Easily the least engaging experience in the Ace Combat numbered entries thus far. The story itself is about as morally black and white as you could possibly imagine with paper thin characters and twists you can see from a mile away. This in itself wouldn't be much of a problem if the gameplay and mission structure could make up for the shortcomings of the plot, however the vast majority of missions serve as well dressed ways to deliver lengthy dialog to you (often enemy targets respawn if you complete the mission too swiftly for the exposition to finish). Moment-to-moment gameplay can be engaging, but whatever works was lifted straight from 04 and for that reason I am not so quick to pile on praise for another game's successes. I don't mind the lack of mission checkpoints, but forgoing return lines makes the respawning targets sting all the more. None of these things are helped by the fact that it is the longest Ace Combat game by a country mile

AC5 is an exercise in tedium and for those fans that adore it, an exercise in mental gymnastics as well. The only saving grace is Ace Combat 5's challenge missions which (wisely devoid of story content) see you playing as Mobius 1 from AC04 with limited combat resources. These missions are short and, as the title suggests, quite challenging. Replayability is also high thanks to the multiple branching pathways (a feature the main game could very well have benefitted from)

Perhaps it would be best if some wars went unsung

"15 years ago, there was a war. Well, war's broken out here plenty of times before."

With those two sentences, starts the most heartfelt Ace Combat game. In my opinion, one of the most heartfelt games ever. You're set up in a plane as a replacement for the deaths of most of your squadron and sent to the bitter frontlines for an amazing ride (flight?) with the most lovable wingmen you could have. You'll genuinely get to care a whole lot about those three guys: Chopper, your best bro - Grimm, the dilligent yet anxious rearguard - and Nagase, your 2nd in command with an undying loyalty and care for you.

You blast through hordes of enemy squadrons while taking care of your squadmate's gear and actions in a really ambiguous war where it growingly becomes clear that nobody really knows why the war is actually being fought. It's your job as the Osean Federation's ace squad to defend your allies and to reach the truth of the conflict - to a final extremely emotive conclusion.

The soundtrack is, in my humble musician's opinion, one of the biggest highlights for you to get this game right now. You go from a jazz fusion briefing theme, through bombastic symphonic arrangements and it all meshes up extremely well to make up one of the best ost's EVER, courtesy of the in-house genius Keiki Kobayashi, as always.

I don't even know how else to boil it all down to a single statement: You need to play this ASAP. The only thing keeping this game (and the whole franchise) from going mainstream in the PS2 days is the sadly niche concept that is a flight game. If you pay no heed to that, you'll encounter an absolute gem to be remembered for the ages.

AC3 comes close but this is my favorite Ace Combat due to the following reasons:
- Excellent controls and mission structure
- Great soundtrack as always
- Great story if you don't take it too seriously; it's very melodramatic and over-the-top but this fits Ace Combat perfectly and the 3D animated cutscenes are my personal favorite along the anime cutscenes from 3
- I really like the mechanic of giving orders to your squadron, it's balanced just right so if you tell them to attack they won't wipe the entire enemy force, just a couple of fighters at most at least on normal.
- Love the characters.

(when i was like 13yrs old) I felt every inch of this and something broke free within me when the stadium scene happened. I ran out of missiles for the first time and found myself surrounded by stealth fighters in the dark sky. Now without the computer's help targeting I just had the gun and my eyes as I streaked in 360 degrees as Nagase's radio vocalizations urged me to kill every one of the stealth fighters and make it out alive.

Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War gives the player the space to process mixtures of passion and beauty that are often unspoken. The theme is the ultimate deception of mankind's industrial behemoth. All industrial advances cause mass death, and yet there is a higher beauty to all of it. I love the story of the Razgriz deeply and feel personally connected to it in my work in the oilfield in a cold climate. I felt the passion when I first played it but the memory of it means a lot more to me now that I sacrifice myself in the trenches of industry. To me it represents the hope that technological advance will lead to a preservation of industrial resources and industrial beauty for the sake of beauty, instead of seeing it all as expenditure.

