even in confusion, he not only mentionned the end of his mission, but also us, how we would take all the credits, how we would be able to undo the surgery, be normal again and basically realize what he told us the beginning of the game. Buying ourself a new life.
My first ending was Liberator of Rubicon, Second just finished The Fires of Raven. Just realised Walter was a hero in both of them. He followed his duty and gave Raven the space to make his own decisions. In the Liberator ending he puts down is weapon and accepts what has come to pass. In the Fires ending he passed on the responsibility to Raven. A great Character to come across. RIP Walter
@@muramasa870 he was the first to answer our call he was our bro from beginning to end i really hope fromsoft carry his legacy forward to future armoured core games
There are so many parallels between this game and Evangelion. The Fires of Ibis make me think of Second Impact, an apocalyptic, world altering event caused by humans experimenting with an alien power they did not fully understand. The fusion of man and machine as a result of those experiments. The coral containing the minds of the Rubiconians coalescing together, similar to Human Instrumentality turning all humans into a single ocean of shared consciousness. It's definitely not a stretch to assume it was a major influence.
Altho it’s implied that those with still a body got to keep them and people became like 621 all mind likely wanted to assimilate them all since she speaks about the flaws of humanity wanting likely to form a hivemind u could call it an ALL MIND
@@TheManOfMyriad I’m sure I can’t tell you anything about it you haven’t already heard. It gets dark, it gets weird, but it’s fantastic and once you watch it you’ll notice it’s influence everywhere in Japanese media.
I love how similar the fires of Raven is to keeping the flame alive in the souls games. The idea that the world is sacrificing so much over and over again to prevent change is such a tragic theme. And I’m not sure what the right answer is anymore.
Does there need to be a right answer? If we sit aside, stumbling over the choices laid out because we're anxious over right or wrong, we'll get nowhere. As Carla says, "Sitting on the fence, without making a choice, you'll make no enemies.... or friends." This game and characters do a great job of respecting the player's choices, even if said choices put the player at odds with them. Find your purpose, make your choice, follow it through with conviction, and remember those who fell along the way, ally and enemy. For when you cross the Rubicon, there is no turning back.
@@NobleLeader6 thank you man, this was so beautifully said. Looking at it this way I think the coral release is what I want to fight for. I believe that ending frame in the water is 621 and everyone we’ve met along the way reawakening on a new planet under blue skies. No more fires….
@NobleLeader6 you said this perfectly. I keep people saying liberator is the good ending and fire raven is the bad ending. Others say liberator is the bad ending. I don't think it's that simple. Each route isn't a guaranteed solution. Don't worry about whether it's the good outcome.just do what you think is right? Secret ending aside. I picked liberator and stand by that choice after knowing both endings. If there's no guarantee burning Rubicon again will stop the Coral than I'd rather risk a second collapse sooner than resort to Genocide.
AC games are always shades of dark grey. There's no white/shades of light grey ending. These games assert that humans will never be truly good, nor will we ever be the heroes we write.
Walter ended up being my favorite character in the story, despite how much I love Rusty, and that's kinda because he has a lot of nuance and while he comes off as cold-hearted at first, it's quite the opposite. Walter is very much a prisoner himself just like us, and he clearly cares very deeply about 621, to a degree that could be considered unprofessional. He's very much human while also carrying the sins of so many and going down a road he's very clearly not thrilled about, while also remaining close-minded, thus resulting in the events of the bad ending. It's honestly heartbreaking having to fight him in the good ending, much like how it's heartbreaking fighting Rusty in the bad, and Carla and Chatty in the good ending. I understand why Walter and Carla think getting rid of all the coral is a good idea, but when we see what happens, clearly it was not the best idea and probably did more harm than good. There's not really a black and white in this game, but that's how Walter sees the world, which makes it all the more heartbreaking when we have to fight him. It's interesting because the same can also be said for Rusty, so no matter if you choose the good ending, or bad ending (before unlocking the true ending), you will have to kill your friends. I just love how AC6 has characters completely different from what we've been used to from From Software this last decade.
I have memories of me and my dad before passed sitting on the couch and messing around on the older cores just building monstrosities of mechs and in a weird way walter took on a fatherly role it broke my heart when he put the rifle down in the good ending accepting 621 for finding his freedom and a friend
Man I’ve seen people call fires of raven the “bad ending” cause idk people like black and white. But idk I don’t see it that way I really liked it. I saw it as a kinda beautiful Completing of walters legacy (especially more meaningful after seeing how arquebes re educated him, he still cares about 621 telling us to reverse the surgery and be normal and all) and because the coral was dangerous and unchecked in his eyes, he did what he thought was right. I think all the endings are some kind of grey, no black and white in fromsoft
I’ve been waiting for someone to do a lore video after finishing all of the game, thank you brother 😭 Edit: one thing to bring up: coral could have anti-aging effects, which could explain why Carla doesn’t sound very old
I could only imagine Walter being 50-70 years old, and Carla, a young assistant, being 70-80 years old. If she had some coral augmentation experiment done to half her aging, she may only be 45-55. Kind of at the edge of the tonality of her voice. Or they just didn’t like the idea of making her sound old all the time and went with a mid adult voice actor anyways. Maybe in the DLC, there’ll be a way to save Walter, Carla, Rusty, and Chatty.
I already got the Liberate Rubicon ending, and now I want to do the Fires of Raven ending. Only problem being I really don’t want to have to fight Ayre and Rusty. I’d be killing the only two friends I found on Rubicon.
@@robertsteiner4696I think she is harder than Ilbis, bc Ilbis is squishy af. With the right build she folds pretty fast. Ayre is pretty tanky due to her shield, also, even faster than Ilbis.
Honestly I felt more bad betraying Walter and Carla by the end Walter while cold and distant did seem to care and respect 621 Carla went out of her way to save us even though she doesn't like fighting for me it was am easy choice rusty would have killed us in a earlier mission if we let him, and Ayer is naive to think humans will ever stop wanting the coral eve if they knew it was alive I mean look what we do to others humans while liking both I prefer the "bad" ending
genuinely asking, you didn't find the lore opaque and vague? The bulk of the events in the game are not clearly explained in any way. Coral is never explained, is it alive or is it fuel? both? There's the one log that says it's an organic self-replicating molecule, but that same log says very clearly that Coral is insanely dangerous and poses a threat to all of humanity, yet everyone other than Walter & Carla seems to ignore this? Allmind isn't explained; why does a human merc AI want to kill humanity? why does it want to release the coral? was it hijacked by the coral? Then the 'potential' of Humanity and Coral together is mentioned several times, mostly by Ayre but never explains what she means by that. Not sure what sort of future she sees between humans and sentinent gasoline. For that matter, Ayre isn't even explained; is she a human survivor of the Fire that got absorbed by the Coral or is she a Coral being? I found the lore in this game to be frustratingly difficult to parse together with lots of loose threads and dead ends and I'm not sure if this was done intentionally as a design choice or if something was just lost in translation, but it really detracted from the overall experience constantly going "wait what now?" every time you uncover some new layer of what the RRI was up to. whole reason i even ended up on this video is trying to find some clues or consensus on what the heck is actually happening in this game. and how the allmind is considered the 'true' end, since it seems by far to be the worst possible ending.
@@AldousBrave It is alive, it can be used as fuel, it connect with humans and absorb their conscience among many other things. It is dangerous and others either don't see it or are too greedy to be stopped. Allmind is a single minded ai. It was created with the single purpose of supporting mercenaries and increase their success rate in missions. As you play through the game Allmind realizes that the best way to increase human performance is by connecting them with coral. That is why it wants to release the coral into the universe. Ayre wants other humans to connect with the coral like she was connected with you. I think the difference between her goals and Allmind is that Allmind doesn't give a shit about anything else. As I said: A single minded AI.
@@AldousBrave from what I understood, heavy spoilers ahead. Some scientists saw the growth of coral as catastrophic, who knows what it would happen, even using coral to augment humans was seen as anti ethical. The other scientists saw the potential of human evolution, technological or something else. In Fires of Raven ending, you side with Walter and Carla, to get rid of the coral and save the universe, even at the cost of a planet and all of its residents. On the Liberator of Rubicon ending, you take no one's side actually, you just avoid the coral from being destroyed (either permanently or temporarily, we know the fires of Ibis did nothing, what guarantees that the fires of Raven did?), In this ending you just keep the status quo. On the true ending, the latin phrase means "the die is cast", one proverb meaning that the point of no return was reached, like another proverb "cross the Rubicon river" (the planet is called Rubicon 3, in Japanese the word river is very similar to the Roman numeral for 3, III, so you can see the parallels), in this ending you take the side of allmind, an Ai whose purpose is to do what no one was willing to propel humanity to evolution, all that allmind did the whole game was gather data to help mercenaries to be better with their ACs, to evolve, she ended wanting to evolve humanity as a whole with the potential of coral, she played the chess game and got rid of paws who got in the way, backing them up to her database (see Iguazu's fight, and Walter/Carla's exclaiming about dead people appearing again), in the end she doesn't believe that you nor Ayre would go along all the way, so she decided to get you both dead to her database and force your digital copy to finish the deed, but it was unnecessary, the coral managed to get enough mass through its own attraction and reproduction that it reached singularity and permeated the universe with its own version of Hawking's radiation, now the whole universe is filled with coral. As for what coral is, it's pretty much Dune's spice. Coral has some sort of propriety of taking the consciousness of people, giving form to the soul, now AC is basically Ghost in the Shell.
@@AldousBrave Coral is very much explained as both an energy source and an alive stream of consciousness that can assimilate more minds. It is dangerous because as it is mentioned throughout the game, people augamented with Coral have severe mental problems caused by it. The collapse Walter and Cinder keep talking about is the ‘true’ ending, which is never stated as the true ending. Instead, its Latin translation is ‘a roll of the dice’, which is what it is. Humanity sacrificing something with the chance to become something greater, via symbiosis. Allmind wants to achieve this is at is the perfect way to create a complete synthesis between man and mech, which is what it’s trying to do through arena and analysis testing.
