If the missions didn't all play the same and go on way too long, this could be a perfect dogfighting game. And I'm sure the future Ace Combat games solved this issue from the looks of things, but man oh man does it sour the initial campaign experience.

On one hand, the reliance on air to ground combat and missions that last 20 minutes with no checkpoints is straight up exhausting. It's by no means hard on Normal difficulty, which makes it all the worse when you fuck up 30 seconds from completion and have to do the same repetitive pillbox bombing to see more story. It doesn't help that 90% of missions have the same structure and lack exciting setpieces. On the other hand, it looks great, controls super well and has an amazing story that is more or less completely disconnected from the actual missions. (You can split hairs about this)

My recommendation? Pick up Ace Combat 5 or 7 and watch this games cutscenes on Youtube. Or at the very least, start with a later entry and come back to this if you get obsessed, because its still solid fun.

Ace Combat 04 sets the foundation of what I'd expected from the series coming into this marathon, as someone who'd only played AC7. This ticks all the boxes of what you'd want from the series, yet plays things a touch too safe and ends up a high quality yet largely unmemorable entry.

What works here is the story. We get illustrated vignettes with voiceover that show us a tiny piece of the conflict, from the perspective of a young lad whose family died when the enemy attacked. Initially, this paints these people in an explicitly negative light, and we get a primary threat: Yellow Thirteen. It's not long before we find out more about this mysterious figure, who ends up being a seemigly decent person, a talented pilot who respects strong opponents and acts as an intriguing window into the enemy's army. He isn't cruel; he treats the people of the town they've overtaken very well, even so far as to help them out of a bind even when they're plotting his downfall. It's a very human tale, and muddies the waters somewhat. Are you definitely playing as the good guys? It certainly appears that way, and maybe that is the case, but there are good people on each side, and the circumstances of their birth has determined their fate long before this fight ever initiated. The conclusion to your rivalry with Yellow Thirteen is somewhat underwhelming, but the journey there had me hooked.

Witnessing the jump from PS1 to PS2 is always quite exciting, and that's the case here too. Graphics are not only more detailed, the environments are far more multi-layered, with many of them being set in hills or cities. Tightly navigating through terrain is very effective due to the better controls, curtesy of the left analog stick. It's the best the series has ever played, and I finally found myself able to shoot down enemies with the machine fun, which was quite the struggle previously. Missions are longer and full of radio chatter which brings the war to life. Late into the game, you get access to the iconic SU-37, which is absurd in terms of speed and turning ability. It's a fantastic late game plane and made me consider doing New Game+ just so I'd have more time in its cockpit.

Where I must ultimately reach with this review is the missions themselves. Things start off as basic as usual, with some dogfights and bombing missions filling the early game. A short time in, you'll come across the first 'score attack' objective. One of my favourite missions in Ace Combat 7 was the nail-biting, utter decimation of a canyon's army base, and this evoked the same feeling (though admittedly a lot easier). What soon sank in was that this was the bulk of the game, with most back-to-back missions being score attacks. There was diversity in locations, but I couldn't help but feel it was all a tad monotonous. It didn't help that most were incredibly easy to not only beat, but to achive S Ranks on. I didn't have to optimise my pathing, I could just drift lazily through the sky, firing on targets that struggle to fight back. As a break from dogfighting, these missions can be effective, but I feel it only caused the game's identity to blur. There just aren't many standout missions here, though the finale is insane in the best possible way.

So for as much as I enjoyed the technical upgrade that is Ace Combat 04 (why is there a zero there?), it falls into the same trappings as its predecessor, with objectives that seem to loop as you work your way towards a stunning finale.

Ace combat is special because the games start off with you shooting planes to protect your base and end with you flying to space to blow up the top secret super weapon named "Laevatainn" or some shit that's designed to assassinate foreign leaders by shooting radioactive sniper bullets from orbit. Ace combat is very special because of how it builds up to that shit in a really measured and believable way

It's like the metal gear of flight sims ("sim" lol), but also the exact opposite in a lot of ways. An exercise in minimalism, Ace Combat 04 uses the simplest possible gameplay and structure to tell the most satisfying story it can, and also it is cool and fuckin you shoot giant planes and super weapons and stuff. In-mission dialogue, pre-flight briefings, steady power scaling in the gameplay, and the rare cutscene are all used so precisely to make peak in the fewest words possible

<< Mobius 1, engage. >>

A estreia da franquia no PS2 foi um pouco decepcionante, ao meu ver.
Os gráficos não mudaram tanto, mesmo considerando ser de início de geração. Creio não ter impressionado na época, e com certeza não impressiona hoje. Apesar disso, serve bem pra dar palco às situações do jogo

O controle do avião segue o mesmo, com alterações irrisórias. O que mudou, porém, foi como você usa os misseis e armas. Essa foi a primeira vez na franquia que eu errei tantos misseis! Chega a ser frustrante até...

A estrutura de missões ter ido em direção a pontos invés do antigo alvos seletos me desagradou um pouco também. Você vai passar a avassaladora maioria do tempo de jogo atirando em objetos imóveis no chão, e também por muito mais tempo que antes, já que agora, mesmo que você cumpra a meta de pontos, ainda tem que esperar o timer zerar. Terminou a meta 3 minutos antes? "E quem disse que isso é problema meu?", o jogo fala. Vai ficar mais 3 minutos fazendo nada de relevante, pode destruir mais uns objetos inanimados no chão pra passar o tempo se quiser. E mesmo quando o timer zera, um outro objetivo é instituído e o timer volta a ter outro tempo. Ao menos, o segundo objetivo costuma ser bem rápido de se concluir

A história foi um ponto positivo. É BEM mais simples e direta que a do jogo anterior, mas ironicamente, entretém mais. A narrativa é legal, e "plot twist", se é que podemos falar assim, das partes mais avançadas do jogo, é bem legal. Me senti meio que vendo um filme de sessão da tarde sobre aviação... no bom sentido!