In a raw sense I think that the gameplay worked very well, especially given how vast the maps were. If you compare the final mission, SOLG, it was a lot like the experience of playing Rez. The Unsung War is kind of like a massive Rez with narrative context for the hologram shooter. I think that everything in The Unsung War complimented the PS2 from the atmospheric menu to the spacial gameplay.

i keep thinking about strangereal. strangereal is a terrific name for the world of ace combat. it aptly denotes the franchise’s mechanics, functions as a wry descriptor for the series’ daredevil aesthetic, and evokes a fantastical image. when it’s working effectively, the realism of strangereal is achieved by means of a kind of unconscious shorthand.

speaking anecdotally, a surprisingly significant number of people look at an ace combat title – the box art, the community, brief snippets of gameplay – and uncharitably make the assumption that it’s plane call of duty. given project aces’ reverence for realistic fighter jets, high altitudes contrails, and dogfighting dusk to dawn, this isn’t necessarily an unfair assumption to make. it’s sometimes uncommon for media to be so attentive to verisimilitude in the little details while simultaneously dabbling in the kind of magical realism that ace combat does. ace combat has top gun romanticism in its veins; it has more in common with afterburner than it does with microsoft flight sim. its primordial essence might as well have been scooped from galaga. but make no mistake, ace combat will imbue its systems with all the affectations of reality. you’ll learn a wealth of complex maneuvers to navigate three dimensional space, all the while stalling accidentally, evading the onslaught of enemy missiles from your periphery, and avoiding crashing into complex architectural spaces. the open air becomes your arena, cities and their edifices your escape shafts, ravines your trenches. it’s tempting – and very funny – to say this is a series about locking on to green squares and waiting for them to ding red, but the core gameplay loop finds its sense of pure excitement in all the minutiae, the calculations (yaw, roll, pitch, speed, missile trajectory) you have to make in order to synchronize with your jet and down a target. the moment you start becoming more comfortable using your regular outfitted machinegun in aerial engagements is the moment you ascend. it all comes down to your nerves. immelman turns, chandelles, cuban eights – cramped tunnel runs. you might call the experience holistically ‘strangereal’. but the most important thing is, of course, that this is a very highly attuned, enthralling natural drama that occurs in all the games – that of plane maneuverability.

ace combat’s strangereal setting is designed as simulacra over facsimile – where realities contend with abstraction. our history and theirs sometimes align, but only to invite comparison and perspective. the bleakness of electrosphere’s setting of strangereal seems callously exaggerated in its lack of regard for bodily autonomy, free will, and self-actualization, but its developers were only drawing upon influences readily understood unconsciously, enlisting production ig’s aid in setting the tone by way of formal shorthand. electrosphere, in depicting a world impoverished and emancipated by the whims of megacorporate warfare, grapples with the tenets of a large body of cyberpunk work depicting profound trepidation over technological revolution, with the venality and frank hostility of nations beset by late-stage capitalism, and draws upon a wealth of easily comprehensible mixed media – the advertising wars waged by microsoft and apple come to mind as a heady influence. this is deliberately reflected in electrospheres plane design. one dominant corporation, neucom, is sleek, futurist, impossibly glossy and curved; general resources, reflecting a down-to-brass-tacks utilitarian brand, serves as their stylistic inverse. this, too, is shorthand. it furthers the realism of strangereal while also exploring new ideas.