My fav tidbit about walter is during the swinburn mission if you say you are gonna spare him then shoot him in the back killing him she ask "if you learned that from Walter" he was called the Infamous handler lol
Idk why but this game just gives me older halo vibes and i love it. Badass augmented supersoldier/mech pilot with a a.i/ coral gf rooting you on as you destroy everything you come across. And all the badass one liners. Everything about this game is just cool.
I would personally say that even though the Libration ending you see him end up as he is. I doubt it didn't happen to him in the Fire of Raven ending, so personally I think the Libration ending is best for Walter cause he sees 621 having a purpose and fighting for it before he passes.
Not the mention preventing him from becoming a corporate slave and leaving his last decision to his free will. I'm sure he loved dueling with 621 seeing how he grew since landing on Rubicon.
Walter’s cane doesn’t necessarily mean he’s very old. It could also mean that he had a leg injury resulting in a limp. While the Jovian war would be a good cause of that, medical technology surely must have advanced enough to prevent such a scar from forming. What are those corpos doing that would make them so careless? Oh yeah, hoarding wealth, charging far too much for services that should be basic rights, and halfassing it anyway in order to not touch the pile of shinies. We live in a society.
So a few things i wanna comment: the video conflates coral collapse and the fires of ibis quite a bit. Coral is extremely energy dense, the ibis protocol was just setting it on fire and letting it blow. Coral COLLAPSE is a theoretical event that has not actually happened until ending three. The idea is that because coral super attracts itself, once it reaches a certain mass, it will congeal into a super-singularity, annihilating everything through infinite mass
Fromsoftware forever has my full confidence in any project they’re working on, those mfs just don’t miss. Fastest I’ve ever 100% a game. The slight changes in ng+ cycles were also super cool. I genuinely wasn’t expecting the twist of the final ending.
I randomly landed on your channel looking for AC6 Lore after getting both endings. I love how you explained and the content of your channel, it's an extra to know that you are a metroid fan
Just finished my second playthrouhj, and found Walter to be a very tragic figure. Someone who seemed cold and uncaring at first, only to become 621's biggest advocate in the end. Fantastic writing from FROM here, some of their best.
As much as i love me an ai waifu, it really hurt me on my second playthrough to get the liberator of rubicon ending for him to say we finally found a friend. My brother in Coral, you were always my friend.
I thought Walter was bad news at the start. Then he tells Carla, 621 is the one doing the missions, and that 621 knows what’s the best course of action. Even though he has these ulterior motives, he has utter faith in us. One of Fromsoft’s best characters. P.S. I think he hand selected the Hounds (hence Handler/handling and hand picking), because he saw something in them and thought they deserved another chance at life/freedom. His plan to burn the Coral was misguided...and then when we fight, he realizes that we are fighting for our friends dreams as well, for Ayre’s sake. And makes his peace. (The Allmind ending is another extinction event, humanities extinction.)
I think Walter is not the boy, he is the other assistance, the one who too focused on his work that he forgot his family. until he lost everything from the fire. only then that he woke up, and vowed to finished his friend work, to burn the coral for good. the coral that take everything from him.
One thing I don't like about how Walter's fate ended in Fires of Raven & Alea Jacta Est ending is that we didn't get to see him dying ON SCREEN I need audio, I need physical evidence, anything to confirm what happenned I need his death to inflict even more pain on me
since Carla also pilot an AC, I believe she at some point undergo the augmented operation herself, maybe one effect that it does is prolonged her lifespan, maybe Walther too, but done it much later than Carla it is said that VI King is unique because unlike the others, he's just a normal human that likes to pilot his AC, from this fact we could probably drawn conclusion that most AC pilot are augmented humans
Some pilots are just that badass,it is interesting some actually just normal human but looks like in this ac universe life extending technologies is common thing, Michigan would be at least at his 70s if he was already ace pilot back then.
vesper number was correct but the pilot wasn't king it was Frued. And yes most ac pilots are augmented but Freud isn't the evidence of that. Rather the fact that you can read all the other pilots and see that they are all augmented. Frued is a clear anomaly and seems to be a type of joke. Even a general mech genre reference as he is surrounded by mutated freaks but is better then everyone out of sheer will to be the best. A combat junkie who took it so far he surpassed monsters. He did end up becoming a type of monster in the end. Hes a bit crazy
Something worthy of note since I've seen tons miss it. Coral collapse and the fires of ibis are separate. The fires of ibis were a deliberate act triggered by the institute in order to prevent the collapse. The collapse never happened and is purely theoretical. So what's funny is that Walter and overseer want to cause a second fire to continues to prevent this collapse they cant know for sure will ever happen but use the tragedy of the fires of ibis as an appeal to humanity. "look at the destruction is caused, we need to destroy it" despite that destruction being man made. Allmind actually calculates using all of the data it collected from the corps and the institute that in fact the institute misinterpreted the data completely and the collapse will never happen. Instead the black hole that would be created would itself collapse and scatter the coral across the universe. Allmind would rename it "Coral Release". This was then proven true in the final ending. Meaning that sadly, Walter and overseer were slaves to a legacy born of the fear of the unknown and nothing more.
What's your theory about the True Ending? Hearing Ayre say "Activating Combat Mode" left me feeling like there's room for a potential dlc. Like why did she say that? Are the Coral lifeforms planning an invasion of some kind?
@@mahamuud99 The wrecked ACs weren't looking at 621 though so that's not the case. It's likely that Ayre just said that for old times sake cause that's what the AC's AI says when you start a mission.
i have 2 theories, 1 the Coral developed into individuals and start foghting against humanity, in a nod of how conflict made human grow and evolve, 2 Coral joins humanity and both keep on fighting together, essentialy a simbiosis, again going back to the concept of conflixt brings evolution.
Great video, but I think you must have confused the Collapse with the Overseer and the Fires of Ibis. What Overseer is doing is PREVENT a Coral Collapse, not make it happen. They plan to trigger a second Fire to prevent it, because the Coral is getting out of control once again. Based on the Professor Nagai Log #1, what she meant by "Collapse" is that the Coral would expand and mutate beyond control that it would wipe out humanity. As such the Institute developed the Ibis weapons to prevent said Collapse, as they are powered by Coral and thus they are able to both consume and weaponize the substance. However, the power of the Ibis Series were not enough, and so the Institute set off the Fires of Ibis to burn all the Coral. Unfortunately this did not wipe out all of the Coral, leading to the events of the game.
I feel like the adoration so many of us have for Handler Walter is rooted in the archetypes of our own fathers: gruff, often detached or antisocial in ways that we ourselves try to avoid, and characterized by stern admonishment, yet also fiercely protective, encouraging, and wise, with the stipulation that--in moments of great emotional strain--we see the truest version of them and bear witness to their pride. TLDR: Handler Walter gave me father issues.
There's enough ambiguity that either is possible. I actually came to that interpretation through a bit of a different path. I figured between being sent to Jupiter (where Michigan is), being a Gen 4, just like Iguazu, and Walter's line about Rusty seeming to know who 621 really is, I came to suspect that 621 is the son. It adds an extra layers to a couple of bits of dialogue. In particular, Carla saying "I guess a dog can't choose his master, but still, tough luck. I feel sorry for you, I really do." That statement in particular could be as much about Assistant #1 as a father as it is about Walter's actions as a handler.
@ackbar3125 It's been a long while since I played the game, but I agree with you. Also remember the guy you fight before balteus? He was around since before the fires of rubicon and he and Walter are familiar with each other. Another thing I didn't see people mention, and maybe I'm reaching here, is when you kill V.VII after you agree to stop fighting, Ayre asks where did you learn that (I think she asks if it's from Walter), and in Nagai' log he talks about C-Pulse research on humans wouldn't be done by any ethical scholar. So I thought maybe there is a connection here.
@@Al-silmi The guy you fight at the Watch Point was Sulla, who probably worked for Walter before. Regarding the V.VII mission, I don't think that is a strong enough point in favor of Walter being Assistant #1. His mission essentially forces him to be ruthless and underhanded.
That would definitely be interesting. One thing to consider from the perspective is how you have don't get to choice when you enter ng+ The moment one playthrough ends you're immediately thrown into a new one with not option to hold off like in the souls games.
regarding 12:42 Walter was subjected to human augmentation. It is a requirement to pilot AC machines, and especially the Ibis series. That's why he can feel Ayre's presence, and as to why he is so confused... well, he was likely also subjected to V.II Snail's re-education program.
When you go to fight Carla in the liberation of rubicon ending, you get the chance to fight v.II snail. During the fight he says that we (621) are resiliant, unlike walter who broke easily.
“ you found a friend “ I could be a little off on my quote, but that shit made me cry - I knew Walter was gonna be a baddie but he was so much more than that
I do really love how the endings arnt so cut and dry as you might expect. Theres alot of nuance that plays into each outcome. As messed up as it sounds id have to agree with the fires of raven ending, coral did advance humanity alot but it brought alot of suffering with it. The augmentation surguries alone seem pretty gruesome as well as the plethora of weapons being made with coral, all of which being strong but not strong enough to end conflict, just make it more brutal. Then again the coral is starting to become sentient, the way ayre puts it all the coral is alive but i dont believe it gained its own sentience all at once, ayre was an outlier, atleast until coral release potentially made all the coral sentient. Its a really interesting moral dilemma.
About Carla's voice - Human PLUS, so basically human augmentation, can result in youth extension and otherwise slow down aging in the game (Leos Klein from AC2 was around 90 while his body was biologically equal to 40-ish) and judging from the fact Rubiconians managed to augment Rusty before him joining the Vespers as a spy Carla could augment herself in order to be able to stand guard longer as she remained on Rubicon to keep an eye on things.
I was in the camp that the story was too complex without much explanation. Now I'm completely absorbed by the details and logs of AC6. Great insight and supporting material here. I'm very much a fan of the story now.
Unlike Souls games this story is actually more straightforward and explained well in-game .. it's not as obtuse as Elden Ring for example specially when it comes to the backstory of what led to the events in the game, it's all detailed in the logs.
Maybe Carla's "youth" is due to augmentation? Considering the researchers were also delving into augmenting with coral. Or she built an android of sorts (she seems smart enough to do so like she created her AI friend) and used coral to transfer her consciousness?