A trilha sonora felizmente desviou do Jungle e agora é mais séria, orquestrada, padrão filme mesmo, porém, não é tão marcante assim, com exceção das duas ultimas músicas finais

Mesmo a história tendo sido mais agradável, e a última missão tenha fechado o jogo com uma chave de ouro, ainda não foi o suficiente pra salvar esse jogo pra mim... Com exceção do primeiro, que não conta, foi o jogo que eu menos me diverti de todos, ao menos até agora

Absolutely incredible game. I've heard about Ace Combat for a long time and mistakenly assumed it was just a generic war game about fighter jets. Every single thing about this blew me away. The story, the presentation, the commentary about the horrors of war, about human relationships, about forgiveness and moving on with your life.

I loved every single second of this game and it never slowed down for a single second. It was short and sweet, and the last mission made such an impact on me that I came out of it a changed woman.

They don't make em like this anymore........

If there's one way to summarize Ace Combat 04 it'd go something like
"get 1000000 points to beat the mission"
"[WARNING]
"[MISSILE ALERT]"
"[WARNING]"
"[MISSILE ALERT]"
"Now here's some of the best soundtrack and storytelling in the entire series"

I enjoyed this game. I think the cutscenes between some of the missions are really nice, and they provide more context regarding the situation and the enemy. I enjoyed every mission, but I felt some pressure from the timing. I never failed a mission because of this, but I would have loved to have more time on some missions to get more engaged in air fights. Another drawback is that a lot of missions mainly focus on destroying ground targets, which is nice but less challenging than air fights.

The last mission was amazing and the best mission of Ace Combat so far (for context, I played them chronologically).

History repeats itself, and so does Ace Combat. I knew a generational leap was gonna be somewhat rough, but we emerged with some net positives despite being poorer than previous games.

It feels like an ace combat game with some changes. The first thing that felt off turned out to be the aircraft roll, planes with high mobility roll too quickly compared to its pitching which throws you off and required fiddling with the sensitivities and deadzones to balance out. Buying plans is back like AC2 but now you can also buy secondary weapons which brings a welcome variety to your standard gun and missiles.
A positive change is that the crosshairs are now clearer and with higher fidelity makes your Vulcan gun more effective and usable.
Better graphics came with strings attached, higher resolution helps dogfights as you can discern enemy positioning more quickly, but has the opposite effect on ground targets because it's a 2000s modern war game with muted colors.
Mission design is nothing new, on the contrary it regressed to being mostly get X points in Y time which gives credits to buy new planes and weapons. Special objectives are usually the 2nd half of missions after the point scoring.
Narrative took a strong hit compared to the jap AC3, now you just follow the narration of a young boy in some town that sometimes react to your missions instead of being a driving plot for your sorties.

To conclude, it is a jagged transition for the series, but it can definitely serve as a building block for later entries.

P.S. There are some issues with emulating it, if your CPU is strong enough use software acceleration for a smoother experience.

As an artifact of the early 2000s, Ace Combat 04 is fascinating. As a game, Shattered Skies sees the Ace Combat formula mature into the melodramatic arcade flier that would define its genre. Essentially an arcade game built around high scores, you're given a bottomless supply of missiles and bullets to race through a variety of environments stuffed with different baddies, chasing points and dopamine rushes from those "HIT" and "DESTROYED" notes flashing on your screen. Occasionally you're given an enemy ace to duel with, forcing you to work a little harder for those points. This is all very basic stuff, but there's an obvious hook in taking an arcade game and giving it an afterburner.

There's also an interesting conversation around history here. Shattered Skies is a clear relic from that first decade after the Cold War, tapping into loose Russian and Western analogs, explicit visual references to the Gulf War, and a specter of decisive, doomsday super weapons looming in the background. I don't think it says anything particularly profound about this period of time, but the context is there and it's not subtle.

I also think it's interesting to think about this series' narrative and Shattered Skies' place within it. We're still some ways away from the science fiction soap opera of more modern Ace Combat games, as well as their more explicit ideological battles about mythmaking, warfare and people's place in both. Instead, we're given a fairly grounded story about citizens of an occupied nation wrestling with a difficult relationship with their occupiers, seen here as pretty sympathetic at at least a surface level. Through this story, Shattered Skies offers us a basic thesis statement that "war is bad," something seeming to conflict with its other, more implicit thesis statement that "fighter jets are cool." It's basically Mobile Suit Gundam with less robots and more Lockheed Martin. I'm mostly comfortable with this contradiction, but I won't say it doesn't give me the occasional reason to pause.

Finally, Ace Combat 04 squeezes in an obligatory trench run mission. Look, I love Star Wars and think the trench run from the first movie is great. It's also maybe better experienced through a movie, because crawling a fighter jet through a narrow chasm with literally nothing else happening isn't exactly the thrilling climax I think the developers hoped for. A mission earlier in the game, when a different super weapon forces you to race through a canyon, fares way better at this, if only because Ace Combat is better experienced when there's room to fly.