Our new Indie Games subforum is now open for business in G&T. Go and check it out, you might land a code for a free game. If you're developing an indie game and want to post about it,
follow these directions. If you don't, he'll break your legs! Hahaha! Seriously though.
The Ace Combat Thread (NSF56k)
Posts
I suppose, but then why mention it at all? If they want to use it to tie in a future game or DLC, then just bring it up then.
You're thinking about it way too hard, it was a brief cameo return of a prior important character from Ace Combat.
In broadstrokes they're canon, a lot of love has been thrown towards AC3 lately so it wouldn't surprise me if they remaster that story at some point. They did the same thing for AC2 with Assault Horizon Legacy. It's just, as of right now, it was a stupid experiment considering even in AC3's timeline, Scarface had already near single handedly stopped the Usean coup.
Strangreal is not earth, but the map itself is built out of bits and pieces of real-world shorelines and land masses in order to evoke a certain kind of feeling about the setting.
It's an Earth-similar planet with a totally different history that's been put through a disastrous wringer. Things are so destabilized due to asteroid impacts and resource shortages, not even WMDs prevent all-out war between powers. It's used so factions can have any super weapon, plane, tank, or warship they want without cries of "not realistic" or pissing off folks who are offended by their country being the "bad guy."
The landmasses were already like that before Ulysses
Yes. Plus, the lowercase "earth" is used in regular speech (in English and Japanese anyway*). It's Final Fantasy rules in this case, where (before some retcons anyway) VII and probably other games called the terrestrial planet they were set on "Earth", and "Jupiter", "Mercury", and "Venus" are all known planets orbiting the same local star.
If you consult the official unofficial Strangereal atlas that has been around for years, the ironically named country of Cayenne very clearly shares the shape with New Zealand (putting aside the projection which makes it look huge). The Pacific, Atlantic, and Arctic oceans are all features. So is the Black Sea. Wellow is clearly shaped like Greenland. So there are lots of shared shapes, and lots of shared names (though not both at the same time). Strangereal Earth (and not "Planet Strangereal", though we could call it that) looks a lot like a smaller (?) mirrored/replica Earth, that probably has a lot of the same constellation (someone must've looked at the night sky in these games before, I wouldn't be surprised if they just copied Earth's in the northern hemisphere), and basically the same planets.
Plus, even if very few cities share the same names, somewhere there are companies or design bureaus called "Boeing", "Grumman", "Sukhoi", "Tupolev", "Mikoyan-Gurevich", etc., all active. Aircraft descriptions never mention our countries by name, but Namco has paid big bucks (or however they did it) to keep use of the trademarks.
*Which gets to another point. English, Japanese, and I'm pretty sure Russian are all distinct languages in Strangereal, and I'm pretty sure they're called that (no one's said "Oh, the instruments on this aircraft are printed in Yuktobanian.") when the actual story writers can't somehow get around it--for example, a character yelling at another one to speak clearer English.
The more fun things that are real "WTF" if you spend too much time thinking about it are common expressions, terms, or foods that involve real world countries.
"My plane has been turned in to Swiss cheese!"
"He did a Dutch roll!"
"We should go to the Italian bistro after this!"
English
Japanese
Russian
Spanish
German
French
Are all distinct languages directly referenced in the games. Belka speaks German for instance and Yuktobanian and Estovakian are Russian of course.
G&T's Dragon Ball Xenoverse Steam Group
Although the game is gorgeous and the gameplay is extraordinarily fun.
The story was absolutely trash and the cutscenes were boring.
Even Ace Combat Zero's hokey green screen and ADR cutscenes were more amusing and entertaining than AC7's. Hell, I still get chills watching the intro trailer for Ace Combat Zero.
But Ace Combat 5's story was pure magic. And the reason it so strongly drew me in was because I actually cared about the characters. I cared about what happened to Edge, Chopper, Archer, and Swordsman. I wanted to rescue Edge when she had to bail out in enemy territory. I wanted to answer Chopper's questions through the radio chatter. I looked forward to watching the cutscene where pops escapes with us from the base. Or meeting Captain Anderson for the first time. Or seeing the Kestrel sink as the last fighters are launched from the aircraft carrier.