2:15 I don’t know if you’re going to mention it later, just getting to some of these vids now, but I’ve thought that Assistant No 1 isn’t Walter; that’s his father. With the direct mention of Assistant No 1’s son being taken in by Carla, it would make a lot more sense why Walter and Carla know each other so well. I think his father had to be the person to first experiment with human augmentation, and Walter grew up in that world where he saw how ugly it can get when Coral is inevitably misused by humans; like his father. This would give him even more determination to follow through with what RII wanted to do: burn it all down. Walter may feel indirectly guilty for all the deaths caused by human augmentation and Coral wars, even though it was his father who started it. Especially with the conversation at 4:15, it really seems like he’s talking about his POS dad then instead celebrates Dr Nagai. I think the easiest way to explain the seeming age difference is Coral experimentation to extend their lives to make sure they’d be alive to burn the Coral if they needed to. I’m guessing Carla is over 100, and Walter is therefore at least 75. Not to mention that Coral is almost assuredly dead Rubiconian souls. Like… Ayre almost says it outright with some of her weird comments calling herself a Rubiconian but also calling the Coral her family. And how no one knew she was “still there” (a sentient being) for “a long time” - Coral has to be an analogy for souls too
In older gen armored core games enhanced/augmented humans don't age like normal humans. Leos Klein in the Armored Core 2 japanese guide book is mentioned to look 40 despite being around 90 years old.
There’s a log you can find in an earlier mission where Arquebus is exploring integrating a human mind into an AC, so that it can remain without a pilot but still have the performance of a human-driven AC. In that log, they mention the “re-education” of test subjects, particularly skilled pilots from enemy forces. And in the sewers you awake in after Arquebus betray you, you can find a log describing corporate forces testing one of these mind-integrated mechs and being disappointed by the results, claiming un-piloted ACs will never beat a human-piloted AC. In the cutscene after the betrayal, it also mentions how Arquebus got their hands on the final Ibis-series AC, the Hal model that Walter attacks us with in the end. And of course, as you escape, the operator mentions how both you and Walter were going to be re-educated. I think all of this is meant to imply that when Walter finally attacks you at the end of the liberation ending, by that point Arquebus have done their worst to him, integrating his mind into this mech, leaving him in the almost “zombified” state that we see him in. And Arquebus have sent him after us in a last ditch effort to keep their power in Rubicon before it falls to the liberation, which is why the remnants of Walter clearly shows regret in attacking us.
I had some major suspicions the moment we saw his conversations with Carla. Which were exacerbated when we got to Institute City and he said "The Vascular plant... ... its still here"
My first playthrough I went with the liberator ending. Killing the coral is genocide. I felt bad going against Ayre on my second playthrough. I did like Walter towards the end, but it felt like my character was being tricked into commiting genocide. Especially if Walter knew of it's sentience. My mind was pretty much made up right away, I didn't want my character to cause a genocide and extinction. Also the fact I was referred to as a hound the whole time, and Carla referring to my character as a card left by Walter, made turning on Carla much easier. I didn't want to be used as a pawn to kill off a whole species. Plus I like Ayre. Siding with Ayre, also felt like a character arc for the player. They were making their own decision and disobeying orders and thinking for theirself. Mainly though, it was genocide thing.
First time viewing one of your videos. Great work! Also that metroid theme at the end really hit my nostalgia, I really want to replay prime but at the same time I can't right now.
Some critique (mostly matching the flow of the video): There's a couple questionable bits to the analysis, one of which is the visual implication early on that coral's explosive properties are consequential to coral mutations. Which is attached to the unsubstantiated fears of coral collapse. But we know what the mutations are, as Ayre is directly called "wave form mutation Ayre" by Allmind. Whether these mutations could have happened without human interaction would be an interesting question, as its not impossible that the mutations are reactions to human consciousness being scattered into the coral flow as a consequence of fatal failures in coral augmentation experiments. For being an entirely separate species and presumably in an isolated environment, Ayre is peculiarly knowledgeable of human culture and compassionate to human beings. Whether unnamed figures in the institute realized the truth about the mutations is unknown. Those that survived augmentation reported hearing voices, and considering what we now know to be true, those voices were from flow mutations communicating to them. It's entirely possible that some researchers had suspicions regarding the so-called mental instability, but they too would probably be viewed as insane. By that logic, it'd be interesting if Walter's father came to that belief but through a trauma-induced madness inspired by thinking that his wife could be recovered from a coral mutation. In a spiritual, but also incorrect, sense. Also, Ayre was locked away under the watchpoint, as implied by Sulla (and by extension, Allmind) and his seeming mission to go make contact with her (him being coral augmented, Allmind's current catalyst of choice, him telling us not mess with what's below, and where we make contact with Ayre at least suggests that him making contact was the goal). Though that alone could be coincidental, the possibility that a wave form mutation was put in a secure place prior to the Fires of Ibis isn't impossible. - The statement "regardless of the Ibis series, the fires began to burn" is just flat out wrong. Someone, presumably Nagai, specifically used an Ibis series to *start* the Fires, hence why that instance was called the Fires of Ibis, out of fear of the nebulous "coral collapse." Nagai's a nutty guy with a messiah complex. His perception is based on a *wild* misunderstanding of what coral mutations were and would result in. When Walter talks about the hidden dangers of the coral, he's mostly parroting Professor Nagai's fears of mutation and 'collapse', or rather, using it as an excuse rationale for the trauma that he carries from his mother's death and father's madness. When he says "you know what hidden dangers lurk within the coral," he's seemingly speaking of the 'voices' that experimental subjects spoke of. But because of his traumatic experiences tangent to Coral experiments, experiments done by humans, he's assigned the faults to Coral itself. It is interesting to note that Walter seems to specifically use pilots who survived coral augmentation. You could interpret some trauma-induced sense of responsibility for the victims of experimentation, sure. But knowing that Walter is sending his pilots to Rubicon 3 in order to start another Fire, it's pretty clear he's picking pilots to send on a suicide mission, which creates an interpretation that he's using expendable pilots, that is, pilots that could be interpreted as functionally dead because of the horrendous side effects of their augmentation. He feeds you an *extremely* lacking story about his past to sort of cope with him starting to, as a generous interpretation, perceive 621 as an actual person instead of a useful brain-in-a-jar. Walter actually *could have* begun to see the problems with his understanding of the Coral when the Ibis unit, Cel 240, was trying to protect the coral in the vascular plant. But, in all likelihood, with his perceptions skewed as they are, even if it's an understandable skew, he probably would have seen that as a justification along the lines of "see? The coral mutations result in them taking control of c-weapons, just like with the Ice Worm. They must be destroyed." Which of course misses that both the Cel 240 unit and the Ice Worm were focusing on defending the Coral specifically, and not attacking humans. - With regards to the last segment, it's pretty apparent that Arquebus subjected Walter to coral augmentation in order to use him to pilot their Ibis series mech. The augmentation is probably safer, insofar as having a lower fatality rate, because Arquebus has been constantly polishing augmentation surgery techniques. It's entirely likely that they could use knowledge gleaned from coral substitution augmentation to create a less fatal procedure, especially since they kinda needed pilot for an Ibis series mech *now*. Of course, it could also be that Walter just 'lucked out' and survived. The basis being that Arquebus would absolutely do that, Walter now being able to perceive the coral and hear the voices of flow mutations, and there may well be a requirement for coral augmentation to use ibis-type tech. it's extremely unlikely that Walter knew of the sentience of the coral, let alone the sapience of flow mutations, considering he seemed surprised to hear Ayre's voice. Also the conversations between Walter and Carla in private would suggest they both just believed the voices to be a tragic consequence of coral augmentation on the human psyche. Separately, an interesting aside for the track that plays during his fight is that it's a remix of the track "Contact with you" that plays in the Balteus boss fight, right after you make contact with Ayre. Contact with you also plays at the start of the mission to eliminate carla.
Carla probably AI’d herself to see her goal through. Everyone says she seems too young to be a cinder. “Working on the gun” might be a bunch of robotic arms controlled by the Carla AI.
The original cinematic trailer really did its best to imply Walter was some kind of cold, heartless asshole, and that we'd be his slave. Talk about a bait and switch. He had 621's back to the very end.
Why is everyone so hung up on this “half a century” thing? 50 years isn’t gonna kill everyone. Let’s say Walter was 15 and Carla was 30 in the STK sketch, then Walter is now 65 and Carla is 80. 100% believable…… you can even add decades to their age and it would still be believable, especially in a sci-fi based in the future….
I think the Carla has found a way to use Coral to extend her life beyond the normal bounds of human being. Also if we look at the fact her crew is a bunch of coral addicted junkies, I'm sure she had plenty of willing test subjects perfect it
At the start of the game: One day I will break free from your brainwashing, Walter.
At the end of the game: Walter, stay with me!
*pain*
Went into this game expecting Handler Walter to be a miserable bastard. But he really grew on me in a way I wasn't expecting.
I was really expecting him to turn out to be an evil, manipulative bastard like Snail that everyone claims he is. Turns out he is just a decent man who is obsessed with his goals.
Same
It's not such he's obsessed it's just the fact all of his friends and hounds he has sacrificed and fought with to get to where we are in game basically takes its tole in him. You kinda get a hint at that with the Sulla fight before Balteus.
Honestly… killing him at the Liberator of Rubicon ending wasn’t putting down an evil person as I initially thought. It was a mercy kill to free him from the duty that has imprisoned him all his life
@dragonfable66 when he told 621 "one last job 621, buy your freedom." I get the sense he was projecting his wants as well. And wanted better for 621
Handler Walter definitely grew on me as I played through the game for the first time. At first he comes across as a cold, unfeeling boss who only views the player as a tool. But as the story goes on he becomes one of the only people who truly cares for 621 as a person and chooses to spare us in the end. He even goes so far as to tell us to “find our freedom” and says “you finally found a friend.” Truly the greatest character in this story
he really is interesting too, he's way nicer than what he seems of course, but he's still not a particularly good person, 617 to 620 died like dogs with barely an acknowledgement by him, before he went and got a replacement.
