There are two endings you can get on your first playthrough of Armored Core VI. One is grimmer, involving alien genocide and seeing your character remembered as a kind of necessary evil that ended the conflict on Rubicon by wiping the planet out (honestly, it's a bit like Leto Atredies II from God-Emperor of Dune, which is a story I think Fires of Rubicon draws a fair amount of inspiration from). The other is more hopeful, stopping the apocalyptic plan with the possibility that, with the corporations and PCA devastated, the RLF can actually secure independence and freedom for their world, and the Coral can live alongside them.
Playing a second go-round, you get the option to make different decisions than the ones you made before. Periodically (and as a new player, I definitely didn't notice these at first,) missions will be marked as "decisions," and will lock you out of the decision missions you don't pick. So, the second time you play through, you can do those missions you skipped, letting you eventually unlock every mission in the Replay Missions options.
But there are other differences. The first you'll notice is on the second playthrough. In the trivially easy "Attack the Dam Complex" or whatever it's called, when you get two superfluous Redgun allies to take on a bunch of very weak enemies (including an AC who tries to stop you but is horribly outgunned,) something changes after the first checkpoint: you get a mid-mission offer from the RLF to turn on your Redgun allies and defend the dam instead of attacking it. Now, you have to take out the Redguns there, which makes for a much more challenging mission.
Doing this (technically you can refuse this offer, which I assume will make the mission play out like it previously did) will give you a couple more missions to help the RLF. In the first of these, you rescue some RLF prisoners who were being interrogated and tortured, and you find that the spiritual/ideological leader of the RLF, Father Dolmayan, has had some kind of terrible portent of things to come. But that's about it.
However, on your third playthrough, in the mission "Survey the Uninhabited Floating City," things start off identical to how they were in the first two playthroughs: you have to deal with ECM fog that robs you of your radar and requires you to navigate through the fog. But while the version of the mission that plays out in the first two runs ends with a rematch against one of those giant attack helicopters from the introductory mission, in this version, that helicopter shows up and is immediately sundered by Dolmayan in his own AC, ranting and raving as he fights you.
I'm pretty sure that if you pick all the alternative missions you hadn't gotten before, the third playthrough will result in the third ending, and probably sees all the missions in the game unlocked, but who knows?
It's just kind of crazy. FromSoft's Soulsborne(iro-Ring?) games give you multiple endings, but as far as I know, all of them can always be attained on a single playthrough. These games have New Game +, but the difficulty goes up with each playthrough (which is why I've allowed the characters who have beaten Elden Ring to sit without starting their New Game+ until the DLC comes out and I've beaten it). ACVI doesn't officially get harder, in the sense that enemies are any tougher to take down, but some of these alternative missions will be a lot more challenging even in the early game.
And the fact that you don't just have to beat the game once to get all the missions, but twice is something I don't think I've ever encountered before. Nevertheless, I think it speaks to the quality of the gameplay that I'm still having fun two and a half ways through the game. I'm hoping I can replicate my IB-01: CEL 240 one-shot from my second playthrough, given that the first playthrough, that was the one boss that forced me to step away from the game and come back the next day.
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