Non-Ace Combat Ace Combats #1

‘Ace Combat’ defined the flight combat genre, but it doesn’t fly solo.

What is this? Well, as one might have surmised from other entries to this blog, I quite like the flight combat genre. Non-Ace Combat Ace Combats, will be an ongoing series of blogs that’ll receive a new post whenever I’ve played enough relevant titles to write about. I suspect many people might underestimate how much can actually be said about a style of game that carries a very similar — in the grand scheme of video games — core design philosophy from decades ago to this very day. However, I hope as you read along you come to understand the nuance of this space.

I’m not a huge collector kind of guy, but I do own a fair few of these games physically. Part of the reason is to replay — or play for the first time — as many as I can. So I figured why not record my thoughts on these Non-Ace Combat Ace Combats, as a means of criticism and for the sake of loose historical documentation. The genre’s popularity has certainly waxed and waned over the years, though recently we’ve seen a bit of a resurgence in the form of Ace Combat 7, Star Wars: Squadrons, Chorus, and the Everspace series to name a few.

This series will focus on a variety of titles from a variety of platforms across a significant span of time. I specifically use flight combat as a genre term rather than flight combat simulation because Ace Combat is far more approachable and arcade-like than games such as Flight Combat Simulator. The latter is usurpingly on the simulation end of the spectrum and is certainly distinct from any title I discuss here. To be fair, Ace Combat did not invent the flight combat genre either, but it has defined it. This is all to say that the title of this series, and my constant internalized and externalized questioning of “is this as good as Ace Combat” is an obvious bias on my part.

JASF: Jane’s Advanced Strike Fighters

Initial Release: 2011

Platforms: Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Windows

Developer: Trickster Games

Publisher: Evolved Games

Is this a secret anti-Iraq War game? I think one could reasonably make the argument that JASF is a reaction to the Iraq War, and at times, criticizes the invasion by the United States. However, this is also a commercial product. A reboot / reinvention of a series that has explicit ties to Jane’s Information Services. Jane’s, is an England based company that provides governments, military forces, and weapons manufacturers with intelligence to “help ensure global security.”

As I increasingly suspected there was a possibility that this game — which forms many of its objectives around blowing up public infrastructure or suspected enemy hideouts within dense urban spaces — could have a Spec Ops: The Line like twist waiting around any corner, reality set in. Even IF, the developers wanted to write this sort of story, would they be allowed by their publisher who were attempting to turn a profit on a “mainstream” version of a flight combat title? Would their licensing partners allow it? No, is undoubtedly the safest answer.

Azbaristan is not a real country. It, like many digital worlds, is inspired by very real places, in very obvious ways. Azbaristan is a Middle Eastern coded island nation, that is also a sort of amalgamation of other nationalities and places. There are names that seem vaguely Russian or eastern European, which given Russia’s common portrayal as the enemy of America across all sorts of fiction, tracks in some fashion. The reason it’s I reach for Middle Eastern beyond some of the names, is because of the plot details. A nation in a tense post-war peace between its two warring factions. The north is run by a military dictator. The south, aligned with the Western Democratic Alliance, AKA fake NATO. While no one ever says America, your character — callsign Razor — is very much coded as such. The WDA has agreed to this alliance, which includes sending over weapons and advisors/pilots, for the exclusive rights to purchase Azbaristan’s oil. Early on, a defector from the north becomes a key informant for the south, and he warns his new allies that the north has is developing nuclear weapons. This information proves unreliable, as the defector proves to be more interested in advancing his own machinations after a falling out with his former northern allies. If the broad premise of someone lying about intelligence regarding nuclear weapons all in order to get western powers help unseat a dictator for self-serving purposes sounds familiar to real life figure, Ahmed Chalabi…

For those unfamiliar with Chalabi, his family once held great power in Iraq prior to the July 14th Revolution in 1958, which Saddam Hussein participated in as a member of the Ba’ath Party which overthrew the western backed monarchy. After fleeing Iraq, Chalabi spent much time in the U.K. and U.S., where in the latter he grew close ties with members of the Pentagon and government. Eventually, this lead to his role as a major informant on the claim that Iraq was in possession of weapons of mass destruction, thus giving the George W. Bush administration public cover to invade, despite obvious reasons for skepticism of Chalabi and his sources. And hey, for good measure let’s not forget, Curveball. He was an actual defector, who was also a major source of these claims. In 2011, Curveball admitted his information was fabricated.

