Ace Combat

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Ace Combat 8 has spurred me to play the rest of the series. The mission I was most impressed with was 14 in the EA-6B Prowler; It was a good use of the heavier physics.

Personal Ranking:
0>3>8>7
 
Kane Lives said:
Maybe a funny lore question, but is there a reason why the XO is handling command duties on the Endurance? Should that not be the captain or CO?
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The captain runs the ship itself, there’s a separate officer in charge of aviation called the Commander, Air Group (CAG), at least in the USN. Both the Captain and the CAG typically report to a rear admiral.
 
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In this day and age the A-6/EA-6B felt like a weird inclusion to the game while omitting some of the experimental platforms the series has focused on like the F-15S/MTD or YF-23

Minor PL but my dad flew the legacy hornet and many people he flew with came up in the A-6 so the inclusion in AC5 felt somewhat more understandable. The setting has that 2005-imagined-future quality to it where the older planes made sense.

Not complaining or anything the A-6 is cool but like someone above said the game felt like just about every hornet variant while skipping some more unique airframes

I think ACZ did the best mix of aircraft
 
Shitting_Dick_Nipples said:
In this day and age the A-6/EA-6B felt like a weird inclusion to the game while omitting some of the experimental platforms the series has focused on like the F-15S/MTD or YF-23

Minor PL but my dad flew the legacy hornet and many people he flew with came up in the A-6 so the inclusion in AC5 felt somewhat more understandable. The setting has that 2005-imagined-future quality to it where the older planes made sense.

Not complaining or anything the A-6 is cool but like someone above said the game felt like just about every hornet variant while skipping some more unique airframes

I think ACZ did the best mix of aircraft
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I mean
they can just add more DLC as time goes on. If 8/Online is more or less the spiritual successor to Infinity, then odds are there's A LOT more planes in the framework.
Just, please no more of the separate Idolm@ster planes with weird stat rebalances. No SNCA entire squadrons of planes, either, don't have the time to grind Mobius 3 or Gryphus 5.
 
indomitable snowman said:
Are there no planes with railguns and PSLs? I started to get good (in my head) with the railgun and PSL in 7 in my last play through before 8.
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FCU doesn't have the defensive dimadollars that OSEA has, so no aircraft railguns or pulse lasers.

Tho railgun pods would've made the land battleships unless if you got a good railgun volley off on them.
 
Finally beat AC8. It's a fun game to be clear since the classic AC gameplay loop is here and is as great as ever. I appreciate that squadron commands and plane selection are back. Was definitely worth a buy because this is a series where more of the same is a good thing. But there are a few niggling things that hurt my enjoyment of the campaign and make me not want to replay it. I'll do the GOAT missions in free play for sure, but probably never sit through every cutscene again.
There are a lot of stupid gimmick missions and a lot of "anti-Ace Combat" quirks that harm otherwise decent ones. Characters won't shut up and you're often stuck flying around waiting for dialogue to finish. Several missions railroad you into doing specific things in specific parts of the map at specific times and punish you for thinking you could approach the battle how you wanted. Sometimes characters will shriek in your ear one right after the other if you don't do something the nanosecond the game wants you to. Was actually pissing me off after a while. I don't remember feeling so constrained by earlier games. You teleport around the map because of scripted sequences. Menu animations take too long. Some forced campaign stuff like watching Professor limp back to the carrier and being unable to swap planes or access the tech tree at scripted times can't be skipped on repeat playthroughs. All antithetical to this arcade sandbox.

The interactive cutscenes are especially stupid, and in general this game loves to waste your time. Even in just the littlest ways, like with briefing sections now turning into back and forth conversations and often being interrupted. That all modern games must be overly cinematic is something I'll never agree with.
Not bad but not great. This war doesn't feel like it was well developed from the player's POV. Sotoa isn't given much backstory for a nation that just appeared with all these weapons out of nowhere. Even if enemy early war progress is always off screen, previous games did a better job of developing Belka, Erusea, Estovakia, etc. The FCU counterattack also doesn't feel completely earned, with new allied units kinda just appearing out of thin air sometimes. The Usean separatists and their willingness to work with Sotoa was also an underexplored idea. Since AC7 seemed to suggest Usea was indeed breaking up like that, they could have bridged the two stories better.

