Still quite incredible to look at even 19 years later. One of the graphical showcases of the GameCube as a launch title. Production values just off the charts. Great music, sound design, and voice actors, not that those things are hard to reproduce from the movie side of things. But they put in the work to get all that stuff and those actors, and it's all employed well here.

The gameplay is great. The controls are good and the game is deeper than I realized. In first person view, you can look around the cockpit. Your fighter crosshairs help you lead targets. Your lasers are stronger when that goofy bar is charged (never knew what that thing represented when I was a kid). I was also happy when I realized you can slowly turn if you hold both shoulder buttons. Oops! Didn't know that.

Overall, the combat looks and feels and sounds great. It's the game design and level design that bog this one down.

Missions are short--some may run you only 5 minutes. But there is no way to recover health during a mission, and some of the playable fighters take such limited damage before being destroyed that they're essentially worthless in my opinion. Even the ones with a little more defense go down somewhat easily, and if you lose 3 lives, you get sent back to the main menu.

When I think of frustrating game design, this is part of it. You lost all your lives, okay fine. If you fail a mission by not meeting a required objective, the game at least offers you a chance to restart the mission from the beginning. But if you lose all your lives, which happens a lot, you have to go back to the main menu, load your profile, select your mission, load the hangar, select an aircraft, and load the mission. I know this game came out in 2001, but this is unforgivable. For crying out loud, why don't they let you restart a mission when you run out of lives if they'll let you restart if you fail an objective?

To compound this problem, the game is fiendishly difficult. I browsed some of the reviews here before writing mine, and I'm glad I'm not alone. I stopped counting, for example, how many attempts I needed to beat the final Death Star mission, but it was upwards of 75 attempts and multiple days. It's frankly a little surprising how hard it was to beat some of these missions. I will say that I dabbled in a few walkthroughs just for some general hints or strategies to beat some missions that had me seriously stumped, and some of them were "D'oh, my fault. That makes sense." But some of them are just seriously challenging.

One gimmick of the game is there in the title: Rogue Leader. In this game, you get to give orders to your wingmen. I never noticed very much difference in what I told them to do. What this game needs is the Ace Combat 6 option where you can order them to shoot at the people shooting at you.

Ultimately, Rogue Leader is an absolute joy to play and look at even now. It's just extremely hard.