However, it turns out the WMDs of northern Azbaristan do exist, despite early information proving to be bad. This development, along with just about everything else, fades away towards the finale. You shoot down the defector, turned informant, turned betrayer in one final dogfight and stop the last WMDs from being used and yayyyyyyyy, Southern Azbaristan and their western allies have won!!!

But wait… what about the infrastructure they blew up? What about the bombing of dense urban landscapes? What about that time two tactical sized WMDs were heading for two separate locations? One a small town, and the other the military base you operate from. Your South Azbaristan commander ordered you to prioritize the one heading for the military base despite that meaning the other will hit its civilian target. None of this is addressed or commented on in any fashion in the closing minutes. Leaving us with the contradiction upon the Iraq War metaphor, but never swinging all the way around either.

JASF, is a game inline with my bias. Or at least it’s trying to be. Modern fighters, the control scheme, the heavy reliance on an amount of missiles and bombs that no-real world fighter can carry, and general mission structure could all fit right into Ace Combat. In fact, JASF had an interesting opportunity when it launched in 2011 — depending on your region — it did so roughly a week after Ace Combat: Assault Horizon. A game which has earned my ire and represents some of the worst American propaganda from video games of its era. Assault Horizon initially received fairly positive reviews from critics, but the fandom was less fond of the drastic departures. JASF could have filled a void, and yet it didn’t. For one, it was using a license associated with flight combat simulators. To have the series be revived after a decade only to be made into a more broadly appealing commercial product, led to disappointment among the franchise’s fans. Secondly, JASF was largely ignored, receiving few reviews and not much press. Of course, what ensured the death of the Jane’s series once more was a poor reception.

I would be lying if I said that JASF is much more than an interesting blip in the genre, and largely because of its perspective on American foreign policy. Flying feels both loose and stiff at the same time. There is an odd constant swaying to the camera that is disorienting. Missiles are unlimited but are on rather limiting cooldowns that can lead to moments where all you can do is fly around and wait. Combine this with their general unreliability, even on targets without countermeasures, and that waiting increases. All of this is compounded even further by the fact that all planes have set loadouts and you are given little info about what you may face each mission.

The production values aren’t there. Battles feel small, given you never fly with a wingman, and you rarely hear chatter from anyone but the two or three voices you hear ad nauseam. The sound mix is terrible, as those repeating voices are drowned out. The lock-on warnings are understated which makes dodging missiles an opaque affair. There are sharp peaks in the challenge of several missions given your limited means of dealing with incoming missiles, lack of wingmen, and the number of enemies. The developers seem aware of this given the generous frequency of checkpoints that will respawn you with full health. Mission variety is shockingly limited, a challenge that Ace Combat often finds clever ways to address. Something as simple as alternating weather patterns isn’t present here besides the final mission. Every other outing has you flying through a generally sunny sky. Of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that upon completing the final mission the game froze. I turned off my Xbox 360, booted it back up, only to receive a notification that my save file is corrupt. I went to YouTube to watch the closing cinematic and in the comments three out of the four had the same exact experience as me.

