Story told by cutscenes is the melodramatic ridiculousness that I remember from six with the more interesting moments both character wise and thematic coming from the in mission dialogue. Story about how war is bad and there are drones but drones are bad so human pilots should be fighting in the wars instead of drones, and going to space, and drone country took over a lot of other countries taking the culture and language of those countries away from the natives which is bad but they should also just move on so everyone can come together to watch the only not useless pilot (MC) shoot down the super drones. Some story moments and characters do seem to tie into Ace Combat 0 and 5, which I have not played.
As far as I remember this plays like the Ace Combat 6 with no real improvements other than having missions that tend to change things up more with the environment or how you go about destroying targets, which can lead to some nice sights but more often than not the missions changing things up are easy, shorter, and lack the more intense fights of larger air battles or the more story heavy or fun moments of flying around the battlefield supporting your allies in larger fights. I think that's the thing I miss most from my memory of six, a lot of that game was fighting with the same groups of air, vehicle, infantry, and support crafts and you choosing who to help or helping everyone in time could change dialogue, mission medals and who survives, having more larger battles and allied communication is something I'd take over flying through a sandstorm to locate enemy vehicles with noting really posing a threat to your plane or your allies. Having so many allied groups over and over again gave you more of a connection with them unlike here where your support is frequently changing. Having less story significant enemy aces appear in most missions of some of the previous games that you may or may not shoot down also felt better than the one story guy appearing every now and then to do impossible maneuvers until you hit him with 8 missiles to get him to leave.
The game is a lot of fun though, even more so in larger battles, so it's just a shame so much time is spent with what are basically tutorial missions or doing really simple things like guiding bombs or flying in low viability areas against a couple normal targets. Really could have used more larger and more challenging battles.
As far as I remember this plays like the Ace Combat 6 with no real improvements other than having missions that tend to change things up more with the environment or how you go about destroying targets, which can lead to some nice sights but more often than not the missions changing things up are easy, shorter, and lack the more intense fights of larger air battles or the more story heavy or fun moments of flying around the battlefield supporting your allies in larger fights. I think that's the thing I miss most from my memory of six, a lot of that game was fighting with the same groups of air, vehicle, infantry, and support crafts and you choosing who to help or helping everyone in time could change dialogue, mission medals and who survives, having more larger battles and allied communication is something I'd take over flying through a sandstorm to locate enemy vehicles with noting really posing a threat to your plane or your allies. Having so many allied groups over and over again gave you more of a connection with them unlike here where your support is frequently changing. Having less story significant enemy aces appear in most missions of some of the previous games that you may or may not shoot down also felt better than the one story guy appearing every now and then to do impossible maneuvers until you hit him with 8 missiles to get him to leave.
The game is a lot of fun though, even more so in larger battles, so it's just a shame so much time is spent with what are basically tutorial missions or doing really simple things like guiding bombs or flying in low viability areas against a couple normal targets. Really could have used more larger and more challenging battles.