Fair enough. This is indeed my first Armored Core experience and I expected an uphill struggle coming in on iteration 6 of the series, but clearly I wasn't prepared for this :P

I'll get there eventually. Just need to keep ramming my head against it until something clicks

Sure, but in Dark Souls there's still significantly better design at work.

Some differences in Dark Souls:

• tutorial messages before the first major encounter explaining the controls
• the difficulty scale between the entry level monsters and the boss is much smaller
• the player can customize their build at least a little bit by selecting their starting loadout
• the first boss is often difficult, but even if the player fails they can still progress the game since they're expected to lose.

AC6 on the other hand lacks all of that. It gives you no tutorialization. You're told to use a sword against shielded enemies and then you're suppose to somehow infer that the helicopter is also weak to swords. You're meant to build up a stagger bar to open a window for big damage, but they haven't even mentioned the stagger bars existence at this point in the game. You're stuck in a single mech loadout with no way to customize.

Imagine if you had to fully kill the asylum demon the first time you encounter it. You've got no plunge damage, no gear, no grasp of the controls, you're just forced to walk out of the jail door and beat the boss before you can engage with any other elements of the game. That's much closer to AC6's presentation