peak ace combat. the gameplay has been tuned to perfection, only being beaten out by its modern contemporary. the story is a fantastic view on war, imperialism, nationality, pride and borders. the soundtrack is an incredible blend of metal and flamenco with prog elements. my only real problem with it are that the super important live action cutscenes they made were dubbed over, and it's super noticeable because some characters don't even fathom the idea of lipsyncing (schnee). the games later difficulties can also cause you to want to blow your brains out.

All it takes is a remaster on easy-to-access consoles for this game to become the kind of masterpiece that everyone obnoxious who wants to be cool and interesting keeps talking about relentlessly, like Pathologic or NieR. If you can somehow manage to find a copy of the game or emulate it before then, you'll be able to be smug about it if it eventually does get real big, which is the best reason you could have for playing a game.

Absolutely best of all time shit firing on every single front - music rips, story is a solemn discussion about war presented in the superior cutscene style of the FMV, it has one of the greatest final bosses to grace the medium, and the gameplay is the silky smooth arcade goodness that Ace Combat is alone in using.

It's very anti-war, it wants to make sure you know it's anti-war, but not in the same way that Ace Combat 5 hits you over the head with it like a blunt instrument. It has more interest in showing the (unfortunately mostly faceless) individual personal conclusions to being faced with fascism and war atrocity. PJ's naive belief that the government cares about the average person, alongside desperate right-wing fascism turned into manipulation of trauma-addled war veterans. It's trying to say a lot, it REALLY comes close to fucking this up, but I think you can read it in a way that isn't too misguided.

This game really gets into the hypocrisy and morality of war, the idea that there is a such thing as a "gentleman's war", the validity of buying into war for "noble reasons", the inherent bloodthirst and dehumanization caused by borders - your side is all evil, even the civilians, so get fucked, etc. It doesn't matter anyway, to participate willingly in a war is buying into it, regardless of whether you're a supposed "knight" or an indiscriminate slaughterer.

Mission 11: The Inferno -> Mission 12: The Stage of Apocalypse is eternal.

Emulated via PCSX2 on Linux.

Hard to put into words because it's mostly just radio chatter and flamenco guitars playing in harmony with the rumble of your flightstick and battle-instincts to produce some of the sickest rushes known to man. On paper, this is just the usual Ace Combat fare, and dogfighting games don't usually stir much in me - I'm an untrained pilot who normally spends his airtime banking wide to link up remote arrows in green circles, but something about this game sustains itself the whole way through. There's just... something about the novelty of its presentation that sits right within you and helps you believe your legend of the Demon Lord.

Despite being a short game, I ended up savouring The Belkan War over the course of a month, playing it in short bursts after work with my cat in my lap (he liked the afterburner feedback on his belly) and a wee glass of whisky to the side. Clad in my big wooly winter cardigan, my gf started affectionately referring to these private flights as my "grandpa time" and it got me thinking about how my own grandpa was sent through force of law to fruitlessly protect the Suez in the dying days of Britain's borders and how my great-grandpa barely surviving a rolling tank at the Battle of Monte Casino in World War II was all the difference between my own life and the lives of countless others existing now. How lucky I am, despite it all, to live in a time when I can just kick back in my office chair and simulate war rather than live through it. Better to be anti-war through ideas and fictions than be anti-war through lived experience.

It seems the grandchildren of those who survived the initial impact of the V2 project have a long-standing fascination with fictious, almost sensational versions of nuclear armaggedon. Inevitable that a Japanese PS2 war game based on a real-life conflict (and real-life weapons (did anyone at BAE Weapon Systems actually play/approve this?!)) would eventually give way to sci-fi lasers on spaceship bombers and a fucking Belarussian Death Star, but I'm unsure why it always ends this way - I'm no sociologist or historian, so I'd love someone articulate to explain why it's such a recurring trope, especially in this specific kind of 2000s art. Perhaps it's an intersection of Ultraman and Mazinger and Macross with The Dam Busters and Star Wars and The Bridges at Toki-Ri, a fantasy that our noble Arthurian heroes from childhood could avert atomic annihilation - and who can deny the pure passion of that ideal? F-15 Eagles soar in the romantic heart of every young boy... I will be thinking about Pixy's final introduction for a long time.