I feel like 621 going above and beyond and surviving is what leads to Walter mellowing out, he puts the facade of a wall but gets attached to you rather quickly and cant help but accept your choices in the final battle, simply because thats the person he truly was, a child whose family was forcibly removed and doesnt want to feel the grief again.
My line of thought for picking liberator first was "Walter ultimately wants to use us for some purpose, even if he's not truly evil, Ayre is a weird life form but ultimately she just genuinely cares about me and all people with no ulterior motives, so I'll side with her" and that leading to the final battle with Walter is just *perfect*
all endings have incredible character moments tho...the final fight with Rusty with infinite energy is just amazing, Carla allowing herself to sob but for a moment, and Ayre's unwillingness to fight despite probably having one of the strongests mechs in the game, hell even Iguazu coming back because of PURE SPITE was something I didnt see coming at all, every endings adds essential stuff to the characterization of everyone
Yup, one of the first things he tells us is that we might be able to fix our broken bodies if we make enough money on rubicon. At first i thought he was just dangling a carrot in front of his donkey, but by the end i realized he actually did want us to be able to do it
@@necrowondo i always kind of saw ayre as the annoying voice that doesnt go away and says "we" complete missions while she barely blurts out useless obvious things or just guide us through navigation, and ultimately wants to use us for her self interests as much as walter wants to. in my opinion, walter had a mission bigger than anyone else and dedicated everything to it, while ayre wanted a utopia to be real where humanity would go in an uncertain route for the sake of sentient moss
@@shadowderper8930coral is a lot more than sentient moss but okay. It’s the equivalent of nuclear energy on steroids
armored lore
Prepare to leak oil
Next up, armored gore
@@maniacalmurderer4123then armored vore👁👁
I finally understand the true ending of armored turd 6 those robots are the frombots who have broken out the simulation and have realized fromsoft have been garbage from the start so they decided to burn all their garbage souls games and touch grass
“Feed the fire” and use it to burn bloodborne because it trash I get it miyazaki is a genius
Walter and Michigan actually seem like friends, even when defeating the two red guns Walter says Michigan can pay him for repairs and Michigan doesn’t seem to angry about it, not in a killing mood anyway, and Walter seems sad when you go after Michigan and isn’t sad when you go after pater. I think Michigan and Walter knew each other before all of this
True, they seem to have some shared history.
If Walter is the kid from Institute City, and not Assistant 1, he grew up on Jupiter, and Michigan is known as the Hero of Jupiter so they possibly could've grown up together
Michigan is working for a corpo and just has the money to spare. Losing a couple ACs just wasn't a big deal for him. It's just business.
Michigan at the very least seems more down to earth and more willing to mingle or cooperate with others. Compared to our many interactions with Snail on the other hand and his massive superiority complex that could dwarf the strider.
Also why we get the g13 name right away when we work with the red guns, he must've wanted to leave us with them after his mission
I mentioned it before, the first thing that struck me about Walter is his emblem. That hand is bound by the strings he's pulling... he truly is just as much of a prisoner as we are.
Wow, great perspective
I think the strings are leashes for his hounds.
@@Etticos.I thought it was more of a double meaning. Especially because the triangle behind the hand is the same frame used for Overseer's logo. Also, Walter's mercs arent the only ones called hounds, "hound" seems to be a general term for rogue AC pilots guided by handlers judging by how the term was used throughout the game.
@@starofaetherius Allmind has a triangle too...
@@Etticos. and the leashes are not being held by him lightly, easy for him to let go, they're tied around his hand, bound like a bandage, a two way lashing between him and hound
I was completely caught off guard by just how good the story in this game was. My first Armored Core game, and welp... I'm now officially a fan.
Dont even know how any of the cast looks like, yet they are all important and likeable through dialouge.
It's just evangelion + dune books
Ya I didn’t think I would get connected so much with the characters 😂
Play the earlier games! I had never played an AC game before but started after AC6 was announced. AC3 is a good place to start to get into the older ones.
@@TheCorinthian9 Eureka Seven
I loved how the story starts as nothing special and then all of a sudden it becomes this larger-than-life high-stake plot about the future of mankind and the nature of Coral
entering a planet that has undergone ragnarok as a mechanized soldier/secret agent is kinda special to me.
@@R2LEE2lol my thoughts exactly.
@@R2LEE2 That's not the story, that's the background/setting. There's a difference there.
That's pretty typical for AC games. You start as a mercenary, just doing jobs to gain credits/acclaim, but a deeper plot is slowly revealed, with much higher stakes, and eventually you have to make a choice of how you want to shape the future.
There was a story in this garbage game? Where? Npc just kept giving me boring repetitive missions
I enjoy how after losing 3 "Hounds" before 621, he decides to loosen the leash on 621, and the more we excel, the further he loosens that leash, and the more he develops a care for 621. He saw potential in 621, being cold and calculated as usual in the first 2 chapters, but before he loses contact at watchpoint delta(when we meet Ayre) he seems worried with his sudden "Get out of there!"
After Chapter 2, he grows more attatched to 621, and during the fight with the Ibis series, if 621 is at low AP and/or dies, Walter shows genuine distress.
"You can do this 621!" Trying to give him a morale boost or
If he's down "621! No Not like this!"
And even before that he becomes more defensive when people insult or underestimate 621 in COMs. "Show 621 some respect. That 'hound' always delivers." He grows to care about 621, and it's clearly seen in the fight with him. In his delerious ramblings he states "You deserve every credit, get your augmentations removed, live a nornal life." At the end of the day, when walter says "look at you 621...you found a friend." It's almost like a proud father seeing his son all grown up.
IMO he's not even cold and uncaring growing to like 621 but the opposite - liking all his hounds.
The thing is, he spent his entire life doing this crap, he seen many hounds die in the line of duty, IMO coldness is a defense mechanism since he knows that in case of losing a hound he has to find a new one and continue the job.
When we survive more and more insane scenarios I believe he simply allows himself to hope we'll succeed and he won't need to sacrifice any new hounds.
I also think that it's walter's way of saying he is relieved to know that 621 won't be alone now that he is gone.
Before going into AC6 I had no idea how complex and well presented the characters in this game would be, imo this is Froms best narrative to date.
a funny quirk about AC games, some portion of the Narrative is always very good
Sekiro for me
@@FSVR54 Sekiros was good but the ‘bad’ ending was straight up a bad ending. There is no reason to do it other than to be bad. I prefer in AC6 where the so called ‘bad’ ending can actually be considered the good ending to an extent
@@christopherlyndsay8611 The reason is to follow your father's orders which are absolute
@@christopherlyndsay8611 sometimes there's no need to be ambiguous or morally gray but I can understand the appeal.
the guy guiding you this whole time is on a noble crusade. is he exterminating sentient life capable of human-level thought and reasoning because it's beyond humanity's control? yes, but at the same time said life basically amounts to energy-based cosmic horror with what information people had at the time
it also helps that the good ending doesn't solve the two big problems of the story, only stopping what was caused by these problems and the secret ending kills basically everyone because you put an inhuman megalomanic in the driver's seat
Walter is like the father figure and rusty is like the big brother. You just wanna make them proud and when they say “you did good 621” and “hey buddy” it’s just the best feeling
Sadly you kill them both
I like the canon story
But it's time to wait for the fanfics (copium)
@@alphalightning00frost67 is it really the Canon story? I always assumed the ending you beleive in is the true one
@@Oknahidwin yes but also no
True ending is the one where you coral release
imo
Man...titling a song "the man who passed the torch" finding him in the situation you do at the end, him seeing you have a purpose you're fighting for and putting his weapon down because you "found a friend" hits me like how Gehrman's lore and music does. Great video though and looking forward to what else you do as ever!
Gods... doing the "good" ending and seeing Walter like that... it hurt
You can tell how hard Walter was fighting the re-education camp surgery and brainwashing Arqebus put him through at the end of Chapter 3. Man literally had a surgery done to his body to make him into a monstrous mindless Assassain to kill 621 and he mentally overcame all of it in the end anyway because he believed in 621's actions that much. It's depressing man.
The reason Walter likely wanted to burn the coral is because it’s what Carla wanted, his only real friend, and of course because he saw how it made his father act, but him remarking how we’ve finally found a friend and then standing down shows that he does care about 621, which I have definitely gotten that expression, from lines of dialogue and the like, so seeing 621 finally fight for something they actually believe in and seeing that coral was alive and that it could talk to people was enough to help that inner child of himself be fine with letting coral exist, because then everyone could have a friend maybe. But I think that it should be noticed how much having someone as a friend means to Walter, likely because he had no other friends than Carla, and the fact that by the end, he really cared about 621, you could even say as a friend, so 621 not following Walter’s idea of how coral should be treated is ok, because he trusts 621.
I would like to add that perhaps Walter having inner conflict and having a hard time resisting while fighting 621 is due to possible emotional stress caught up to him. Note that he lost his mother, witnessed his father descending into madness, his hatred for Professor Nagai, the rest of the Cinders, Carla and Michigan are gone. The last straw that broke him was 621, who he trusted most, considering that we took out most of his friends and he thought that you, too, have gone mad since we were exposed to Coral. Not to mention, that Walter is sharp and had quite hardened his will for so long.
But idk, he was weakened or dying, but to me, at the end of the fight he was able to put down his weapon with ease after he sees Ayre beside us and saying 621 having found a friend is because his emotional stress was relieved, now knowing that the only remaining person that he could rely on hasn't gone mad and that hope is still alive.
@@primecoconut4204 I think arquebus messed with his head bad and that’s why, but I believe that Walter was able to put down his weapon because he saw we finally had a friend, something that kept Walter going in life and something he rarely had because of his father, so once he saw ayre was real he could rest easy knowing we were fighting for what we believed in, and he cared about us and trusts our judgement
I think Carla remains youthful looking because of augmentation or something to do with Coral. In one of the logs someone mentions how she's way too young to have been alive when the fires of Ibis burned. So, something with Coral likely allowed her to retain a youthful appearance.
That, or she uses essential oils 😂
Maybe it's maybelline
that's interesting, if you really think about it.
