When you beat Armored Core VI, the credits roll, and then you immediately get the dialogue that follows the introductory mission in which you secure the ID of Raven. (They don't have you replay that mission).
For a while, things look the same. You're a newcomer independent merc working for one faction in one mission and then turning on them in the next. Admittedly, the context is clearer this time around - I know, for example, how Balam, Dafeng, and the Redguns are all part of one corporate faction and how Arquebus, Schneider, and the Vespers are part of the other.
But the missions are identical, and pretty easy with all the parts you've unlocked over the course of the game. While nothing's strictly better - I think they make every weapon and AC part with a certain "budget" - you certainly feel a lot more powerful when you can build an AC with dual miniguns and Stun Needles.
In the early part of my first playthrough, "Attack the Dam Complex" was a go-to credit-farming mission. If you just blow through it and take care of the mandatory objectives, it's an utter cakewalk, especially if you just skip past the RLF AC that tries to talk you out of the mission.
And in New Game Plus, it starts off identically.
And then Walter tells you he's getting a call from the RLF. That's new. They're offering to pay you double what Balam is paying you if you turn on the two ACs you've been sent with and take them out instead of destroying the dam.
You actually get the option to refuse this offer, but naturally you're going to take the new option. And with this, well, A: you get a checkpoint, and B: you get a very different mission. And what was a cakewalk becomes a quite challenging one, as the two former allied ACs now turn on you and team up.
Following that, I got a brand-new mission: I was sent to escort an RLF helicopter sending commandos on a prison break. You wind up rescuing two (trying for three, but one is dead by the time you get there) RLF officers, including Little Ziyi, who attacks you during the equivalent mission in the first playthrough.
So, clearly, the intention here is to do multiple playthroughs. You lose absolutely nothing by doing so - every mission you've completed previously is still available in Replay Missions, and you retain every part and OS Chip. Indeed, after several missions (maybe after I beat Balteus the second time, which... boy, if you use the Weapon Bay and swap between Pulse weapons and Shotguns and use a very speedy build, it's a pretty quick and easy fight) AllMind came to me with new Arena fights, which granted way more OS chips. At this point I think I have every weapon type maxed out (except perhaps melee).
The game is certainly not easy - the Coral-powered AC at the end of the penultimate chapter is really painful - but it's not terribly long. But these oddities extend the game's life significantly. There's a lot of replayability in this, which is something I've found a lot in FromSoft games (I've beaten Elden Ring on like six or seven characters).
There's no reason to make a new save file in Armored Core VI, given that doing so erases your existing one, but also, everything can be replayed. The only reason you might do so is if you make a decision between exclusive missions that you regret, but you're probably better off just playing through and doing the other decision on New Game +. I will say that I sort of wish I'd done the ruthless mercenary choices in my first playthrough so that I could do all the heroic options on this playthrough, but honestly, given the grittiness of this setting, there's no version of the story that lets you come out feeling good (I probably shouldn't feel bad for killing Cinder Carla, given how many times she committed perfidious surrender in the mission where I met her, but I kind of like the scrappy aesthetic of the RaD folks, again, even though we find out they're not quite the "anarchist junkers" that they seem to be at first.)
There's no real narrative justification for the changes in NG+, but it is kind of fun to have these weird differences pop up. The altered mission and the new mission were much bigger challenges than the stuff I was generally doing the first go around, so it injects some late-game difficulty into the early game.
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