Speechless that Naoto Maeda went on to become a project middle-manager for mobile games after this, a game that rivals Metal Gear Solid 3 in the pantheon of alt-war/anti-war digital fiction. Hey buddy, you still alive? I hope to see you on the battlefield again one day...

This is a masterpiece. The last of the golden era of Ace Combat. It has aged really well and my love for this game hasn't changed throughout the years after numerous replays.

It has peak PS2 era graphics that will look good years from now. It has top notch flight shooter gameplay with lots of variety and replayability in the missions and aircraft with incredible moments to moments that always give me chills.

It's story is well written which tells a great anti war message without being preachy or taking out the fun. It is presented really well with documentary style FMVs.

It also has solid voice acting and some of the best music in gaming.

All of these then come really well together once you encounter one of the best final bosses.

Seriously, do yourself a favor and play this game (as well as 4 and 5) if you haven't already.

ALL non essential targets ought to have affected morality. There was no reason to set aside specific targets for that purpose as essentially nothing more a switch that you flip by shooting a missile at it. ("Kill these if you're doing the evil route, otherwise don't.") It's overly mechanical and offers no decision making like "oh that gun turret is annoying but if I kill it I become evil". The only tension comes from having to guess how many to kill if you're doing the neutral route, since you can't view your new morality in real time. You ought to have been able to.

But in general games with multiple story paths are always maidworky and age with comparatively less grace and are more laborious to revisit. Sometimes you want to be able to just pick up a game and experience it again and not have to get out a spreadsheet.

Anyway, good game. Great music.
hey buddy still alive yadda yadda

knights at the round table, and the unseen, unheard figures and machinations animating their movements and dismantling their legend. it's ironic that the arthurian myth lens that frames the narrative means that the game is necessarily skewed towards fable and folklore in a way that AC5 had already attempted to, but 0 provides far more fertile ground - there's a wealth of generative potential buried here, i think, in a way that's proven difficult to write about but is central to the text (particularly as it relates to codes of honor and wartime engagement but im not deluded enough to pretend i know much beyond the bare essentials of arthurian legend). but there's a lot of moving parts here, so personally i think its greatest success is reconfiguring AC3s framework (emphasis on simulation, expertly grounding its thematic heft on a silent protagonist (cipher lol) piloting aerial death machines) through the lens of 90s post soviet armed conflict and trying to better understand a period marked by great political uncertainty and loss of life. however in doing so 0s concerns feel far more individually oriented and i think politics are felt here largely as a specter orchestrating every sortie; pilots try to exercise autonomy here because they've had the skies bequeathed to them but it's like its instead their prison. there's a sense that even as the documentarian/archivist narrator conducts interview after interview attempting to ascertain some kind of truth on the belkan war (disseminated through glorious FMVs) it's futile to totally encapsulate and it matters less than the surprisingly well-realized individuals caught up in the conflict, the truths they extracted from the war and how they've continued to live outside of war. anyways. tricky game. complicated and cynical and messy in ways i appreciated. obsessively dedicated to its premise in the best possible way. spanish flamenco guitars. my fave of the games ive played this year

also the 'morality' system (if you can call it that, im still not convinced) isn't corny it's part and parcel of what the game is attempting to say and i appreciated its passivity and complete lack of judgment. one of the top five final bosses of all time but that goes without saying

This was my first Ace Combat game.
Not gonna be my last.

I wanted to get into the franchise because I heard it was Metal Gear in the sky. While I think this is certainly true, I don't think it would have been enough to hook me. Funnily enough I stayed for the gameplay.

The controls in this game are pitch perfect. There aren't many games which utilised the PS2 controller and it's progressive buttons to the fullest. This game certainly does. The Dogfights play razorsharp, the steering is just right and the weapons feel satisfying as hell.

The missions are well paced and offer much variety. They also have a fantastic way of escalating the difficulty in my opinion.

The Soundtrack is fucking amazin. Holy shit, I can't believe I never heard any of these tracks.

I could keep gushing but I'm just gonna get back to playing the game.

Even if you have no interest in planes or dogfighting whatsoever, give it a go. You won't regret it.