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Come to think of it....there wasn't a big tunnel run. Unless there's an optional one I missed. Did the island tunnel, geothermal plant tunnel, and of course the mandatory megafloat one but nothing nearly on the scale of other AC games. Bummer, those made the noobs cry.
I fully expected to come in hating danger hair girl, but I think she worked. I also didn't mind Queen 1 who had girl boss vibes. Turns writing characters to be competent is important.
Finished the game on hard. Better then AC7 but I still think I like the PS2 games more. This game loves wasting your time. There are too many missions where the action will stop for a cutscene, for characters to blab on the radio, or for the boss to cease invincibility. Chopper died during an intense dogfight. In this game he'd get a 10 minute cutscene where you do nothing.
The story for whatever reason makes me miserable. It's the standard affair but all the talk of hope and coming together is defeated by the fact that this game is set in Usea. Since 2005 there's been non-stop wars, and coups. Then in about 10 years there will be another massive war. Ironically the "bring everyone together and breakdown borders" shtick results in an even more meaningless war between corporations instead of nations. The game is darkly comedic that way.
Anyhow, when the AC3 squeal releases I - somewhat unrealistically - that the player character will be Abyssal Dision while Nemo hunts you throughout the game.
this is the core of my review as well. some missions take too long to end, too much bullshit before and after the actual meat of a level; this game just actively gets in the way of you playing it in a variety of ways.
these are the missions with the biggest problems in my experience:
mission 8, retaking of theve II, is jam packed with waiting around, and it gets worse as the mission goes along.
mission 10 pisses me off because it's anti-Ace Combat. the first few times i played the mission i kept trying to fly to airships to destroy them early but they don't spawn right away, and you get constantly bitched at to go back and defend the fleet until the game decides you're supposed to go and shoot the blimps down. this just missed the point entirely of what this series is about. i've never felt so constrained in this series until that part, it's just garbage.
mission 16 is artificially padded with all the dialogue, and forcing you to start on the edge of the map. this also highlights a massive problem with the in-game cutscenes repositioning you on the map and this is a real bitch in some missions. not because it can screw you over, it's just obnoxious. i fucking love engaging enemies and then getting teleported away from them for story cutscenes.
the end of mission 26 is ludicrous on a replay. you can't skip his fly back to the fucking carrier and you can't skip the landing that comes after it, either (unless you flub it somehow lmao). the game direction took a major hit along the way with this game and it's trying to be way too story rich and the cast just isn't up to it. PA needs to go back and review Ace Combat 5 (for story) and Ace Combat Zero (for missions) for pacing after this. i mean, God damn, bro, the DLC for AC7 is the definitive masterclass of how Ace Combat should be, each of those three missions nailing every single possible aspect that makes the series what it is and that kind of production just wasn't in AC8.
on the flipside, missions 4 7, 9, 19, couple others, are direct and straightforward, but a lot of the seemingly good missions still waste your time. you compare a lot of these missions to just one or two in AC7 and it really sets in how much cruft they needed to cut. go back and play just one AC7 mission like Mission 11 Fleet Destruction (Siren's Song) and you'll see exactly what i mean.
unrelated to missions, the upgrade system is mostly shit, too. i like that it's just based on slots and not that arbitrary point system like in AC7, but most of the offensive upgrades suck dick. why even have "increase standard missile power" and the new "increase standard missile power against air-or-ground TGT" if having both variants doesn't let you one-shot a plane? there are no breakpoints to hit, so this is retarded. oh awesome, i can take down a little ship in one less missile maybe??? might as well just take capacity increases. even the upgrades that supposedly make missiles fly faster, increase homing, don't appear to have any meaningful effect or open enemies up to more angles of attack.
I'm not done with the game yet, but I just gotta' rant a little.
