FromSoftware still has at least one secret up its sleeve for Armored Core 6: the mecha designers
Elden Ring wasn't just FromSoftware's biggest game ever: it was also the studio's most high-profile collaboration with someone outside the world of game development. George R.R. Martin wrote the lore for The Lands Between, which FromSoftware built upon to create their fantasy game's story. FromSoftware hasn't done that kind of collaboration many times in its history, but there is one other famous example. Throughout the Armored Core series, FromSoftware has relied on mecha designer Shoji Kawamori to guide the visual style of the hulking piles of metal players pilot and destroy.
Kawamori isn't famous on the international level of George R.R. Martin, but he is a legend within his old field. Or fields—he started working as an animator in the anime industry as a teenager in the 1970s, and eventually created, wrote and directed most of the entries in the Macross series. He also designed Macross's famous transforming variable fighter jet-mech hybrid.
Outside of Macross, he's written and directed other anime and also served as a mechanical designer for other shows as well as a number of games. Just recently Kawamori designed all of Devil May Cry 5 protagonist Nero's robotic arms, the Devil Breakers.
In a 1997 interview about the first Armored Core game translated by Shmuplations, Kawamori talked about working with FromSoftware to decide how many parts of the mech players should be able to customize and how it differed from his work in anime, where he isn't usually designing each individual component of a mech. «We had a series of conversations in which I asked them to make things as simple as possible for my design work,» Kawamori said.
«First, I asked them to settle on the main cores. If there were hundreds of cores there'd be
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