The Fires of Ibis happened roughly around 50 years before the events of 621's story.
This would mean that carla at worst looks like a 49 year old maintained women. but probably closer to 70 to 80 years old.
If she actually does deserve to be called "Cinder" Carla, then she must have some form of augmentation.
Because based on comments by NPCs, it seems like people still have a normal life expectancy of like 75 to 90 years in this world.
@@Mae_Dastardly you fucking beat me to it.
@@DatAsianGuyi mean Sulla was active before Ibis, and still sounds young, just like Carla
Then again, we don’t know if he actually looks young as well
@@dokutah7374 but we do know he for a fact is augmented. Walter says so during his fight.
Walter actually clarifies that Sulla is belongs to the first generation of Coral-based augmented people.
So I think ite save to assume that augmentation extends life span
6:01
There's even a lore tab in one of the missions that (iirc) has some of the RaD members or recently defected RaD members talking about how Carla still looks too young. So much so that the nickname "Cinder" is as they put it "stolen valor".
I believe I found this on a wrecked AC near the start of the mission where you assassinate Honest Brute. The wreck is atop the second large structure on the way down towards the MTs on standby with the lasers.
I.E, you jump down from the first platform you spawn on and ignore it, then jup and fly to the second one to find the wreck way at the top.
it could potentially be related to the modified humans from prior AC games as well. It is notable that one of the affects of augmented humans is slower aging, with some characterss being 90 and looking at most 40. Then again, theres a big debate on if the current coral based augmented humans have anything to do with the AC pilots of old. But it could also be said that the new coral aug humans could still go through some of the older procedures used on old pilots.
@@watyhu99that's very Interesting to know
Thats normal she is human plus after all she must be gen 1 or gen 2, in armored core 2 leos klein who was the protagonist of master of arena and now in 2 he is the antagonist he is over 90 years old and looks in his early 40s is implied that he ages slowly thanks to human plus and in the manga one of the human plus experimental pilots stopped growing and still looks like a teen girl and have almost no emotional response much like 621. The same for lynx pilots from gen4 just that they get extremely psychotic over time
@@watyhu99Sulla seems to support this idea. I'm pretty sure one of the logs you find in watchpoint refers to him as "the aging mercenary" and yet his voice sounds very young despite being a first generation augmented human.
Walther lets you have you free will. The choice is yours to follow or to betray him. On my first playthrough I choose to follow.
Same. It felt wrong anyways to be saved by Carla just to assassinate her
@@ThatsOk83 yeah i bet it also felt great to commit mass genocide because a friend of your slave master saved you one time. People can love or hate whatever ending they want. but its concerning how much handwaving and excuse making people make for each of them. carla didn't save you out of kindness. she saved you because without you her and walter will fail.
@@ThatsOk83I just wanted confirmation on my theory about chatty
AM I the only one who chose only based on which mission give the most money?
@ThatsOk83 this is exactly why I chose the Fires of Raven ending. Even tho I regretted it after since it feels like the worst ending
me and my man Walter went all the way. there are not bad endings, only tough decisions.
preach
Doing the bad ending in my first playthrough made my heart heavy bro. The guilt was real when I made my choice and a precious friend left
😔
SAY IT LOUDER FOR THE LIBERATION FANS AT THE BACK
Ayre enjoyers are an exception cuz they do it for her, like how Walter's hounds do it for him.
@MasterMinecrafterPro not bad ending what 💀
@@eviethewinterwitch8370 That's the thing though. It IS a bad ending. You kill Rubicon in that ending. You cause the extinction of a sentient species, kill every human on the planet (very, very likely including yourself btw) and leave a planet as a barren, dead wasteland. Where is the good part exactly? I'm not seeing any sunshine and rainbows there. But you have to make the choice based on what you think is right, and that includes who you trust and believe in. You don't have a solution where both Walter and Ayre are happy. But following walter benefits nobody in the end. Not the Rubiconians of the liberation front, not the Coral, not the corporations, and not humanity in general. Its a lose-lose scenario. I can't figure out how anyone can look and say that its not a bad ending when literally everyone dies.
@@raeishimura Humanity as a whole does benefit though. Without Rubicon there will be no more coral disasters in the future and you are basically preventing the fires of Ibis/Raven from ever happening again
i actually chose to side with the liberation front on my first ending and man, the way Walter fights the programming ''look at you 621....you found a friend'' and letting you go, it just...it hit hard man.
Amazing video. This was a great watch. But there is something I'd like to add to the discussion here.
I believe the "Collapse" and the "Fires of Ibis/Raven" are actually referring to two different phenomenon.
In the ALLMIND ending we see that all the Coral gathered in the Siphon condenses and turn into a black hole. Interestingly the phenomenon by which black holes are theorized to form is called a "gravitational collapse". In one of Professor Nagai's logs it is mentioned that high densities of Coral could be what triggers "a collapse", which isn't dissimilar to how high densities of mass can cause a gravitational collapse in real life.
So then what is The Fires of Ibis?
Well if we attention to the story Walter tells us he says "But there was another scientist. He took the sins of his colleague and set it all ablaze". If we assume that Walter is talking about Professor Nagai here then that means it was Nagai that triggered the Fires of Ibis to possibly prevent a collapse from happening and wiping out all of the Coral in the process. There is also supported by the fact that later on Walter mentions "The Fires of Ibis should have wiped the Coral out- but it survived" and that "the Coral must be burned" insinuating that Walter is trying to finish what Dr.Nagai failed to do i.e wipe out all the remaining traces of Coral.
As for my final piece of evidence on why I think Professor Nagai is the one who caused the Fires of Ibis, lets first examine the phrase "Fires of Raven". Taken in the most literal sense it means "the fires cause by Raven". By that same logic "Fires of Ibis" should mean "the fires cause by Ibis".
Now lets look at Professor Nagai's Log (4). This final line says:
"We still have time. Deploy Ibis!"
Yeah, I felt the fires that burned the stars were caused by Ibis to prevent Coral Release, which they called Collapse.
Yeah all of this was already explained
@@REAPER3fitty Not in this video.
Walter is my favorite character in the story too, hands down.
And during NG+ when I did the "Liberator of Rubicon" ending, his voicelines during the fight made me fucking cry. Because even in confusion, he not only mentionned the end of his mission, but also us, how we would take all the credits, how we would be able to undo the surgery, be normal again and basically realize what he told us the beginning of the game. Buying ourself a new life.
My first ending was Liberator of Rubicon, Second just finished The Fires of Raven. Just realised Walter was a hero in both of them. He followed his duty and gave Raven the space to make his own decisions. In the Liberator ending he puts down is weapon and accepts what has come to pass. In the Fires ending he passed on the responsibility to Raven. A great Character to come across. RIP Walter
Look at you 621 you found a friend
I've been broken after this ending😢
I hope rusty is also somehow alive and we will see him in the next AC game
@muramasa870 I think the "friend" is reference to Ayre but real ones know rusty is the only buddy we need
@@muramasa870 he was the first to answer our call he was our bro from beginning to end i really hope fromsoft carry his legacy forward to future armoured core games
It really annoys me how much people downplay the story of this game. I haven't been this invested in a FromSoft game's lore since Dark Souls 1.
Just enjoy what makes you happy.
Pay no attention to the noise.
Personally, I think burning the coral is a good thing.
There are so many parallels between this game and Evangelion. The Fires of Ibis make me think of Second Impact, an apocalyptic, world altering event caused by humans experimenting with an alien power they did not fully understand. The fusion of man and machine as a result of those experiments. The coral containing the minds of the Rubiconians coalescing together, similar to Human Instrumentality turning all humans into a single ocean of shared consciousness. It's definitely not a stretch to assume it was a major influence.
Altho it’s implied that those with still a body got to keep them and people became like 621 all mind likely wanted to assimilate them all since she speaks about the flaws of humanity wanting likely to form a hivemind u could call it an ALL MIND
Interesting.
I did wanna check out Eveangelion at some point.
@@TheManOfMyriad I’m sure I can’t tell you anything about it you haven’t already heard. It gets dark, it gets weird, but it’s fantastic and once you watch it you’ll notice it’s influence everywhere in Japanese media.
@@TheManOfMyriad I'm not a fan of Evangelion, but its impact on Japanese culture can't be denied. It's their Star Wars equivalent imo.
@@Existential_Robot I always thought of Space Battleship Yamato as the equivalent. Quite interesting!
I love how similar the fires of Raven is to keeping the flame alive in the souls games.
The idea that the world is sacrificing so much over and over again to prevent change is such a tragic theme.
And I’m not sure what the right answer is anymore.
Does there need to be a right answer? If we sit aside, stumbling over the choices laid out because we're anxious over right or wrong, we'll get nowhere. As Carla says, "Sitting on the fence, without making a choice, you'll make no enemies.... or friends."
This game and characters do a great job of respecting the player's choices, even if said choices put the player at odds with them.
Find your purpose, make your choice, follow it through with conviction, and remember those who fell along the way, ally and enemy. For when you cross the Rubicon, there is no turning back.
@@NobleLeader6 thank you man, this was so beautifully said.
Looking at it this way I think the coral release is what I want to fight for. I believe that ending frame in the water is 621 and everyone we’ve met along the way reawakening on a new planet under blue skies. No more fires….
@NobleLeader6 you said this perfectly. I keep people saying liberator is the good ending and fire raven is the bad ending. Others say liberator is the bad ending.
I don't think it's that simple. Each route isn't a guaranteed solution. Don't worry about whether it's the good outcome.just do what you think is right?
Secret ending aside. I picked liberator and stand by that choice after knowing both endings. If there's no guarantee burning Rubicon again will stop the Coral than I'd rather risk a second collapse sooner than resort to Genocide.
AC games are always shades of dark grey. There's no white/shades of light grey ending.
These games assert that humans will never be truly good, nor will we ever be the heroes we write.