It has been a good, long while since I've played a game that's given me a good 'oh shit' moment. I don't mean the 'slightly sit up in your chair and put in a bit of effort' or 'oh I kinda liked that' bit but a proper smiling, hands clenching the controller hard enough to hurt, leaning in and getting fully engrossed moment. Metro Exodus didn't do it for me, Ace Combat 7 didn't do it for me, Pikmin 4 didn't do it for me, but Ace Combat 8 sure as shit did with Mission 8. After the clusterfuck that was the first attempt to take back Theve you're dropped right into the middle of what I can only describe as a rock concert experience. Charging in against the fleet in front of you lit up by flares was one thing, but as soon as Purple Magic engages the land battleship and you see flashes on the horizon I was grinning like a moron and reliving the joy I felt playing Liberation of Gracemaria all those days ago. Was it as good as Liberation was? No, but if this was a scene in a movie I feel like it'd go up there with the Emmy bait that was the opening of Up or the blackhole scene from Interstellar. Absolutely phenomenal music, and now we can add Coster to the small but important list of 'wingmen that have an emotional breakdown from losing someone they love', alongside Shamrock and the Razgriz squadron. Also, welcome back that zoom-in slow-mo bullshit from Assault Horizon, I missed you.
Other highlights so far include the desert run mission, the 'I am him' moment from mission 20, mission 21 as a whole, and the slugfest murdering children over Expo city. Great game, I even don't mind Debra Wilson as I stated in an earlier post.
Can you really commit war crimes against subhuman Estovakians? Frankly my only real issue with 6 is that the final mission didn't consist of nuclear weapons being fired at Estovakian schools and nursing homes.
the end of mission 26 is ludicrous on a replay. you can't skip his fly back to the fucking carrier and you can't skip the landing that comes after it, either (unless you flub it somehow lmao). the game direction took a major hit along the way with this game and it's trying to be way too story rich and the cast just isn't up to it. PA needs to go back and review Ace Combat 5 (for story)
Ace combat 5 has the ultimate Fuck You mission when you're following pops around in the airplane to evade the air patrols. It's 10 minutes of slowly following around a island with no combat and just dialogue.
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I do agree there is a lot of just BS in the way. It's almost 30 minutes at the start before they let you actually play the game.
Ace combat 5 has the ultimate Fuck You mission when you're following pops around in the airplane to evade the air patrols. It's 10 minutes of slowly following aro
[Dog]: BARK
[YES ] < > [NO]
I think Reprisal is still one of the most egregious missions in the series. 5's ratio of good to dogshit missions is about 1:4. Thank God Harling got drone striked by Erusea because I got sick of saving him.
i saw a post earlier commenting on how Moon 11/ Tewy is a compelling character that made them cry so i thought about listing all of Sotoa's astonishing amount of war crimes or daily atrocities in response:
1) Sotoans, at large, LARP as a nomadic people while destroying their own land (desertification) through unchecked industrialization and harming the plains where the actual nomads live. also, they were forcibly conscripting those people.
2) due to the retardation mentioned above, their self-inflicted desertification was used as justification to launch a war of conquest and extermination.
3) they attacked Usea/the FCU without warning with WMDs from orbit, beginning by dropping Rods-from-God on Expo City and the UN headquarters. they also targeted densely-populated civilian areas like Theve with air strikes and more. then they came back and bombed the refugee camps that these attacks generated.
4) Sotoan soldiers were abducting Usean women as war brides.
5) attacked neutral nations and seized resources and technology, like the Stonehenge cannon.
6) used the Tonitrus WMD to completely obliterate a civilian town/city (Rio Bajo).
7) they transported PoWs back to Sotoa to be used as slave labor on their restoration projects.
8) deploying weapons and emplacements in civilian structures.
9) Shadow 22 has a history of shooting ejected pilots' parachutes, and does it again right in front of you when attacking Queen Flight.
10) openly bragging about killing civilians on the comms.
11) willing to drop Tonitrus spears all over Usea as a last act of defiance, murdering millions if not tens of millions instead of choosing surrender.
12) attempted to justify all their inhuman behavior by whining about their homeland.
13) Tewy herself even casually remarks that her people are searching for a place to call home in Mission 29, as if that is supposed to engender a sympathetic response. same energy as "here's a picture of crying Sotoans, fuck the law i guess".
14) launched very literal terror strikes on the international Space Elevator using drones.
