Finished up the last mission with 16 hours on the clock (including no mission replays and 4 MP TDM) - enjoyed the story overall, and even not being majorly into the Ace Combat lore everything else seemed to flow pretty well.
Final mission spoilers;
Seriously that mission can go to hell. Taking out the drones was easy enough in the Su-47, but the flying through the tunnel with randomly closing doors and the flying through the elevator caused me more mission restarts that I care to admit. That section was certainly frustrating and took away from an otherwise fun experience
End game lore spoiler;
At the very end, what was up with "Pioneer 1" - was that a call back to a previous game, or was that some sort of "flashforward"? That was the only part I couldn't piece together and I wasn't able to find anything relating to the callsign on the wiki
I hate to admit it but I actually 'beat' the mission and then couldn't find the way out of the base of the elevator.
I have no idea what the Pioneer 1 shit was about. It seemed totally out of left field and as far as I can tell was the first time it was referenced (at least in this game).
Transcript
Kei; "...On our way back from our 7 year mission to the asteroid belt. I can't tell you how proud I am to be the first to land at this space port. This is Captain Kei Nagase of the spaceship Pilgrim One. The Ocean of stars in out galaxy in finally within our reach. To the pilot who generously gave this spaceship a place to dock, we are forever grateful. The universe lies ahead of us, waiting to be discovered. And now, at last, we have a gateway to ascend to it. Over and over again."
Person on radio It's all coming together for me. Today was the day; the moment of her return.
Kei: I salute the pilot, who gave us all a future.
My take: This transmission is happening in real time and the Space Elevator leads to a Space Station that they're docking at. I wonder what KIND of ship they're in. I can imagine they went to the asteroid belt to break up larger asteroids like Ulysses
That was my take too, but I have no idea why they thought it warranted being in the finale of the game. It felt like they were trying to close a plot thread that had been cut earlier in production.
Kei Nagase is one of your wingmen in Ace Combat 5. The unidentified voice on the radio could be Blaze. Anyway, I took it as a hint that they are planning a sequel to Ace Combat 5.
So maybe I am being slow, but I still dont get it. An Ace from a previous game was given a Space-plane (in secret), to go and break up asteroids in the belt so there wouldn't be another Ulysses. And just by pure coincidence they want to dock at a space station (also a secret) at the top of the space elevator at the same time that Trigger liberates it from hostiles (that Pilgrim wouldn't even probably know about because the comms are down etc.
If that is it, then... why have that as a tacked on 30 seconds to the final mission. Sure, have it as a hook for DLC but then either leave all of it in DLC or have something about it through the whole game. e.g. The Belkan's really wanted the Space Station and set up the Eursea war as a cover etc.
All they needed to do was have a line in the mission briefing: "The Osean spacecraft Pilgrim 1 is scheduled to dock at the space elevator by XXXX. It is imperative that the elevator is fully under our control before docking procedures begin."
Or something to that effect.
We're trying to keep Advanced AI Drones from transmitting their data to fully automated aircraft manufacturing plants and creating an Air Force that would completely control the skies and who knows where it would go from there. Who gives a fuuuuuuuck about Pilgrim One right now?
Plus, it was a 7 year mission. Even if they weren't at war I can imagine it's something that wouldn't be at the forefront of someone's memory
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.
Finished up the last mission with 16 hours on the clock (including no mission replays and 4 MP TDM) - enjoyed the story overall, and even not being majorly into the Ace Combat lore everything else seemed to flow pretty well.
Final mission spoilers;
Seriously that mission can go to hell. Taking out the drones was easy enough in the Su-47, but the flying through the tunnel with randomly closing doors and the flying through the elevator caused me more mission restarts that I care to admit. That section was certainly frustrating and took away from an otherwise fun experience
End game lore spoiler;
At the very end, what was up with "Pioneer 1" - was that a call back to a previous game, or was that some sort of "flashforward"? That was the only part I couldn't piece together and I wasn't able to find anything relating to the callsign on the wiki
I hate to admit it but I actually 'beat' the mission and then couldn't find the way out of the base of the elevator.
I have no idea what the Pioneer 1 shit was about. It seemed totally out of left field and as far as I can tell was the first time it was referenced (at least in this game).
Transcript
Kei; "...On our way back from our 7 year mission to the asteroid belt. I can't tell you how proud I am to be the first to land at this space port. This is Captain Kei Nagase of the spaceship Pilgrim One. The Ocean of stars in out galaxy in finally within our reach. To the pilot who generously gave this spaceship a place to dock, we are forever grateful. The universe lies ahead of us, waiting to be discovered. And now, at last, we have a gateway to ascend to it. Over and over again."
Person on radio It's all coming together for me. Today was the day; the moment of her return.
Kei: I salute the pilot, who gave us all a future.