or take the strangereal of shattered skies for a comparatively more grounded approach. with terrain pockmark ridden at best (and irreversibly altered for the worst in many other instances) by a deluge of asteroid fragments following a global crisis, shattered skies immediately establishes political instability and humanity in crisis as the norm, which informs its setting and its depiction of warfare. this is a world picking up the straggling pieces after a semi-successful defense against a cataclysm of untold proportion, with these actions still inevitably leading to widespread devastation and the collapse of infrastructure. this is first introduced with the first lines spoken in ace combat 04:
“I was just a child when the stars fell from the skies. But I remember how they built a cannon to destroy them. And in turn how that cannon brought war upon us.”
the war in question is shattered skies’ continental war, which was triggered by loss of infrastructure, tensions with displaced refugees, and trade quotas. in brief summation, it involves the invasion of a nation with a railgun capable of destroying the ulysses asteroid, and repurposing it as an anti-aircraft weapon, and the fight to take it back. ace combat takes the struggles of reality – climate and extinction anxiety, humanitarian crises, warfare itself – and alters them through the lens of strangereal to convey its action. that, alongside the gameplay, is also a big appeal of the franchise.

all of these elements, depictions, and sensibilities coalesce to create a series that is continually compelling even at its messiest. shattered skies is the predecessor to the unsung war, and the franchise’s debut on the PS2. with that uncertain introduction, especially following the commercially unsuccessful yet wildly ambitious electrosphere, came a very solid, if unambitious title with a wide range of problems. the flow of its military campaigns made sense, its world was compelling and understated, its narrative quiet and melancholic yet taut, but it was sorely lacking in visual identity and mission variety. it returned to the traditional ace combat 2 military campaign structure of working towards an explicit goal through various missions, each sensibly placed one after the other. and the narrative emerging opposite this is one following the enemy aces who have no choice but to engage with you by the end, thus lending the proceeding battles weight through dramatic irony. it’s an unsettling moment when you kill one of yellow squadrons pilots for the first time and radio silence fills the airwaves, and it’s part of ace combat continuing in the footsteps of electrosphere: the necessary interrogation, however minor or subtle, of an arcade flight sim that feels great but derives influence from realism. this is something shattered skies nails (although electrosphere does it better) and to me it’s the crux of the series identity – it’s strangereal. it’s the feeling that this world could have been our own, but everything is affected by a layer of digital remove.

ace combat 5 finds this characteristic off-kilter reality in abeyance. the unsung war tips tips the formerly tightly wound balance (strange/real) far more towards the tonally ‘strange’, the magical realism. this isn’t the biggest problem ace combat 5 has, but it is absolutely the lynchpin of all my criticism because the approach undertaken by project aces in this game informs all the issues i have with it.

these changes, in my opinion, were seemingly made to ameliorate the problems people had with shattered skies. ace combat 04 is a dry but very candid and forthright title with a simple, but well-executed narrative. ace combat 5 has more personality from the get go and packs a bit more production value. the environments don’t look quite as dreary, the planes move a bit more responsively, and the cutscenes are 3D CG this time. on top of that there’s an actual cast of characters this time around and missions are usually set up with intrigue, so there’s a sense that something is happening to you rather than you being a lone agent in an ongoing overarching struggle. one mission starts from first person perspective as you remain in the cockpit, watching the bombs drop in your vicinity, before rushing to takeoff and defend the skies.

but this increased narrative focus carries with it several unique problems. i want to start with the first moment this became clear to me, because ace combat 5 opens decently enough that you might not notice the cracks in its seams, and with a charitable focus on the game one might not be so inclined to interrogate any potential mishaps or wrongdoings. seven missions into the game you’re pulled into a situation where you and your squad must lead a counter-assault against a submarine carrier; you had previously survived your last encounter with the submarine by the skin of your teeth. the submarines anti-aircraft weaponry consists of burst missiles which annihilate anything under an altitude of 5000 feet when it fires. you know this, your wingmen know this, the mission briefing specifies this – it won’t catch you off guard like it did the last time. on top of this you have now retrofitted a satellite with an orbital laser so that you have further means of dispatching the burst missiles.

the dilemma is this: lacking personnel with which to conduct the sortie, your commanding officers send your squadron and many cadets-in-training, affectionately named ‘nuggets’. despite their lack of dogfighting experience, they know enough that they’ll be able to hold their own against enemy ordinance, especially with full knowledge of what will be attacking them, no surprises.

