Ah, o que falar de Ace Combat 2? Simplesmente melhorou tudo do primeiro jogo em cada detalhe. Primeiramente, a trilha sonora que já era incrível no primeiro jogo, conseguiu ficar melhor ainda para o jogo e tem um trabalho bem mais elaborado por trás em quesito de passar o sentimento da fase. A direção de arte do jogo melhorou TANTO, as missões são mais variadas os cenários são lindos, a HUD é muito mais agradável e charmosa. A gameplay melhorou horrores, muito mais justo, sempre quando eu perdia eu senti ser incompetência minha e não do jogo, sua jogabilidade é muito mais dinâmica e divertida de se jogar. Agora algo que eu não estava esperando do jogo, é ter um valor semântico dentro disso tudo, coisa que o jogo anterior simplesmente não tinha, a situação em que estamos - uma situação emergencial já que somos pegos desprevenidos aqui - é muito bem transposta in-game, você sente como precisamos correr contra o tempo, há várias fases que você tem que fazer as coisas rápidas se não você falha, essa constante sensação de precisar fazer algo de urgência com poucas pessoas ainda, é muito boa e todo a execução disso é bem bacana.

Good visuals and a hard hitting soundtrack coalesce into a game that can only be described as a vibe. I continue my Ace Combat journey as I play the sequel

I described the first game's visual design as "simple" but Ace Combat 2 is a really vibrant game. You'll go from snowy mountains to a rocky desert, or fly over the cold blue sea in what feels like a cold winter day and the game's vibrant colours so a great job of immersing you in the world as you fight off this enemy invasion.

Guys...I did it. I finally changed the controller layout from Novice to Expert!!! I don't know if the first game had it but the expert layout gives you much better control over the plane that I'm surprised it's not the standard. The gameplay is pretty similar to the first one but it is better, as for the levels themselves I think only a few levels in this game irked me due to their design not being great. Sometimes the target would be around too tight a corner or be smack dab behind a narrow passageway. This game also has less levels than the last one, which wouldn't be an issue but this game also has way few choices in what levels you want to approach. The last level was also unfortunately a bit of a let down, I still think the first game's final enemy slowly coming into your view with that ominous music in the background far outshines this game's lackluster finale.

Oh yeah the soundtrack? It's stellar. Never did I expect that jazz would go so well with blowing up airplanes but here we are. Being locked into firefights with enemy planes as you both desperately try your best to destroy each other while hard rock music plays just pumps you up. It really is something you have to play for yourself to experience.

Ace Combat 2 is a fun time, definitely better than its predecessor I'd say. I'm curious to see what the remake is like, but I'm sure it won't match the original. Anyways, time to enter the Electrosphere.

I think AC2 is a good entry after deciding to embark for this series. The usual campaign is 21 missions, each could take from literally a couple of minutes or 15-16 on the higher end depending on how good you are and whether you clear the map or just focus on the main objective. The campaign has a divergent path halfway through to encourage replays.
There's quite a few aircraft available but unlocking them is easy and most are straightforward upgrades rather being distinct fighters with quirks so usually you only decide between 2 prime planes depending on the mission.
The combat arcadey with enough difficulty that expectedly ramp up, I recommend learning the expert control layout because it gives you more control and a wider range of play, while the other exhausts combat quickly way before the campaign's over.
The soundtrack has some strong standouts, I never thought I'd be firing air to air missiles to a jazzy track. That was great.
Sequel is supposed to be the one starting the ace shenanigans so here we go.

"Communication mode: Level 5
Operation code : TC2012
Communication description :

A coup d'état broke out in the military corps' general area code 'NA-P2700'.

They saw an opportunity during a time when their leaders were away from the country on a diplomatic mission.
After the forces occupied the centre of administration, they seized control of important facilities in each district. They are expanding their influence while strengthening their fighting power.
Their military capabilities include air and sea forces. It has also been confirmed that they are in possession of extra powerful cruise missiles.
To respond to the rebel's forces, the military corps' headquarters made a decision to use the special tactical fighter squadron, "Scarface" which consist of you, my fellow pilots.

We want you to go on this mission and suppress the coup d'état immediately. you will receive all-out support from our military corps. Full information regarding the rebels, full co-operation through our intelligence division, and military supplies.
The situation is tense, and there is no time to waste, take on this mission immediately.

That is all."

Ace Combat 2.

The amount of times that intro monologue has been stuck inside my head is astounding, along with the fantastic 'Dystopia' soundtrack, which brings a dire, gloomy situation the fictional nation is at the moment, with it's only hope in establishing a special air force unit in order to change the tide of war in their favour.

So Ace Combat 2 is in all sense superior to Ace Combat 1, better controls, better graphics, fantastic soundtrack and improved gameplay.

So a perfect sequel.

A childhood classic/favourite.

