All the things he said
All the things he said
Running through my head
Running through my head
Running through my head
All the things he said
All the things he said
Running through my head
Running through my head
All the things he said (all the things he said)
This is not enough (enough, enough, enough)
This is not enough
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Buddy

Holy shit. Holy shit!

After all of Ace Combat's missteps (to me) moving into realism and abandoning the arcade-y nature, this is the one that hit! 04 was too stuck in poeticism to phase me, and Unsung War was dull gameplay moment after dull gameplay moment coating a pretty damn good tale.

I'm not sure exactly what it is immediately, or at least I didn't for a while. The map design felt more varied, and not to mention more important compared to Unsung War's rather bland flat landscapes, but I don't think anything has really changed about the core gameplay? Something about the gameplay just feels so damn GOOD, though. I managed so many risky maneuvers once I got the hang of planes again, and even then 1/7 of them ended in an immediate mission failure, the ones that worked got an out loud "FUCK YES!!!!" from me.

The only real gameplay feature difference, and what I pin on this one winning me over, is the ability to choose your wingman's weaponry. A lot of this game's plot hinges and you forging a connection with this wingman through the FMV cutscenes and your brief gameplay interactions. They're smart enough to know you're in danger, and they'll turn around and try to fire their rockets into an enemy before they can do it to you. This guy saves your life more than once, never once a scripted moment, it all feels like the natural course of things.

You can probably guess how the game ends from that alone, I bet. All of this is wrapped in this narrative (as bizarre and unspecific as the prior games) about putting down a rebellion you have only vague context for. All of it culminates in a victory, only for a nationalist uprising to pop up and prompt the ending sequence of missions, all played straight into each other with no saving in-between. Remember those FMV cutscenes I mentioned? They're silly, but once you've played enough, they just 'make sense'. And those last missions are gonna hurt.

The ending of this game got to me in a weird way, too. After getting my taste of the final sequence's music, a huge step up from 04 and 5 by the way- it combines the modern war film instrumentation with the experimental silly-type sounds of the third game- I prepared a short playlist of music to listen to along the way. I put it on shuffle. Somehow, it was timed perfectly.

The final boss is in three phases. First, I heard the live version of Big Cat by Wild Beasts. One of my favorite songs as of recent, it's slow, calm, but overtly serious tone, broken up by these rare guitar riffs that overpower the rest of the song, really took me some places emotionally. All while the boss is throwing out these requests for you to shoot them down, once and for all, if you're so clever.

For the second phase, it began playing Mark On You by The Mountain Goats. A song very much so about what was happening, narratively, but the weakest ironically in it's connection to what was happening. This was the only point in the fight my opponent was able to land a shot on me- their weapon shifts to a bomb cannon that leaves mid-air danger zones that 'throw' you off whenever you reach them. As if by perfect timing, the song ends right as the cutscene before the final, and longest phase.

And finally, Steven's Last Night in Town by Ben Folds Five. Overly jaunty as the stakes were increasing and the game got more intense, something I've never had happen occurred, at least never as perfect as this. The song began to sync to my opponent's actions. At moments where the lyrics broke for an instrumental pause, that was when the enemy plane turned around and went in for a head-first strike. Every time, I managed to avoid getting hit, but only half of my attempts led to my opponent being hit. There's this occasional- I don't know music, is it like a brass hit? But every time that happened, that preceded the in-game dialogue, or a noticeable deacceleration/acceleration that would change the pace of combat.

I was very emotionally moved by this completely unintentional event. This is the shit Wong Kar-wai makes movies about.

very anti war

anyway EAT THESE XMAA-ROCKETS FROM MY Su-27 YOU PUSSY
YEAAHHH
I LOVE BLOWING UP PEOPLE IN MULTI-MILLION DOLLAR PLANES

this game takes every single flaw the franchise has up until this point and simply fix it

and not only that but it also adds new stuff that makes it even better.

great game

yes i do watch max0r's epic ace combat "inaccurately explained" series with pure delight, "hey buddy still alive, PEPSİMANNNNN, ONLY THING I KNOW FOR REAL, WTF BOOM!, THAT'S WHAT V2 IS FOR! HAHA!", cannot wait to base my personality around the main character of the next max0r video! btw i never really played the series but i looove posting memes about it on Social Media! You wanna see my Topster about best video games of all time? (ace combat zero, metal gear rising, yakuza zero, ridge racer type 4, final fantasy xiv:shadowbringers)