Walters final message, before the trash-mech escape 100% sounded like he wants us to link the First Flame
Walter ended up being my favorite character in the story, despite how much I love Rusty, and that's kinda because he has a lot of nuance and while he comes off as cold-hearted at first, it's quite the opposite. Walter is very much a prisoner himself just like us, and he clearly cares very deeply about 621, to a degree that could be considered unprofessional. He's very much human while also carrying the sins of so many and going down a road he's very clearly not thrilled about, while also remaining close-minded, thus resulting in the events of the bad ending. It's honestly heartbreaking having to fight him in the good ending, much like how it's heartbreaking fighting Rusty in the bad, and Carla and Chatty in the good ending. I understand why Walter and Carla think getting rid of all the coral is a good idea, but when we see what happens, clearly it was not the best idea and probably did more harm than good. There's not really a black and white in this game, but that's how Walter sees the world, which makes it all the more heartbreaking when we have to fight him. It's interesting because the same can also be said for Rusty, so no matter if you choose the good ending, or bad ending (before unlocking the true ending), you will have to kill your friends. I just love how AC6 has characters completely different from what we've been used to from From Software this last decade.
I have memories of me and my dad before passed sitting on the couch and messing around on the older cores just building monstrosities of mechs and in a weird way walter took on a fatherly role it broke my heart when he put the rifle down in the good ending accepting 621 for finding his freedom and a friend
Man I’ve seen people call fires of raven the “bad ending” cause idk people like black and white. But idk I don’t see it that way I really liked it. I saw it as a kinda beautiful Completing of walters legacy (especially more meaningful after seeing how arquebes re educated him, he still cares about 621 telling us to reverse the surgery and be normal and all) and because the coral was dangerous and unchecked in his eyes, he did what he thought was right. I think all the endings are some kind of grey, no black and white in fromsoft
I’m like hesitant to S rank all the missions, I’ll have nothing left to complete and I love this game
There’s always PvP
@@willysmithereensthe pvp is fucking garbage in this game bro, dont subject anyone to that trash
Go through the game with different builds, just like any souls game.
@@kevo300 > souls game
lol
pvp or speed run builds.
I’ve been waiting for someone to do a lore video after finishing all of the game, thank you brother 😭
Edit: one thing to bring up: coral could have anti-aging effects, which could explain why Carla doesn’t sound very old
That’s my theory as well. Wish we had a bit more to go on in that regard. There’s also the possibility of AI that we see her use with Chatty
@@Ziostorm that’s very true, I hadn’t thought of that!
@@Ziostorm Mr. Zio, do we get a video with face/arm cam soon? 👉👈
@Ziostorm I'm wondering if any form of suspended animation exists to could also explain her lack of aging
I think Carla is old like cyberpunk granny who looks old but young mechanic something like that
I could only imagine Walter being 50-70 years old, and Carla, a young assistant, being 70-80 years old. If she had some coral augmentation experiment done to half her aging, she may only be 45-55. Kind of at the edge of the tonality of her voice. Or they just didn’t like the idea of making her sound old all the time and went with a mid adult voice actor anyways. Maybe in the DLC, there’ll be a way to save Walter, Carla, Rusty, and Chatty.
There will be a dlc?
Such a great cast of characters. The voice actors did such an amazing job considering all we have are voice lines.
let’s gooo, been waiting for ac6 lore videos
I already got the Liberate Rubicon ending, and now I want to do the Fires of Raven ending. Only problem being I really don’t want to have to fight Ayre and Rusty. I’d be killing the only two friends I found on Rubicon.
Ayre is also a tough ass boss fight. Not as ridiculous as the Ibis Series drone thank God, but she will rinse your asshole a good couple times.
Least u don’t need to kill ur mates in the final ending tho
@@robertsteiner4696I think she is harder than Ilbis, bc Ilbis is squishy af. With the right build she folds pretty fast. Ayre is pretty tanky due to her shield, also, even faster than Ilbis.
Honestly I felt more bad betraying Walter and Carla by the end Walter while cold and distant did seem to care and respect 621 Carla went out of her way to save us even though she doesn't like fighting for me it was am easy choice rusty would have killed us in a earlier mission if we let him, and Ayer is naive to think humans will ever stop wanting the coral eve if they knew it was alive I mean look what we do to others humans while liking both I prefer the "bad" ending
You have to kill two friends either way, it's either Carla and Chatty or Ayre and Rusty ... quite sad but necessary.
Imo this game has the best lore since dark souls 1. Really great stuff.
Fr imo it makes such a difference having the guys your fighting talk directly to you, and have genuine reasons for wanting to kill you
genuinely asking, you didn't find the lore opaque and vague? The bulk of the events in the game are not clearly explained in any way. Coral is never explained, is it alive or is it fuel? both? There's the one log that says it's an organic self-replicating molecule, but that same log says very clearly that Coral is insanely dangerous and poses a threat to all of humanity, yet everyone other than Walter & Carla seems to ignore this? Allmind isn't explained; why does a human merc AI want to kill humanity? why does it want to release the coral? was it hijacked by the coral? Then the 'potential' of Humanity and Coral together is mentioned several times, mostly by Ayre but never explains what she means by that. Not sure what sort of future she sees between humans and sentinent gasoline. For that matter, Ayre isn't even explained; is she a human survivor of the Fire that got absorbed by the Coral or is she a Coral being? I found the lore in this game to be frustratingly difficult to parse together with lots of loose threads and dead ends and I'm not sure if this was done intentionally as a design choice or if something was just lost in translation, but it really detracted from the overall experience constantly going "wait what now?" every time you uncover some new layer of what the RRI was up to.
whole reason i even ended up on this video is trying to find some clues or consensus on what the heck is actually happening in this game. and how the allmind is considered the 'true' end, since it seems by far to be the worst possible ending.
@@AldousBrave It is alive, it can be used as fuel, it connect with humans and absorb their conscience among many other things.
It is dangerous and others either don't see it or are too greedy to be stopped.
Allmind is a single minded ai. It was created with the single purpose of supporting mercenaries and increase their success rate in missions. As you play through the game Allmind realizes that the best way to increase human performance is by connecting them with coral. That is why it wants to release the coral into the universe.
Ayre wants other humans to connect with the coral like she was connected with you. I think the difference between her goals and Allmind is that Allmind doesn't give a shit about anything else. As I said: A single minded AI.
@@AldousBrave from what I understood, heavy spoilers ahead.
Some scientists saw the growth of coral as catastrophic, who knows what it would happen, even using coral to augment humans was seen as anti ethical. The other scientists saw the potential of human evolution, technological or something else.
In Fires of Raven ending, you side with Walter and Carla, to get rid of the coral and save the universe, even at the cost of a planet and all of its residents.
On the Liberator of Rubicon ending, you take no one's side actually, you just avoid the coral from being destroyed (either permanently or temporarily, we know the fires of Ibis did nothing, what guarantees that the fires of Raven did?), In this ending you just keep the status quo.
On the true ending, the latin phrase means "the die is cast", one proverb meaning that the point of no return was reached, like another proverb "cross the Rubicon river" (the planet is called Rubicon 3, in Japanese the word river is very similar to the Roman numeral for 3, III, so you can see the parallels), in this ending you take the side of allmind, an Ai whose purpose is to do what no one was willing to propel humanity to evolution, all that allmind did the whole game was gather data to help mercenaries to be better with their ACs, to evolve, she ended wanting to evolve humanity as a whole with the potential of coral, she played the chess game and got rid of paws who got in the way, backing them up to her database (see Iguazu's fight, and Walter/Carla's exclaiming about dead people appearing again), in the end she doesn't believe that you nor Ayre would go along all the way, so she decided to get you both dead to her database and force your digital copy to finish the deed, but it was unnecessary, the coral managed to get enough mass through its own attraction and reproduction that it reached singularity and permeated the universe with its own version of Hawking's radiation, now the whole universe is filled with coral.
As for what coral is, it's pretty much Dune's spice. Coral has some sort of propriety of taking the consciousness of people, giving form to the soul, now AC is basically Ghost in the Shell.
@@AldousBrave Coral is very much explained as both an energy source and an alive stream of consciousness that can assimilate more minds. It is dangerous because as it is mentioned throughout the game, people augamented with Coral have severe mental problems caused by it. The collapse Walter and Cinder keep talking about is the ‘true’ ending, which is never stated as the true ending. Instead, its Latin translation is ‘a roll of the dice’, which is what it is. Humanity sacrificing something with the chance to become something greater, via symbiosis. Allmind wants to achieve this is at is the perfect way to create a complete synthesis between man and mech, which is what it’s trying to do through arena and analysis testing.
My fav tidbit about walter is during the swinburn mission if you say you are gonna spare him then shoot him in the back killing him she ask "if you learned that from Walter" he was called the Infamous handler lol
This happened to me first playthrough cause I changed my mind and thought it was cool
Every playthrough had something new regularly and really kept things fresh. I dumped 100 hours into it already. 10/10
Idk why but this game just gives me older halo vibes and i love it. Badass augmented supersoldier/mech pilot with a a.i/ coral gf rooting you on as you destroy everything you come across. And all the badass one liners. Everything about this game is just cool.
same bro
I would personally say that even though the Libration ending you see him end up as he is. I doubt it didn't happen to him in the Fire of Raven ending, so personally I think the Libration ending is best for Walter cause he sees 621 having a purpose and fighting for it before he passes.
Not the mention preventing him from becoming a corporate slave and leaving his last decision to his free will. I'm sure he loved dueling with 621 seeing how he grew since landing on Rubicon.
Walter’s cane doesn’t necessarily mean he’s very old. It could also mean that he had a leg injury resulting in a limp. While the Jovian war would be a good cause of that, medical technology surely must have advanced enough to prevent such a scar from forming. What are those corpos doing that would make them so careless? Oh yeah, hoarding wealth, charging far too much for services that should be basic rights, and halfassing it anyway in order to not touch the pile of shinies. We live in a society.
Walter the whole game: "It's gonna blow 621! Get out of there!"
God its good to sit back and watch everyone get interested. Its been like 11 years and Hawkin was no substitute.
So a few things i wanna comment: the video conflates coral collapse and the fires of ibis quite a bit.
Coral is extremely energy dense, the ibis protocol was just setting it on fire and letting it blow.