The earliest ac ive played. AMAZING music, fire youngman and rising high are my personal favorites.

shouldnt be forgotten, but its not an essential play. play this if youre an ac superfan and want to experience its roots as i did.

oh, also, not being able to skip the dialogue on mission intros is annoying.

finally sat down and did that hard mode playthrough I said I would do: expert controls, Operation Bellissima (I did Alphaville the first time). truly something remarkably and unimitable in its tactile sense. I'm an engineer, but my bachelor's was in electrical engineering and my ph.d. work is primarily in dependable systems with a lot of compsci-adjacent coursework. suffice to say, the tenets of aerodynamics are far afield of me. before now I've never had to consider the exacting inputs it takes to move the craft as the novice control schemes handles the details for you. this level of abstraction is necessary to pull new players in, but at the same time it inhibits the perception of truly controlling the craft. the slam dunk easy-mode argument here would be "player expression", but there's something else here that warrants introspection.

there are many reasons we play video games; in this recent round of vsurv discourse there was a focus on the dichotomy of challenge versus relaxation as experiential modes. but this really isn't a true dichotomy, is it? video games in particular we also play to experience that which exists beyond the bounds of our reach. the "simulacrum motive", if you will. we seek to simulate experiences that could potentially take years of practice and/or exert physical danger upon us and others by distilling them into this abstraction of the real experience. each skill we nuture over the course of our lives potentially pays numerous dividends (financially, socially, and in terms of personal satisfaction) but at the same time drain our time, resources, and physical capacity. it only follows that we would desire ability to exert less (holding a controller) in exchange for propotionally less reward (that which comes from playing a video game).

in particular there's a romanticism and wonder built up around vehicles and their characteristics that lends itself well to games. consider sega rally championship. cars are beasts of significant nuance with the way they turn, the shifting of the gears, the friction against terrain, the counterweight of the frame against the vehicle's momentum, and many other fundamental physical phenomenon my coder brain can't articulate. sega rally perfectly strikes the balance between letting the player into this world of cosmic understanding on how this machinery operates and pervails across a world's worth of environments without requiring them to fully embed themselves in understanding the details. a key factor in this is that mistakes are unimpactful. you may have shifted down too early into that sandy turn and spun your front right into a railing, but you didn't kill a spectator or contract whiplash. you have room to learn by example and develop an internal overlay of properties for how your vehicle works. I've commended sega for their skill at this style of gameplay many times before.

flipping the expert controls on in ace combat showcases this style of game design with aplomb. with novice controls it's much like you're trapped within a glass box; an outsider making commands of the vehicle rather than at the controls proper. as soon as the controls flip over and you're given the ability to independently control your pitch, yaw, and roll everything changes. bombing runs of yore lazily looping back and forth over a set of targets turns into the rush of nailing the turn desperately pulling up against your perpendicular craft before leveling out and diving, perhaps rolling between two skyscrapers in the process. you're in control of a proper thing. it fights back against you until you learn its temperment. it allows you to make turns you never thought possible and chase death far closer than previously expected. small little details like pushing the rudder to line up your target while rolling the reverse direction out of a turn become ingrained in the play itself. in cases like these a machine gun, a missile system, and a handful of targets are all you need. the experience of controlling a system that doesn't simply 1:1 map your inputs to its output yields an enriching experience.

which is not to say the flight mechanics of ace combat are truly "realistic", but this is a fundamental aspect of the simulacrum. a game engine that hews too close to the physical laws of reality creates a simulation that demands nearly the same level of competance that the real mccoy does. this isn't an issue, but it changes the target audience and the scope of the game -- more and more the motive for experiencing a illusory form of the object becomes indistinguishable from reality, where iracing champions transition into roles in F1 and other sponsored leagues. but I am not an expert. I am just someone who likes to play a variety of video games. these "exaggerated sims" appeal to me for these reasons: their ability to abstract away details that don't concern me while centering responsive systems of play that require learning and feeling the source material. I have other domains I experience the opposite effect in; I'll always feel awkward playing the rock band drumkit and lacking the sensation of groove or the encouragement to improvise after playing real kit for nearly 15 years.

in the domain of control theory we spend much time concerning ourselves on how to make mathematically optimal controllers. controllers that rely not on the imperative set of commands we frequently encounter via programming but on the transformation of numeric inputs into outputs that converge to a desired result. the most versatile of these is the PID controller: when controlling the system, include not only the input but a proportional element of the error, its integral (its accumulation through time), and its derivative (its slope, or "trajectory" in a sense). when we control one of these systems (the control engine or handling of a game) it should potentially involve not only considering how much "correction" we need to apply to our result but also where we've come from in our past and where we hope to be in the future. perhaps these are our current speed, the state of our afterburners, our altitude, our angle of attack, and many such things, all considered both in the present moment and in past and future moments all combined. this is our method of play when a system is truly responsive and requires our utmost attention to control. more games could potentially learn how to create an engaging mechanical structure from these elements, even when the top-level design of the game itself is as simplistic as ace combat 2's is.

vastly more confident and polished than its predecessor in every conceivable way.