Oh sons and daughters of Belka, luckily the roaring of jet engines hasn't made me so dense to not spy through your deceptions. Perhaps getting soldier ace isn't such an exciting objective for it's not associated with a platinum trophy(?), believe me I too am not a proponent of war just like them playstation 4 exclusives (pet your son now with 16 times the detail™), but I'm not one for turning the other cheek either. They say those who survive a long time on the battlefield start to think they're invincible - maybe my visions are dreamer-like or borderline schizophrenic? Whatever the case, let's make the skies tremble once more as we issue ragnarök.

I try not to focus too much on how I score a game, but I'm really at my odds with myself here. On the one hand, Ace Combat Zero is an Ace Combat game, which means there's a high baseline of enjoyment to be had. On the other, this is the 7th AC game I've played, and if the game doesn't bring something exciting to the table, my weariness is going to set in. And truthfully, this is the first time I've felt that there's truly so little that sets this game apart from its predecessors.

This game looks like AC4 and 5, it controls like them too. One thing you can count on to be different is the story, which to me took a bit of a back seat. The cutscenes, when they happen, tend to be quite long, but missions are generally short and these scenes only show up after knocking out a few. I wasn't all that invested in the plot, nor the characters, which you really need to be for one of the late game plot twists to deliver. There are some brilliant moments; while the final level fails to deliver a groundbreaking combat experience, it is a narratively epic conclusion, enhanced by another excellent, albeit often unmemorable, soundtrack.

Now we take a quick detour to the hangar, which I've neglected to discuss in detail in any prior review. This is for the simple reason that it just works, even if each game deviates from the last somewhat. 5 had my favourite implementation, as I often hit S Ranks, I felt rewarded in that I could buy any aircraft I wanted, and any excess money could be poured into buying spares for the rest of my squad. I prefer each plane having its own distinct special weapon, as it helps to set them apart. Zero returns to the way 04 handled things, which isn't my preference but is fine. Now you can get up to 3 special weapons for each aircraft, but... everything is so expensive! Despite getting S Ranks on 16/18 missions (on hard difficulty mind you), I could barely afford to buy anything! This, combined with the fact that you unlock the SU-37 barely an hour or so into the game, meant I rigidly stuck to the same couple of planes for the entire experience. Perhaps it's a fault of me that I didn't experiment, but I didn't felt that this game was at all conducive to doing so.

"Are the missions good?" I hear you ask. To that, my answer is a resounding "I guess." While I wouldn't necessarily single out any specific mission to call bad, I don't know if I could do the opposite either. Despite having a much shorter campaign than 5, the objectives here blend together into mush. Destroy air targets, destroy ground targets, destroy air and ground targets! It's almost nothing you haven't seen before and while this would serve as a solid if not fantastic introductory Ace Combat experience, it's so utterly lacking in individuality.

The core distinction in Ace Combat Zero is the 'yellow' targets. When shooting down certain aircraft, they are sometimes neutralized instead of destroyed. They are weak, using the last ounce of power to flee the battlefield. In this scenario, you can choose to shoot them down or let them live. This extends to certain ground targets also, such as windmills or tents which don't push your mission forward, but would 'harm' the enemy. Whether or not you shoot these down affects your Ace Style, which ranges from a cruel mercenary to a noble knight. You'd expect this to have some impact on the story, but as far as I can tell, it just affects the enemy squadrons you face throughout the game. These fights are fine, but just amount to simple dogfights that I rarely found to have anything distinguishing themselves from the countless other nameless aircrafts you face. It would be generous to call the system half-baked, as I'm not even sure it was put in the oven. If I wasn't playing these games back to back, directly contrasting them against each other, I might neglect to mention it altogether!

So while Zero serves as an incredibly solid dogfighting simulation by virtue of being an Ace Combat game, I don't feel as if it did the Belkan War justice. This is an iconic precursor to the events of the entire series, yet rarely has moments that earn it that stature.