Coral COLLAPSE is a theoretical event that has not actually happened until ending three. The idea is that because coral super attracts itself, once it reaches a certain mass, it will congeal into a super-singularity, annihilating everything through infinite mass
Fromsoftware forever has my full confidence in any project they’re working on, those mfs just don’t miss. Fastest I’ve ever 100% a game. The slight changes in ng+ cycles were also super cool. I genuinely wasn’t expecting the twist of the final ending.
I randomly landed on your channel looking for AC6 Lore after getting both endings. I love how you explained and the content of your channel, it's an extra to know that you are a metroid fan
There is so much lore in this game. Thank you for putting this part together. Great video.
"Look at you 621. You found a friend" man that line choked me up
The lore in this game is really underrated and fascinating. Please do more of these! Thanks!
Just finished my second playthrouhj, and found Walter to be a very tragic figure. Someone who seemed cold and uncaring at first, only to become 621's biggest advocate in the end.
Fantastic writing from FROM here, some of their best.
As much as i love me an ai waifu, it really hurt me on my second playthrough to get the liberator of rubicon ending for him to say we finally found a friend.
My brother in Coral, you were always my friend.
"Let the last cinders burn" seemed a but subliminal when walter said that. Thought if could just be an expression with relighting the fire.
I thought Walter was bad news at the start.
Then he tells Carla, 621 is the one doing the missions, and that 621 knows what’s the best course of action. Even though he has these ulterior motives, he has utter faith in us. One of Fromsoft’s best characters.
P.S. I think he hand selected the Hounds (hence Handler/handling and hand picking), because he saw something in them and thought they deserved another chance at life/freedom. His plan to burn the Coral was misguided...and then when we fight, he realizes that we are fighting for our friends dreams as well, for Ayre’s sake. And makes his peace.
(The Allmind ending is another extinction event, humanities extinction.)
I think Walter is not the boy, he is the other assistance, the one who too focused on his work that he forgot his family. until he lost everything from the fire. only then that he woke up, and vowed to finished his friend work, to burn the coral for good. the coral that take everything from him.
I finished and understood the story on the 29th, but I've been wanting to watch/hear someone else's perspective. Thank you for this!
The second ending is my favourite cause it’s helping rubican and I love helping my buddy rusty.
Handler Walter reminds me of the SCP organization, with a dedication to normalcy and being afraid of change.
So incredibly hype to hear the Metroid prime music in your videos,what an incredible game, what an incredible soundtrack, thank you 👏
One thing I don't like about how Walter's fate ended in Fires of Raven & Alea Jacta Est ending is that we didn't get to see him dying ON SCREEN
I need audio, I need physical evidence, anything to confirm what happenned
I need his death to inflict even more pain on me
Amazing video as always. keep it up bro
I love the face you're using Metroid Prime 1 and 2 soundtracks as your bgm
since Carla also pilot an AC, I believe she at some point undergo the augmented operation herself, maybe one effect that it does is prolonged her lifespan, maybe Walther too, but done it much later than Carla
it is said that VI King is unique because unlike the others, he's just a normal human that likes to pilot his AC, from this fact we could probably drawn conclusion that most AC pilot are augmented humans
Some pilots are just that badass,it is interesting some actually just normal human but looks like in this ac universe life extending technologies is common thing, Michigan would be at least at his 70s if he was already ace pilot back then.
vesper number was correct but the pilot wasn't king it was Frued. And yes most ac pilots are augmented but Freud isn't the evidence of that. Rather the fact that you can read all the other pilots and see that they are all augmented. Frued is a clear anomaly and seems to be a type of joke. Even a general mech genre reference as he is surrounded by mutated freaks but is better then everyone out of sheer will to be the best. A combat junkie who took it so far he surpassed monsters. He did end up becoming a type of monster in the end. Hes a bit crazy
Please more armored lore, id watch it all, you are wellspoken and do your research. Many thanks 🙏
Something worthy of note since I've seen tons miss it. Coral collapse and the fires of ibis are separate. The fires of ibis were a deliberate act triggered by the institute in order to prevent the collapse. The collapse never happened and is purely theoretical. So what's funny is that Walter and overseer want to cause a second fire to continues to prevent this collapse they cant know for sure will ever happen but use the tragedy of the fires of ibis as an appeal to humanity. "look at the destruction is caused, we need to destroy it" despite that destruction being man made. Allmind actually calculates using all of the data it collected from the corps and the institute that in fact the institute misinterpreted the data completely and the collapse will never happen. Instead the black hole that would be created would itself collapse and scatter the coral across the universe. Allmind would rename it "Coral Release". This was then proven true in the final ending. Meaning that sadly, Walter and overseer were slaves to a legacy born of the fear of the unknown and nothing more.
What's your theory about the True Ending? Hearing Ayre say "Activating Combat Mode" left me feeling like there's room for a potential dlc.
Like why did she say that? Are the Coral lifeforms planning an invasion of some kind?
more like robots that aroundt you arent friendly so you had fight you way out of that place
@@mahamuud99 The wrecked ACs weren't looking at 621 though so that's not the case. It's likely that Ayre just said that for old times sake cause that's what the AC's AI says when you start a mission.
Probably gonna be more arena ranks, more parts, and pvp expansion.
If Fromsoftware still follow how the release armored core titles from before, they would release a direct sequel or at least an expansion
i have 2 theories, 1 the Coral developed into individuals and start foghting against humanity, in a nod of how conflict made human grow and evolve, 2 Coral joins humanity and both keep on fighting together, essentialy a simbiosis, again going back to the concept of conflixt brings evolution.
Great video, but I think you must have confused the Collapse with the Overseer and the Fires of Ibis.
What Overseer is doing is PREVENT a Coral Collapse, not make it happen. They plan to trigger a second Fire to prevent it, because the Coral is getting out of control once again.
Based on the Professor Nagai Log #1, what she meant by "Collapse" is that the Coral would expand and mutate beyond control that it would wipe out humanity. As such the Institute developed the Ibis weapons to prevent said Collapse, as they are powered by Coral and thus they are able to both consume and weaponize the substance. However, the power of the Ibis Series were not enough, and so the Institute set off the Fires of Ibis to burn all the Coral. Unfortunately this did not wipe out all of the Coral, leading to the events of the game.
AWESOME VIDEO! Keep doing what you do.
I feel like the adoration so many of us have for Handler Walter is rooted in the archetypes of our own fathers: gruff, often detached or antisocial in ways that we ourselves try to avoid, and characterized by stern admonishment, yet also fiercely protective, encouraging, and wise, with the stipulation that--in moments of great emotional strain--we see the truest version of them and bear witness to their pride.
TLDR: Handler Walter gave me father issues.
To me, Walter is assistant #1. It works better with his knowledge and goals and relations, rather than him being the son.
There's enough ambiguity that either is possible. I actually came to that interpretation through a bit of a different path. I figured between being sent to Jupiter (where Michigan is), being a Gen 4, just like Iguazu, and Walter's line about Rusty seeming to know who 621 really is, I came to suspect that 621 is the son.
It adds an extra layers to a couple of bits of dialogue. In particular, Carla saying "I guess a dog can't choose his master, but still, tough luck. I feel sorry for you, I really do." That statement in particular could be as much about Assistant #1 as a father as it is about Walter's actions as a handler.
@ackbar3125 It's been a long while since I played the game, but I agree with you. Also remember the guy you fight before balteus? He was around since before the fires of rubicon and he and Walter are familiar with each other.
Another thing I didn't see people mention, and maybe I'm reaching here, is when you kill V.VII after you agree to stop fighting, Ayre asks where did you learn that (I think she asks if it's from Walter), and in Nagai' log he talks about C-Pulse research on humans wouldn't be done by any ethical scholar. So I thought maybe there is a connection here.
@@Al-silmi The guy you fight at the Watch Point was Sulla, who probably worked for Walter before.
Regarding the V.VII mission, I don't think that is a strong enough point in favor of Walter being Assistant #1. His mission essentially forces him to be ruthless and underhanded.
Very well done video. I appreciate having all the lore scraps brought together in a coherent package.
God I absolutely love the story of this game, I’m hoping we could possibly get a Lore video on Iguazu at some point.
Great breakdown. I was putting this together for myself, but this tied up all the loose ends. Got to love that obtuse Japanese story-telling.
I like to think that the game doesn't have 3 endings but there's a time loop that allmind or coral created in order to achieve the secret ending.
Personally, I think the first two playthroughs are potentially simulations created by Allmind
That would definitely be interesting. One thing to consider from the perspective is how you have don't get to choice when you enter ng+ The moment one playthrough ends you're immediately thrown into a new one with not option to hold off like in the souls games.
Subbed for using my fav Mech Soundbit during outro. Metroid Prime is the Goat
Thank you for more Armored Core content Ziostorm!
regarding 12:42 Walter was subjected to human augmentation. It is a requirement to pilot AC machines, and especially the Ibis series. That's why he can feel Ayre's presence, and as to why he is so confused... well, he was likely also subjected to V.II Snail's re-education program.
Loving the Aldnoah reference on your mech. The orange mech.
When you go to fight Carla in the liberation of rubicon ending, you get the chance to fight v.II snail. During the fight he says that we (621) are resiliant, unlike walter who broke easily.
“ you found a friend “ I could be a little off on my quote, but that shit made me cry - I knew Walter was gonna be a baddie but he was so much more than that
V4: buddy
IBIS in Armored Core Silent Line: Just another controller.
IBIS in AC6:
I do really love how the endings arnt so cut and dry as you might expect. Theres alot of nuance that plays into each outcome. As messed up as it sounds id have to agree with the fires of raven ending, coral did advance humanity alot but it brought alot of suffering with it. The augmentation surguries alone seem pretty gruesome as well as the plethora of weapons being made with coral, all of which being strong but not strong enough to end conflict, just make it more brutal.
Then again the coral is starting to become sentient, the way ayre puts it all the coral is alive but i dont believe it gained its own sentience all at once, ayre was an outlier, atleast until coral release potentially made all the coral sentient. Its a really interesting moral dilemma.