+the UI has been touched up significantly, both in the highly stylized menus as will as with the significantly clearer HUD.
+better animated mission briefings, and cutscenes overall
+more rugged and varied landscapes with higher-quality texture work. the cities look really amazing here, as do the ravine levels, which far exceed the chunky rock formations of the original.
+mission objectives vary far beyond the mindless target-hunting of the original. twists to the way you approach your targets are now at the forefront: the one that requires you squeeze the throttle and fly far above cloud level in order to trail surveillance planes, the one where you must divebomb radar hubs tucked away in craggy ocean-side cliffs with solely machine-gun fire, and the one that requires you to approach silo targets head-on at frighteningly low altitude all illustrate a desire to realize depth from otherwise simple gameplay mechanics. there's even rather competant escort missions thanks to the relative autonomy and combat prowess of your allies.
+destroying the plane now results in a small fine that acts more like a slap on the wrist than losing your plane entirely as in the first game. given that save scumming still exists here, it was smart of them to make this concession.
+special high-profile targets exist that will bestow decals onto you if you manage to destroy them. the best dogfights in the game lie in these optional objectives, and I only wish they were more prominently exhibited rather than being so subtlely placed.
+wingman system was pared down in all the right ways. you get two choices per mission with sophisticated tactical options compared to that of the original. your wingman is transparent about their self-chosen objectives and thankfully pretty useful, even though you'll likely rarely need them on normal.
+wider selection of genres with the music here. ac1 got a little too caught up in the butt-rock, but here they transition into more fascinating textures, with breakbeats, saxophones, and lovely synth breaking through. definitely more groove-focused and less riff-focused, which is exactly what I want.
+as far as I'm aware ac1 only had one path towards the ending, meaning that pursuing certain quest paths could lead to a dead-end. the branching storylines here do a much better job both encouraging replayability and keeping the game rolling along.

there really isn't much I can knock ace combat 2 for either, but at the same time it's held back in terms of ambition. the missions are not that long, and there aren't really side objectives to speak of for the most part. why eliminate optional opponents when the only thing they reward you with is money to go towards planes? this is especially evident in the ending missions, which at the end of the day are not that different from what came before (other than the brief but compelling submarine mission right before the true ending). a large boss like the original probably would not have been the best move, but they could have elevated the finale beyond what was given. the criteria to get into the true ending is also not communicated either, though I can excuse this a tad given the game's age.

still, the quality on display here portends great things to come. I would like to rerun this game with the beta operation on hard with expert controls (and not with my roommate's broken xbox controller... btw duckstation on xbox one sort of rules). above all though I'm really excited to dive into electrosphere and its evolution from the series's arcade roots.

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AGORA SIM.

Um dos maiores saltos de qualidade de uma sequência que eu já vi, ainda mais nesse contexto.
Melhora tudo que o 1 trouxe, só que dessa vez muito mais divertido e casual.
Trilha sonora FENOMENAL, design de fases bem intuitivo, controles jogáveis e sem bobagem de gameover.
(bom, talvez até tenha, mas uma pessoa de habilidade média não conseguiria fracassar tanto, que nem era no primeiro)

It's a more polished Air/Ace Combat 1 with a slightly better OST. Nice planes, great gameplay that improves on the first one's foundation, and overall really fun to play. It's really just more of the same but a lot better.
No big crazy complicated plot yet. Just fun times. Pew pew the other planes and all that. Fairly short, so you can probably finish in 2-3 days.

Overall, I really liked this one (as expected). Might be hard to adjust to if you're coming from the newer games and their more in-depth flight systems.

Surprisingly solid considering how hard I bounced off of AC1, including expert controls and me being motivated enough to map the left stick to the d-pad controls counted for a lot on that front though. This series really has been the same since the start hasn't it? Just a core of mission types and set pieces with room to improve with more tech. And this one really suffers for the lack of tech, short render distances and tiny flight ceilings make every dogfight claustrophobic, and attacking ground targets feel more like playing chicken with the earth waiting for a lock on the AA gun shredding you on the way in. in spite of this it still manages to be properly pretty, and with a fantastic soundtrack that sells the action perfectly.

Nunca vi um salto tão grande de qualidade num mesmo console. Constantemente meu irmão dizia que não parecia em nada com um jogo de ps1 de tão bonito que é.

O melhor ponto desse jogo é que, diferente do primeiro, cada caça funciona de maneira distinta, então você acaba utilizando diversos aviões durante a campanha, é muito divertido.

As fases melhoraram demais em comparação com o primeiro jogo, são bem mais diversificadas e há uma boa melhora no funcionamento delas, como nas de ravina, onde não há limite de velocidade.

Tudo nesse jogo é absolutamente maravilhoso... TIRANDO A ÚLTIMA PARTE DA ÚLTIMA FASE, DERRUBAR AQUILO É CHATO DEMAIS. Mas tirando isso, jogo íncrivel, recomendo para todos.