While this game isn't "woke", which I appreciate, female characters feel like they're handled with kiddy gloves. Unless I'm forgetting some very minor voice over comms, not one allied female character was killed or otherwise genuinely out of action over the course of the entire story. Always cocky and confident, but it doesn't feel like they've earned it, it feels like the plot is magically protecting them. Playing for the first time without spoilers, I called every "plot twist" about characters who died vs. fakeouts just based on their gender. It's laughable when it becomes that predictable. Previous AC games weren't like that.

Tasha in particular was INCREDIBLY annoying, never shutting up and never not shitting up my comms. And it's weird that conversations often revolve around her like that Simpsons joke about how everyone needs to talk about Poochie at all times. Sorry if I insulted your middling waifu, dear Kiwi reader, but I really just actually wanted her to be dead after a while.

In general this game seems to hate silence. AC has always had radio chatter yes, but in this game the comm shittery is far worse than ever before. Bonus points for multiple characters all chiming in at the same time to tell you something you already know (if they're not whining about you being one map square away from where the game demands you to be)

The lore around the FCU in particular confuses me. In AC4 they were presumably the main power behind ISAF. But I honestly thought AC7 had decanonized them because the Usean borders no longer showed a larger central country, plus the Useans were completely helpless when Erusea started shit again and needed Osea's help. But now the FCU is back to being the continent's main power?

In general I've always wished AC games had more callbacks. Always some minor ones sure, like the ISAF roundels on some planes in this game, but never enough to make me feel like this is truly one timeline. I also wish more AC7 characters were followed up on. Like, why show Shilage again if it's just a literally who squadron. What about the pilots from Sol?

And what at all was the point of Cope being a ghost?
Fun game at its core, but the campaign can be annoying. The devs themselves really need to go back and replay Zero and 6 to relearn lessons about pacing and mission design. The gameplay was an overall improvement over 7, but other things were steps back.

Oh and there wasn't a good superweapon related tunnel flight :mad:

To round off my autism here's my series ranking.
0 > 6 > 4 > 7 > 8 > 5
Haven't played the PS1 games. I have played the AC2 remake on the 3DS, but as an inherently smaller and less impressive game I don't know how to fairly compare it to the main games. It was Ace Combat on the go and that was good enough really.
 
Oh and if the Sotoans wanted to threaten the whole world with their Rods from God, why did they even bother invading Usea conventionally first? The satellites were already up before the war began, so why didn't they remain at peace long enough to already have these guns loaded and pointed at everyone's heads? Then they could have demanded whatever without requiring any conventional warfare.

Granted there's just one line from the XO in a mission briefing suggesting this was their plan, so maybe that's just her in-setting opinion on what was going on.
 
Americasbig250th said:
why did they even bother invading Usea conventionally first?
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The UN was massing forces in Expo City to occupy Rocky Island after they were getting a bit suspicious about the nuclear accident coverup by Sotoa, which was their justification for occupying it and turning it into a land battleship factory.

Is any of this mentioned in the game? Even the short films? Nope. Just a few lines in the Aces at war book. So much information that would've helped make sense of things is just arbitrarily paywalled behind a preorder.
 
The true and objective rating goes like this

0=5>8>4=7>6

I haven’t played the PS1 games enough to add them and I need to replay the mobile games. Assualt horizon looks gay and doesn’t take place in strangereal so I don’t care.
 
Pixy said:
It's the submarine/drones confirming whatever orders Enso is issuing out. There's only so many times one can tolerate hearing the same monotone 'roger roger roger' (to me it sounds more like lager) before getting annoyed.
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That mission is a little eerie by AC standards because you get absolutely no enemy chatter, save for the lil' drone noises. Really gives an inhuman contrast to Enso.
 
indomitable snowman said:
What's up with the intermittent robot voice on the last mission.
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Pixy said:
It's the submarine/drones confirming whatever orders Enso is issuing out. There's only so many times one can tolerate hearing the same monotone 'roger roger roger' (to me it sounds more like lager) before getting annoyed.
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Kane Lives said:
That mission is a little eerie by AC standards because you get absolutely no enemy chatter, save for the lil' drone noises. Really gives an inhuman contrast to Enso.
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Are there any clean voice lines for the drones?
 
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