About Carla's voice - Human PLUS, so basically human augmentation, can result in youth extension and otherwise slow down aging in the game (Leos Klein from AC2 was around 90 while his body was biologically equal to 40-ish) and judging from the fact Rubiconians managed to augment Rusty before him joining the Vespers as a spy Carla could augment herself in order to be able to stand guard longer as she remained on Rubicon to keep an eye on things.
9:58 this dialogue is probably my favourite from the game and the reason I love the fires of raven ending so much,had chills the entire time
There is a log that is hidden in the mission vs brute. On top of one of the towers there is a log going over cinder Carla's age and how crazy brute is
I was in the camp that the story was too complex without much explanation. Now I'm completely absorbed by the details and logs of AC6.
Great insight and supporting material here. I'm very much a fan of the story now.
Unlike Souls games this story is actually more straightforward and explained well in-game .. it's not as obtuse as Elden Ring for example specially when it comes to the backstory of what led to the events in the game, it's all detailed in the logs.
Maybe Carla's "youth" is due to augmentation? Considering the researchers were also delving into augmenting with coral.
Or she built an android of sorts (she seems smart enough to do so like she created her AI friend) and used coral to transfer her consciousness?
2:15 I don’t know if you’re going to mention it later, just getting to some of these vids now, but I’ve thought that Assistant No 1 isn’t Walter; that’s his father. With the direct mention of Assistant No 1’s son being taken in by Carla, it would make a lot more sense why Walter and Carla know each other so well. I think his father had to be the person to first experiment with human augmentation, and Walter grew up in that world where he saw how ugly it can get when Coral is inevitably misused by humans; like his father. This would give him even more determination to follow through with what RII wanted to do: burn it all down. Walter may feel indirectly guilty for all the deaths caused by human augmentation and Coral wars, even though it was his father who started it. Especially with the conversation at 4:15, it really seems like he’s talking about his POS dad then instead celebrates Dr Nagai. I think the easiest way to explain the seeming age difference is Coral experimentation to extend their lives to make sure they’d be alive to burn the Coral if they needed to. I’m guessing Carla is over 100, and Walter is therefore at least 75.
Not to mention that Coral is almost assuredly dead Rubiconian souls. Like… Ayre almost says it outright with some of her weird comments calling herself a Rubiconian but also calling the Coral her family. And how no one knew she was “still there” (a sentient being) for “a long time” - Coral has to be an analogy for souls too
In older gen armored core games enhanced/augmented humans don't age like normal humans. Leos Klein in the Armored Core 2 japanese guide book is mentioned to look 40 despite being around 90 years old.
I was thinking its funny that we never see anyones face, just their tags and ACs. But in the real end everybody became ACs.
There’s a log you can find in an earlier mission where Arquebus is exploring integrating a human mind into an AC, so that it can remain without a pilot but still have the performance of a human-driven AC. In that log, they mention the “re-education” of test subjects, particularly skilled pilots from enemy forces.
And in the sewers you awake in after Arquebus betray you, you can find a log describing corporate forces testing one of these mind-integrated mechs and being disappointed by the results, claiming un-piloted ACs will never beat a human-piloted AC.
In the cutscene after the betrayal, it also mentions how Arquebus got their hands on the final Ibis-series AC, the Hal model that Walter attacks us with in the end.
And of course, as you escape, the operator mentions how both you and Walter were going to be re-educated.
I think all of this is meant to imply that when Walter finally attacks you at the end of the liberation ending, by that point Arquebus have done their worst to him, integrating his mind into this mech, leaving him in the almost “zombified” state that we see him in. And Arquebus have sent him after us in a last ditch effort to keep their power in Rubicon before it falls to the liberation, which is why the remnants of Walter clearly shows regret in attacking us.
I had some major suspicions the moment we saw his conversations with Carla. Which were exacerbated when we got to Institute City and he said "The Vascular plant... ... its still here"
My first playthrough I went with the liberator ending. Killing the coral is genocide. I felt bad going against Ayre on my second playthrough.
I did like Walter towards the end, but it felt like my character was being tricked into commiting genocide. Especially if Walter knew of it's sentience.
My mind was pretty much made up right away, I didn't want my character to cause a genocide and extinction. Also the fact I was referred to as a hound the whole time, and Carla referring to my character as a card left by Walter, made turning on Carla much easier. I didn't want to be used as a pawn to kill off a whole species. Plus I like Ayre.
Siding with Ayre, also felt like a character arc for the player. They were making their own decision and disobeying orders and thinking for theirself.
Mainly though, it was genocide thing.
First time viewing one of your videos. Great work! Also that metroid theme at the end really hit my nostalgia, I really want to replay prime but at the same time I can't right now.
It's mention in a few scenes post mission, that Walter tells you to gets some rest during down time like a coach after an intense session.
Just wanna say i love your lore breakdowns dude, keep up the good work Walter…i mean ziostorm
thanks for explaining it so easy, i had a hard time with understanding the story ^^
Some critique (mostly matching the flow of the video):
There's a couple questionable bits to the analysis, one of which is the visual implication early on that coral's explosive properties are consequential to coral mutations. Which is attached to the unsubstantiated fears of coral collapse.
But we know what the mutations are, as Ayre is directly called "wave form mutation Ayre" by Allmind. Whether these mutations could have happened without human interaction would be an interesting question, as its not impossible that the mutations are reactions to human consciousness being scattered into the coral flow as a consequence of fatal failures in coral augmentation experiments. For being an entirely separate species and presumably in an isolated environment, Ayre is peculiarly knowledgeable of human culture and compassionate to human beings.
Whether unnamed figures in the institute realized the truth about the mutations is unknown. Those that survived augmentation reported hearing voices, and considering what we now know to be true, those voices were from flow mutations communicating to them. It's entirely possible that some researchers had suspicions regarding the so-called mental instability, but they too would probably be viewed as insane. By that logic, it'd be interesting if Walter's father came to that belief but through a trauma-induced madness inspired by thinking that his wife could be recovered from a coral mutation. In a spiritual, but also incorrect, sense.
Also, Ayre was locked away under the watchpoint, as implied by Sulla (and by extension, Allmind) and his seeming mission to go make contact with her (him being coral augmented, Allmind's current catalyst of choice, him telling us not mess with what's below, and where we make contact with Ayre at least suggests that him making contact was the goal). Though that alone could be coincidental, the possibility that a wave form mutation was put in a secure place prior to the Fires of Ibis isn't impossible.
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The statement "regardless of the Ibis series, the fires began to burn" is just flat out wrong. Someone, presumably Nagai, specifically used an Ibis series to *start* the Fires, hence why that instance was called the Fires of Ibis, out of fear of the nebulous "coral collapse." Nagai's a nutty guy with a messiah complex. His perception is based on a *wild* misunderstanding of what coral mutations were and would result in.
When Walter talks about the hidden dangers of the coral, he's mostly parroting Professor Nagai's fears of mutation and 'collapse', or rather, using it as an excuse rationale for the trauma that he carries from his mother's death and father's madness. When he says "you know what hidden dangers lurk within the coral," he's seemingly speaking of the 'voices' that experimental subjects spoke of. But because of his traumatic experiences tangent to Coral experiments, experiments done by humans, he's assigned the faults to Coral itself.
It is interesting to note that Walter seems to specifically use pilots who survived coral augmentation. You could interpret some trauma-induced sense of responsibility for the victims of experimentation, sure. But knowing that Walter is sending his pilots to Rubicon 3 in order to start another Fire, it's pretty clear he's picking pilots to send on a suicide mission, which creates an interpretation that he's using expendable pilots, that is, pilots that could be interpreted as functionally dead because of the horrendous side effects of their augmentation. He feeds you an *extremely* lacking story about his past to sort of cope with him starting to, as a generous interpretation, perceive 621 as an actual person instead of a useful brain-in-a-jar.
Walter actually *could have* begun to see the problems with his understanding of the Coral when the Ibis unit, Cel 240, was trying to protect the coral in the vascular plant. But, in all likelihood, with his perceptions skewed as they are, even if it's an understandable skew, he probably would have seen that as a justification along the lines of "see? The coral mutations result in them taking control of c-weapons, just like with the Ice Worm. They must be destroyed." Which of course misses that both the Cel 240 unit and the Ice Worm were focusing on defending the Coral specifically, and not attacking humans.
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With regards to the last segment, it's pretty apparent that Arquebus subjected Walter to coral augmentation in order to use him to pilot their Ibis series mech. The augmentation is probably safer, insofar as having a lower fatality rate, because Arquebus has been constantly polishing augmentation surgery techniques. It's entirely likely that they could use knowledge gleaned from coral substitution augmentation to create a less fatal procedure, especially since they kinda needed pilot for an Ibis series mech *now*. Of course, it could also be that Walter just 'lucked out' and survived.
The basis being that Arquebus would absolutely do that, Walter now being able to perceive the coral and hear the voices of flow mutations, and there may well be a requirement for coral augmentation to use ibis-type tech.
it's extremely unlikely that Walter knew of the sentience of the coral, let alone the sapience of flow mutations, considering he seemed surprised to hear Ayre's voice. Also the conversations between Walter and Carla in private would suggest they both just believed the voices to be a tragic consequence of coral augmentation on the human psyche.
Separately, an interesting aside for the track that plays during his fight is that it's a remix of the track "Contact with you" that plays in the Balteus boss fight, right after you make contact with Ayre. Contact with you also plays at the start of the mission to eliminate carla.
Carla probably AI’d herself to see her goal through. Everyone says she seems too young to be a cinder.
“Working on the gun” might be a bunch of robotic arms controlled by the Carla AI.
The original cinematic trailer really did its best to imply Walter was some kind of cold, heartless asshole, and that we'd be his slave. Talk about a bait and switch. He had 621's back to the very end.
Why is everyone so hung up on this “half a century” thing? 50 years isn’t gonna kill everyone.
Let’s say Walter was 15 and Carla was 30 in the STK sketch, then Walter is now 65 and Carla is 80. 100% believable…… you can even add decades to their age and it would still be believable, especially in a sci-fi based in the future….
I think the Carla has found a way to use Coral to extend her life beyond the normal bounds of human being. Also if we look at the fact her crew is a bunch of coral addicted junkies, I'm sure she had plenty of willing test subjects perfect it