wrong. all of the ‘nuggets’ died in the sortie because after three successful strikes, the orbital laser malfunctions. everyone realizes this and makes a big fuss over it, but rather than elevate aircrafts to an altitude of above 5000 feet within 30 seconds after the first warning from nagase (which, by the way, only takes three to four seconds to accomplish from a base altitude, if that) every single nugget perishes in burst missile range. this is because ace combat 5 is a game that for all intents and purposes begins favoring drama and wayward polemic at the expense of realism. it wasn’t a demanding altitude, a demanding time limit, or a demanding number of enemies and every cadet died to further the casualties suffered under war and to add to the cast’s understanding that War Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up To Be, We’re All Cogs™. while i haven’t tested it yet, it would not surprise me in the least if the AI for the nuggets climbed to an altitude just below 5000 feet, and then right before the safe zone, they stalled so as to perish in battle.

but the troubles don’t really end there. the increased focus on the narrative proceedings and on wingman banter has direct ramifications for gameplay as well. several of ace combat 5s missions are unnecessarily padded so your squadmates can speak, ordained by the script, before progressing to the next stage of the mission. i played on hard difficulty and even then i was stunned to see that because i had dispatched all enemies well before the mission dictates that i should have, the mission simply continues to respawn enemies on the ground and in the air so that you have something to do to fill out the dead time. not only is this obscenely artificial once you come to grips with what’s going on, but it also throws a significant wrench into preparing for a sortie. i accept the premise that a mission briefing could be wrong so as to further the stakes and to amplify the tension of the gameplay, but this is a case where all your mission briefings might be lying to you and you have no way of foreseeing it. a mission with 30 ground targets and 15 aerial targets could easily become a mission with twofold that amount, with one particularly egregious mission respawning enemy bunkers repeatedly after you had already dealt with them. complicating this is both the lack of resupply lines from ace combat 4 and targets with greater health pools than prior iterations of ace combat, meaning you waste more ammunition to deal with enemies that were not specified to be there and you have to micromanage your ammunition to counter this fact in what is supposed to be a replayable, score-based arcade title. missions are stuffed to the brim with this kind of dead time and overindulgence in enemy count. one mission has you follow a truck for five minutes with zero friction – you cant even target structures so as to stop the trucks path. at least the mission where you flew slowly at low altitude for ten minutes possessed a semblance of mild danger. your wingmen barely make a dent in any of this despite any of the tactical orders you might try to give them. if you don’t believe me, kindly look at my squadmates numbers by the end of the campaign.

https://imgur.com/a/BfwCqNN

this is also the longest campaign in an ace combat title, topping out at 27 missions plus a victory lap. with the litany of scripted missions and gimmick missions that this title has, ace combat has never felt so much like an exhausting marathon. there are moments that it all works as a nice composite, but these moments are so few and far in between that the game is actively drowning in mud for most of it. it’s quite amusing to me that this entry in the franchise has the opposite problem of something like nier or drakengard – both of which are recipients of ace combat’s conceptual dna. in nier, the problem is the casts dialogue during battles, which are both narratively important and entertaining, but can easily be cut off by player input; in ace combat 5, the script, oftentimes for worse, obstructs player input in service of narrative. despite this, this can easily be interpreted in niers favour, which i won’t do for the sake of avoiding spoilers. ace combat 5 gets no such reprieve.

some of this might be excused if the unsung war had a good narrative, but it rather unfortunately registers to me as hisitronics. it’s bereft of the kind of nuance, humanity, or expressiveness of previous entries in the series in favour of aerial schmaltz. these characters are paper thin apex predators fighting against the machinations of war by doing hardly anything different from any other title in the series – indiscriminate slaughter. and far be it from me to reject something that has the potential to be subversive or satirical in intent, but nothing about the unsung war is even vaguely suggestive of this to me. it’s markedly less thoughtful than both electrosphere and shattered skies before it, without the comparative mechanical strengths of the relatively narrativeless ace combat 2. it sacrifices what works for an anti-war fairy tale that culminates in a squadron’s shared anti-war anthem, right before eviscerating the enemys offence entirely in a show of brute military strength. the whiplash is unreal to me. particularly so when the conspiratorial bent of the narrative seems like it will dismantle the kind of jingoist nationalism that fuels combative sentiment, but stops before even attempting to.

