I've been playing the first Armored Core game on the PS1 and I wasn't ready for how immediately it comes out of the gate with its themes. It doesn't even for a second let you think it's just a fun mech game. You're immediately thrown into hell. The game's killer-for-hire structure is still shockingly edgy, even to this day.
The game opens by asking the player to choose between two missions:
Cross a picket line and murder a group of striking workers to 'teach them the rules of society'.
Kill squatters in a ruined factory so that the factory can be demolished for a luxury land development.
So you pick one, complete it, come out a couple thousand future-dollars richer and feeling a little bit filthier than you did before, only to discover that to progress the game you now have to do the other one. But it's a little easier now... the second crime against humanity isn't quite as difficult as the first; and anyway, it's just a job.
Immediately, the game makes it explicit that you have no agency—all choices are illusory. Even in your 30 foot tall mech, you're still just a slave. You can never get ahead, you will never be able to retire. You will be paid the bare minimum, used until you die, and then you will be replaced.
To reinforce this, every time you complete a mission, the payment you receive takes a serious hit from any damage you took during the mission (which needs to be repaired) and any ammo you used to take out the 'enemies' (which needs to be replaced). You're always riding a razor's edge, only ever making enough money to buy slightly better equipment—which only allows you to stave off the poverty resulting from the higher engagement costs of the later (more dangerous) missions.
You can even start to fall into debt if you fail a mission, are too reckless with your ammo, or take too much damage—and that debt can snowball, eventually becoming inescapable. Mandatory missions often end up being a net drain on your resources—essentially putting you in a position where you're paying your employers for the privilege of working for them.
It's a vicious critique, and it's crazy reading reviews from 1997 where games journalists mostly write-off Armored Core's story as a pointless/intrusive afterthought—despite every mission and every gameplay element being designed from the ground up to reinforce the game's narrative.
I'm only a couple hours in, and so far I've massacred civilians for being politically misaligned, been on both sides a corporate conflict, covered up a potential nuclear disaster, and gunned down homeless people hiding in the sewers. And almost all the action has taken place inside these huge Blame!-esque steel and concrete post-cyberpunk megastructures.
The game essentially uses capitalism as a sci-fi horror trope, without ever actually saying the C-word itself or even making overt political critiques/allegories. You're simply placed in the middle of a system taken to its logical extreme: suffer and draw your own conclusions.
Even the downtime between the missions plays into this. Mission Select takes place in a highly aesthetic virtual terminal where you customise your mech, track the bodycounts of other characters, and receive emails from corporate contracts, handlers, and other AC pilots.