15) attempted to hijack the Space Elevator to deploy more unassailable WMDs to threaten the entire world.
and most likely a couple other things. it's incredible how universally terrible they are as a people. is PA secretly based for this unrepentant portrayal of Islamic culture?
they are little more than Cumans/Huns with modern weapons; they are unsophisticated, bloodthirsty barbarians. it's a shame we didn't get to blow up their capital in return, but the megafloat was a good consolation prize. also, for a tangent: Erusea and San Salvacion were insanely retarded for thinking their neutrality meant anything by this point. this is so stupid in retrospect that it's a huge plot hole to me: you can't have some aggressive nation slaughtering Usean populations en masse and not have the whole continent immediately rally behind the FCU in any way they could. it's also unthinkable to me that the FCU could fracture in such a way that anyone would side with the Sotoans months into their murderous blitz across the continent, or feel any sympathy for savage invader filth. this makes the Southern Waiapolo guys fucking retards, too.
Tewy herself even casually remarks that her people are searching for a place to call home in Mission 29, as if that is supposed to engender a sympathetic response. same energy as "here's a picture of crying Sotoans, fuck the law i guess".
It's getting late at night for me presently so lighting isn't ideal to image pages from the Aces at War book, but I have new complaints - there was 0 proofreading done on it. Some characters' biographies in the book are just cut-off mid-sentence, like Jenkins and Pike.
The short stories included in the book suggest that the Tonitrus Spear satellites were first launched under the cover of being telescopes, and only during the opening salvo was it revealed that they're rods from God.
So has anyone here heard of Rubylight? He's a Ace Combat "critic" that just had a crash out over 8 saying it's the worst in the series and Project Aces doesn't care for the hardcore fan base.
Ace Combat has always pretty much always been a casual flight game? Like, none of them are particularly punishing to play outside of some 100% completion or challenge runs. I understand the point, the higher difficulties of AC8 genuinely are too forgiving, but complaining about the casualization of a casual game in a casual genre seems kind of pointless.
Okabe: I'm guessing that your decision to use an Independence-class ship as a vase was more a question of taste - as in, you prefer that kind of intimidating, ominous appearance.
Kanno: Absolutely. We actually did field research on an Independence-class ship in San Diego, and seeing ti in person next to the surrounding ships, it's clearly unusual. Like a stealth fighter, the Independence class has this air of unpredictability, like you can never tell what it's going to do next.
Also, when you view the hull from the front, there are gaps between the two outer hulls and the central hull of the trimarin structure. Simply put, we thought it would be fun to fly through those gaps in ACE COMBAT (laughter). So we actually enlarged the hull to allow players to do that.
July 23rd.
The alarms went off. The attack by Sotoa that would mark the beginning of the conflict came from somewhere we never expected. It was a strike from orbit.
Almost the entire range of satellite orbits, from low Earth to geostationary, had been rendered unusable for nearly ten years due to a massive Kessler syndrome event that occurred when the 2019 war between Osea and Erusea spread into space. Ten years is a seemingly impossibly short amount of time to clear such a vast expanse of space, but Brigadier General Kei Nagase managed to spearhead a makeshift international space agency and successfully clear the path again. I have nothing but respect for her.
The satellite orbits finally started upening up again this year. It seems that the "space telescope" Sotoa launched in January was just a ruse. It revealed its true nature as a satellite bbuilt for offensive warfare. Kinetic bombardment soon rainsed down from orbit. The alarms soundded, but the attack was terminated in short order. All communications were lost with Expo City in eastern Usea - the location of the UN headquarters. Expeditionary forces from various nations had been gathering there to increase military pressure on Rocky Island, but now... I'm not so sure they are there anymore.
So has anyone here heard of Rubylight? He's a Ace Combat "critic" that just had a crash out over 8 saying it's the worst in the series and Project Aces doesn't care for the hardcore fan base.
Can he actually articulate why it's "slop"? Because it all just sounds like the rambling of someone upset that the game got a better ad campaign this time around so there are a lot of new players, same shit happened with Armored Core 6. Comparing it to something like CoD and MK is a poor attempt at gatekeeping. Did he respond the same way with AC7? In some areas that felt like a step backwards, but I don't recall diehards sounding like Project Aces just shot their dog. The only major sloppification I noticed is the battle pass and for real criticism of the game a user already broke down most issues, such as delayed spawns, forced teleportation after cutscenes, and long menu animations, to name a few.
He has multiple videos on why AC7's story is trash, but he doesn't do any better by saying that Project Aces should've brought Phoenix back as the final boss for 7.
