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.
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.