My take: This transmission is happening in real time and the Space Elevator leads to a Space Station that they're docking at. I wonder what KIND of ship they're in. I can imagine they went to the asteroid belt to break up larger asteroids like Ulysses
That was my take too, but I have no idea why they thought it warranted being in the finale of the game. It felt like they were trying to close a plot thread that had been cut earlier in production.
Kei Nagase is one of your wingmen in Ace Combat 5. The unidentified voice on the radio could be Blaze. Anyway, I took it as a hint that they are planning a sequel to Ace Combat 5.
So maybe I am being slow, but I still dont get it. An Ace from a previous game was given a Space-plane (in secret), to go and break up asteroids in the belt so there wouldn't be another Ulysses. And just by pure coincidence they want to dock at a space station (also a secret) at the top of the space elevator at the same time that Trigger liberates it from hostiles (that Pilgrim wouldn't even probably know about because the comms are down etc.
If that is it, then... why have that as a tacked on 30 seconds to the final mission. Sure, have it as a hook for DLC but then either leave all of it in DLC or have something about it through the whole game. e.g. The Belkan's really wanted the Space Station and set up the Eursea war as a cover etc.
You're thinking about it way too hard, it was a brief cameo return of a prior important character from Ace Combat.
Spoilers for a mega old game, but it always cracked me up that the secret twist of AC3 was that you were an AI designed to see if it was possible for one pilot to change the course of a war single handedly, and the conclusion was that no, it was impossible.
Except for Mobius-1
And Phoenix
And Blaze
And Cipher
And Talisman
And Gryphus-1
And Trigger...
Did these corporate suits literally not even bother? :P
I kinda get the feeling that anything prior to AC4 is basically total horseshit.
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.
Ok I'm a little confused about Strangereal. Is it Earth with different landmasses, or is it Earth with our landmasses that were altered by the Ulysses Incident. New Zealand, Greenland, and the Great Lakes are throwing me off
Ok I'm a little confused about Strangereal. Is it Earth with different landmasses, or is it Earth with our landmasses that were altered by the Ulysses Incident. New Zealand, Greenland, and the Great Lakes are throwing me off
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.
Ok I'm a little confused about Strangereal. Is it Earth with different landmasses, or is it Earth with our landmasses that were altered by the Ulysses Incident. New Zealand, Greenland, and the Great Lakes are throwing me off
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."
Ok I'm a little confused about Strangereal. Is it Earth with different landmasses, or is it Earth with our landmasses that were altered by the Ulysses Incident. New Zealand, Greenland, and the Great Lakes are throwing me off
The landmasses were already like that before Ulysses
Finished up the last mission with 16 hours on the clock (including no mission replays and 4 MP TDM) - enjoyed the story overall, and even not being majorly into the Ace Combat lore everything else seemed to flow pretty well.
Final mission spoilers;
Seriously that mission can go to hell. Taking out the drones was easy enough in the Su-47, but the flying through the tunnel with randomly closing doors and the flying through the elevator caused me more mission restarts that I care to admit. That section was certainly frustrating and took away from an otherwise fun experience
End game lore spoiler;
At the very end, what was up with "Pioneer 1" - was that a call back to a previous game, or was that some sort of "flashforward"? That was the only part I couldn't piece together and I wasn't able to find anything relating to the callsign on the wiki
I hate to admit it but I actually 'beat' the mission and then couldn't find the way out of the base of the elevator.
I have no idea what the Pioneer 1 shit was about. It seemed totally out of left field and as far as I can tell was the first time it was referenced (at least in this game).
Transcript
Kei; "...On our way back from our 7 year mission to the asteroid belt. I can't tell you how proud I am to be the first to land at this space port. This is Captain Kei Nagase of the spaceship Pilgrim One. The Ocean of stars in out galaxy in finally within our reach. To the pilot who generously gave this spaceship a place to dock, we are forever grateful. The universe lies ahead of us, waiting to be discovered. And now, at last, we have a gateway to ascend to it. Over and over again."
Person on radio It's all coming together for me. Today was the day; the moment of her return.
Kei: I salute the pilot, who gave us all a future.
My take: This transmission is happening in real time and the Space Elevator leads to a Space Station that they're docking at. I wonder what KIND of ship they're in. I can imagine they went to the asteroid belt to break up larger asteroids like Ulysses
That was my take too, but I have no idea why they thought it warranted being in the finale of the game. It felt like they were trying to close a plot thread that had been cut earlier in production.
Kei Nagase is one of your wingmen in Ace Combat 5. The unidentified voice on the radio could be Blaze. Anyway, I took it as a hint that they are planning a sequel to Ace Combat 5.
So maybe I am being slow, but I still dont get it. An Ace from a previous game was given a Space-plane (in secret), to go and break up asteroids in the belt so there wouldn't be another Ulysses. And just by pure coincidence they want to dock at a space station (also a secret) at the top of the space elevator at the same time that Trigger liberates it from hostiles (that Pilgrim wouldn't even probably know about because the comms are down etc.
