JohnHarrelson
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--
Days in Journal
1 day
Last played
May 22, 2022
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This review contains spoilers
I’m wary of talking about this, if only for the fact that I think you’ll need to get through some fairly generic early game missions to get to the really transcendent parts. Getting to the end of each route isn’t terribly long, but I imagine it’ll feel like playing through something much more anonymous than one might expect, with simplistic, surprisingly short missions (there’s one you can finish in seconds) flying through a string of objectives that feel ripped out of some off-brand, “Air Warriors” game.
But the overall effect, whether intentional or not, is that when you get to the end of each route it feels as though the whole facade is breaking down- those anonymous missions giving way to scenarios that strain at what the series can be, where you'll be hounded by the remains of one of your old comrades through the ruins of a megacity, presented with the kind of menace you’d only expect in horror game, or pitted against a rival ace for the finale- but instead of having it be this climactic moment, a battle of two equally matched wills, you’re just there to witness his mental collapse. Even the series-standard tunnel run ends up feeling off, where you’ll fly through the guts of some impossible cybernetic superstructure, less a triumphant Death Star-esque victory, but something much more claustrophobic.
On a more granular level, there’s a degree of challenge and novelty present in these final sections that’s missing elsewhere. (I don’t think it should take until the last mission before fighting an opponent that can actually match pace with you, but it’s appreciated nonetheless.) The targets you have to kill here will either be much more difficult to take down, requiring multiple passes as you avoid some of the densest enemy configurations in the game or you’ll be tasked with clearing the entire sky, as compared to many of the earlier missions where you have a few ground targets to clear and you can just make a beeline for the objective, avoiding most engagements in the process.
And maybe it's just that the lack of radio chatter makes the mechanical shortcomings a little more stark- even mediocre missions in the later games could still have some drama to them, bits of humanity and character bolstering what would otherwise just be standard, “destroy-all-the-targets,” missions. I don’t know if it’s a technical limitation or a stylistic choice, but the bulk of the narrative plays in VN-style windows, the missions themselves having little in the way of dialogue; there’s an easy-to-miss mission where you’ll need to clear a path for a terrorist airship that’s strangely lacking in the intensity the scene should demand, owing to the fact that you’ll have listened to their broadcast separate from the mission itself, and then spend the next few minutes completing the objective in silence, nothing to distract from the simplicity of it all.
It’s not all bad though, with the differing routes having substantial changes in what sorts of planes you’ll access to; there’s a three-way battle between the UPEO, General Resource, and Neucomm partway through the game where you’ll really feel the gulf between the factions- Neucomm’s next-generation fighters sleekly entering the fight from the upper atmosphere, General Resource rocketing up to meet them, and the intervening UPEO jets left lagging behind, straining to reach the heights the other craft can so effortlessly meet.
More broadly, there’s a remarkable willingness to leave players in the dark for much of the game- that battle where you feel the technological gap between the factions, doesn’t seem like much when you first go through it, a full understanding of it’s scope only coming into focus hours later. And this is true for many of the events, characters, and concepts: they’ll seem glossed over when you’re first introduced to them, but give it some time and everything starts to fit into place.
Still not quite sure of how it’s landed for me. I keep on thinking about how aggressively functional so much of the game is: character arcs that are pretty good, and missions that are… fine. But get to the finale of each route and it’s hard to put into words how wonderfully wrong it all becomes, subverting the parts of the series that would become so fundamental to its identity in the decades to come, left without the usual feelings of triumph or gritted resolve, but just a creeping sense dread.
Ace Combat shouldn’t sound like this.
But the overall effect, whether intentional or not, is that when you get to the end of each route it feels as though the whole facade is breaking down- those anonymous missions giving way to scenarios that strain at what the series can be, where you'll be hounded by the remains of one of your old comrades through the ruins of a megacity, presented with the kind of menace you’d only expect in horror game, or pitted against a rival ace for the finale- but instead of having it be this climactic moment, a battle of two equally matched wills, you’re just there to witness his mental collapse. Even the series-standard tunnel run ends up feeling off, where you’ll fly through the guts of some impossible cybernetic superstructure, less a triumphant Death Star-esque victory, but something much more claustrophobic.
On a more granular level, there’s a degree of challenge and novelty present in these final sections that’s missing elsewhere. (I don’t think it should take until the last mission before fighting an opponent that can actually match pace with you, but it’s appreciated nonetheless.) The targets you have to kill here will either be much more difficult to take down, requiring multiple passes as you avoid some of the densest enemy configurations in the game or you’ll be tasked with clearing the entire sky, as compared to many of the earlier missions where you have a few ground targets to clear and you can just make a beeline for the objective, avoiding most engagements in the process.
And maybe it's just that the lack of radio chatter makes the mechanical shortcomings a little more stark- even mediocre missions in the later games could still have some drama to them, bits of humanity and character bolstering what would otherwise just be standard, “destroy-all-the-targets,” missions. I don’t know if it’s a technical limitation or a stylistic choice, but the bulk of the narrative plays in VN-style windows, the missions themselves having little in the way of dialogue; there’s an easy-to-miss mission where you’ll need to clear a path for a terrorist airship that’s strangely lacking in the intensity the scene should demand, owing to the fact that you’ll have listened to their broadcast separate from the mission itself, and then spend the next few minutes completing the objective in silence, nothing to distract from the simplicity of it all.
It’s not all bad though, with the differing routes having substantial changes in what sorts of planes you’ll access to; there’s a three-way battle between the UPEO, General Resource, and Neucomm partway through the game where you’ll really feel the gulf between the factions- Neucomm’s next-generation fighters sleekly entering the fight from the upper atmosphere, General Resource rocketing up to meet them, and the intervening UPEO jets left lagging behind, straining to reach the heights the other craft can so effortlessly meet.
More broadly, there’s a remarkable willingness to leave players in the dark for much of the game- that battle where you feel the technological gap between the factions, doesn’t seem like much when you first go through it, a full understanding of it’s scope only coming into focus hours later. And this is true for many of the events, characters, and concepts: they’ll seem glossed over when you’re first introduced to them, but give it some time and everything starts to fit into place.
Still not quite sure of how it’s landed for me. I keep on thinking about how aggressively functional so much of the game is: character arcs that are pretty good, and missions that are… fine. But get to the finale of each route and it’s hard to put into words how wonderfully wrong it all becomes, subverting the parts of the series that would become so fundamental to its identity in the decades to come, left without the usual feelings of triumph or gritted resolve, but just a creeping sense dread.
Ace Combat shouldn’t sound like this.