AC7 had NONE of those cutscenes. Most of the cutscenes were of Scrap Queen (a character you have no direct relationship with) lamenting about the color of the sky. You get some uninteresting shots of prisons, a news report, a group of people walking through smoke filled cities, an old guy with asthma, and a dude with glasses. AC7 failed to develop these characters properly and failed to make me care about my wingmen. With AC5 I felt like my character was a part of the cutscenes, as if I was involved int he story. AC7 completely disconnected me from the narrative and played out like an exposition dump rather than making me an active participant on what was happening.
I definitely had my jaw drop when certain characters returned and disappeared. But the Nagase cameo was forced and preachy. In fact, it genuinely feels like the writing team really didn't know how to continue Ace Combat after 5. And for me, AC5 remains the best ACE game because of the incredible variety of missions (and the awesome soundtrack of course). I loved the reprisal mission where I had to help a cop car navigate through a city while extinguishing nerve gas. I enjoyed escorting President Harling's plane through SAM infested areas. And I really got a kick out of flying the trainer planes to escape from Belka.
And still, the most gut wrenching scene for me, asides from Chopper sacrificing himself to protect innocent civilians; was when the Yuktobanian ship tried to prevent the other ship from attacking the Kestrel. It was such a great moment and such a fun mission to play that I was really hoping and praying AC7 would have similar exciting encounters.
But it didn't.
AC 7 was nonsensical. Belka starting crap up didn't make any sense. The drones were a boring antagonist. The arsenal bird was ugly in design and the variety of enemies was poor. At least in AC 5 we had to also blow up submarines AND the Arcbird, and a satellite, and Hamilton.
Despite all this, AC7 is still an amazing game. The graphics, sound, music, gameplay, really got me immersed in the world they created. I only wish the ACES team could have also given it a story of equal measure.
It's a pretty direct reference:
Wow.
Are all the Zero wallpapers references? Oh, it's an edit.
Also, lol:
If you can get past the CG main characters you'll find a show with exceptionally well choreographed dogfights with sound design so fucking on point it puts Hollywood WWII movies to shame and ridiculously detailed airplanes. I don't know who the composer of the show is, but man are they totally channeling their inner John Williams.
G&T's Dragon Ball Xenoverse Steam Group
Independence Day was close.
the awacs constantly saying you're trash and whatever was ok for a mission or two but man i cannot believe they're sticking with it, expected an ace combat 5 sort of story turn.
It took me three times to get through The Long Day (Mission 6?) on Hard. Ended up going with an F-14D and getting lucky with the particularly unrealistic (like it matters) air-to-air multi-missiles against those MQ-99 drones. A very appropriate title in the sense that "This mission is going to seem really long the third time around, hahah."
I always hated those kind of missions in AC5 and AC0 as well--where you didn't fail because you were shot down or crashed, but because you didn't rush yourself enough. Not to save a particular objective or intercept a particular target, but for the whole mission.
I'm sure there are more too.
I ended up having big problems with mission 4 because...
You can be scum AND an Ace
Ace Scumbat 7
Zubov was the poster child of that.
Season pass trailer
Steam: stabbitystyle | uPlay: stabbitystyle | b.net: Stabbity#1528 | XBL: Stabbity Style | PSN: Stabbity_Style | Twitch: stabbitystyle
Going through the comments to see what the lore nerds have caught. The ADFX-01 Morgan and ADF-01 Falken got spotted in the blueprints and there's some speculation that we may be starting to go into AC3 territory due to
edit - it's especially fucking stupid because the briefing says that if you don't complete the objective you'll just get less points at the end, NOT THAT YOU'LL FAIL THE MISSION. the first 2 times i got shot down near the end, the 3rd time i hung back a bit and on purpose didn't completely just so that i was finished with the fucking thing.
god I was so fucking mad. plus no checkpoints.