it takes a lot to pull me out of this kind of high octane schlock, but ace combat 5 represents the worst of both worlds. its lack of meaningful hooks renders its explosive highs destitute by the time you get there, and all the strengths it possesses as a mechanical ace combat title are negligible once you remember that they’re reflected better in the games before it. i much prefer the cowboy bebop-esque fatalism of something like shattered skies over the sluggish and preachy, constantly disconnected nature of ace combat 5. my argument here doesn’t intend to suggest that ace combat can’t be corny, but this tone should operate in tandem with the systems rather than disrupting them. and likewise, the mechanics should leverage the storytelling. because ultimately, project aces are right – in spite of the destruction they represent, planes are cool. they’re kinetic. they dance and joust in the skies. but so much of this game is repellant instead – it misses what makes ace combat work mechanically, and it misses what makes it work narratively. it aspires to the self-interrogation of games past, but instead opts for having your squadmate say ‘dogfights suck’ in the first mission of the game. its attempts to evoke reality are both underwritten and lacking in subtlety (yuktobania in this game is absolutely just russia; the antagonists in this game are cartoonishly committed to being evil). it ain’t strangereal, it’s just strange. and i can get similar, but more considered joys, somewhere else.

Ambitious, missed potential, confused, anti-nationalist. Yeah. Emotionally aware, dramatic, pays attention to its individual characters while tripping over itself for what it actually stands for.

They had a great opportunity with the anti-war stuff, not that it's terrible, but it's like... well, it eventually resolves itself into nationalism being bad, which is true, but to get there it also felt like it had to give up another thing it got close to: something along the lines of "war is manufactured by the ones who don't have to experience it." but that gets dashed aside for couple of twists that I won't detail because I don't want to give this a full spoiler tag.

Lovely cast of characters, albeit somewhat scatter-brained usage of them. The method of feeding you cutscenes that are mostly from a non-military non-player perspective is always something I liked, and the aesthetic of shooting it through a camera for journalism that also exists in some places is nice... There's a lot going on in this, it gets very direct with shit like the military silencing journalists (temporarily, in this case) so they don't report on things that should be known, the citizens of your originating country don't fucking care about the war and think it's pointless... It has ambition, like I said before.

It plays nice. It has horrid team-AI, with a caveat: they are decent at damaging enemy planes, they are godawful at finishing them off. It's very scripted, which okay, fine, it's way more focused on making you engage with the narrative and the spectacle (stuff like the ICBM lighting up the entire sky), I don't think it's a huge issue. It's not very difficult outside of a couple of obtuse occasions. It has lots of hectic radio chatter, for me it helps prop up some of the border-line snoozefest levels, but if you think it isn't convincing enough, yeah, there's nothing helping some of these missions. Lots of infinitely respawning pairs of jets and whatnot to keep you occupied. It's whatever.

It's not bad, but it's very... fantastical. It doesn't have the balls to commit to the grand vision that it felt like it was capable of, it hit some really weird twists and story beats in the later bits, and is generally kind of strange.

Emulated via PCSX2 on Linux.

Great gameplay (with some exceptions like an awful 10 minute long trailing mission), but the story is a big mixed bag. Being overly pretentious and cheesy, the game pretty much ruins the more subtle elements of its predecessor, trying so hard to make you care about its characters and telling a message that ultimately feels thereby hollow. The decision mechanic had potential, but was ultimately redundant and a rather annoying way to make me interact with the characters. The actual decisions are obscurely presented (how the hell does a comment on music change the outcome of a coin toss?!).
Still, there are some great moments and I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy the game for the most parts.