If that is it, then... why have that as a tacked on 30 seconds to the final mission. Sure, have it as a hook for DLC but then either leave all of it in DLC or have something about it through the whole game. e.g. The Belkan's really wanted the Space Station and set up the Eursea war as a cover etc.
You're thinking about it way too hard, it was a brief cameo return of a prior important character from Ace Combat.
Fair enough, but throwing a cameo in is fine if it is done in a understandable manner. If it had been a little mention in a prior missions (maybe with Stonehenge), then thats one thing. Making it more or less the closing line in the game and throwing it front and centre to the audience opens it up to being under more scrutiny. I think I am pretty mush just going to ignore that it was said at all and only worry about it if it ties into something else further on
But the planet is still called Earth, isn't it? Jupiter is still a planet in the Ace Combat universe, after all
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.
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AxenMy avatar is Excalibur.Yes, the sword.Registered Userregular
edited February 2019
At some point in time it was confirmed that Strangereal's solar system is exactly the same as ours. Same constellations in the sky too.
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.
Axen on
A Capellan's favorite sheath for any blade is your back.
One thing I appreciate about the pentultimate boss is just how unkillable it appears to be.
After tanking an alpha strike from an entire air wing, fleet, and tactical cruise missiles from B-2s, Arsenal Bird not only is unscathed, after you knock it down the FIRST time, it somehow reactivates its disabled propellers, which moves you into yet another phase of the boss fight. All while a swarm of drones and volleys of AA missiles spiral in at you, and your allies fire away in desperation. I think it may just be the most visually stunning boss fight of the series upon a repeat play.
I don't like the final boss. I found no rhyme or reason to how invincible it was. And the only reason I killed it was because the AI randomly decided it was Idle o' Clock.
mastertheheroProfessional Video Editor & Book AuthorRegistered Userregular
I recently completed the campaign during my youtube livestream and I have to say:
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.
Some join voluntarily because war is all they know. However, Shin is press ganged against his will, and his protests get met with a, "That's nice kid, you try to run and we'll shoot you down. Finish your contract."
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cj iwakuraThe Rhythm RegentBears The Name FreedomRegistered Userregular
Area 88 is mostly Mercenary, but they get screwed over by exorbitant prices for fuel, repairs, and ammo, so they rack up big bills and have to fight to try to pay them off
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AxenMy avatar is Excalibur.Yes, the sword.Registered Userregular
If you enjoy anime and are looking for a show with some seriously amazing dogfights of the WWII plane variety then The Magnificent Kotobuki (Kouya no Kotobuki Hikoutai) is well worth a look.
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.
A Capellan's favorite sheath for any blade is your back.
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cj iwakuraThe Rhythm RegentBears The Name FreedomRegistered Userregular
Sadly, the best dogfights in cinema I can think of usually come from Star Wars films, namely Rogue One and Return of the Jedi. I love grand scale skirmishes with capships and snubfighters.
Thinking about it, I honestly think Macross Frontier has better dogfights than anything in Rogue One. And Macross Zero for that matter--though in both cases, you're straddling line between "jet dogfight" and "basically mecha versus mecha action."
I'm at like mission 10 and I like the game but I really don't enjoy the penal squadron framing.
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's been a long time since Ace Combat 6 (the last title in the franchise, that's right). I'd forgotten that your main threat isn't enemy missiles, but the goddamn mission timer.
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.
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cj iwakuraThe Rhythm RegentBears The Name FreedomRegistered Userregular
I like 7's story, but I feel like it throws too much at the wall. You're an ace! Never mind, you're scum. Oh wait, you're an ace again!
It's been a long time since Ace Combat 6 (the last title in the franchise, that's right). I'd forgotten that your main threat isn't enemy missiles, but the goddamn mission timer.
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...
They only give you ~1 minute to shoot down the president's plane, which is... real dumb when that is not a thing that you obviously need to be doing, and is part of a thing where a timer doesn't even make any sense.
It's been a long time since Ace Combat 6 (the last title in the franchise, that's right). I'd forgotten that your main threat isn't enemy missiles, but the goddamn mission timer.
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...
They only give you ~1 minute to shoot down the president's plane, which is... real dumb when that is not a thing that you obviously need to be doing, and is part of a thing where a timer doesn't even make any sense.
That mission gets extra funny if you replay it with a jet that has a laser cannon on it. It was literally impossible for it to have been Trigger when when he had been using a pulse laser to shoot down drones but the dialogue is locked into Mother Goose 1 being hit by a missile so I can just imagine Trigger sitting there in the cockpit wondering just how fucking stupid the Oseans actually are after that.
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
the way AC7 ended with SPAAAAAAAAAAAACE stuff being hinted
and the timeline lining up right for a young Abyssal Dision to be active.
TOGSolid on
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HardtargetThere Are Four LightsVancouverRegistered Userregular
edited February 2019
wow fuck mission 6
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.
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.
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.
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
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.