This isn’t to say JASF is devoid of mechanical satisfaction. Combat is… fine and even manages to hit moments of base satisfaction that the genre provides. More notably is the expansive singular map, which large chunks are carved out of for each mission. This creates for a cohesive world, where you get a sense for the arc of the war as you launch from the same handful of bases time and time again. Venturing out to new areas or familiar ones with different objectives. It’s a compelling idea that if used more effectively could been highly evocative. Imagine having a mission around a village with enemies advancing upon it and citizens fleeing, only to fly over it a few missions later and it’s a smoldering pile of rubble. Something fascinating could be done with this design. Chief word being “could.” JASF does little beyond the setup. Given that you hardly ever hear a non-military voice throughout the entire game, that pilots — friendly or otherwise — hardly ever speak, and much of the map looks very similar.

My notes as I played through JASF are a bit more extensive, but for the sake of brevity — well, I probably lost that a couple thousand words ago — I’ll cut myself off here. JASF: Jane’s Advance Squadron Fighters was supposed to be one of the worst games on the list of several dozen genre entries. When I picked it up at the Too Many Games convention outside of Philly, I expected some sort of “what the hell is this” comment from the sales person. As if the game was so unmarkable that they had forgotten they even stocked it. Yet, it’s not a terrible game. It’s fine…-ish. It’s at the very least far more interesting to write about than many games I play in a given year.

Blazing Angels: Squadrons of WWII

Initial Release: 2006

Platforms: Xbox 360, Arcade, PlayStation 3, Xbox, Wii, and Windows

Developer: Ubisoft Bucharest

Publisher: Ubisoft

Blazing Angels: Squadrons of WWII is functional. It’s decent. It’s not a bad game, but even in its general okay-ness, not much pops. To deploy a tired old game reviewer adage, it’s a real “fans of the genre” type of game. That’s me. I’m fans of the genre.

This isn’t my first time with Blazing Angels, at least the initial installment. I distinctly remember going to my local small town rental store in the waning years of such places and picking up a copy on the Xbox 360. A revisit has left me feeling less kind, but still appreciative. While Ace Combat’s … combat is often dominated by lock on missiles, the feeling of having to gun down bogeys with just your machine cannons can be rather satisfying. They require you to get in close, and to stick to their tail as the enemy makes desperate maneuvers. For the most part, the act of flying, which shockingly makes up a sizable portion of this, provides an entirely satisfactory loop.

The trouble is, damn near everything surrounding these basic actions. Encounter design relies heavily on waves of enemies that you progress through one at a time. There is very little variety in what you’re doing in any given mission. While most don’t last more than 10 minutes, some, such as Pearl Harbor, are rather tedious. When it does lean into a stealth or photography mission, there is very little going on that meaningfully differentiates from any other mission than the fact that the best part — the combat — has been stripped out.

This is nostalgia. Both mine and a intrinsically American kind. A part of me will always love the prevalent bloom lighting of the seventh generation, even though here it is hiding uneven production values and inconsistent art direction. It’s a visual style inspired by the cinematography of Steven Spielberg’s work which launched the WWII history boom of the early 2000’s. Spielberg's films and shows are often directly involved with the mythologizing of the “Greatest Generation.” Joyously recalling archetypal stock, and deeply American, characters like those who make up the squadron of the Blazing Angels. The big mouth New Yorker and the not particularly educated southerner with ample mechanical know-how. Or the stoic yes-man, always dutifully carrying out orders for his beloved stars and strips. All of whom, along with everyone else in the game repeat the most trite lines. Wishing they could get back home, slinging out shorthand names like Yanks or… less racially sensitive words, or screaming “tell my mom I love her” every few minutes. Each mission begins with the bare minimum information about what’s to come, gussied up with the cliches of Americana prose.

The Blazing Angels Forrest Gump their way through WWII, with little care for historical accuracy. Fighting Rommel alongside the British’s Desert Rats. Surviving Pearl Harbor. Then invading the shores of Normandy, and even taking the fight all the way to Berlin. All the while what little narrative hooks exist are at barely gestured at. Especially if you’re playing on Xbox 360, as later versions of the game add a little more complexity and drama to the main cast, but nothing that makes it feel like the story of the Blazing Angels as much as it is the story of WWII as it has been homogenized by years of American media on the subject.

I will probably sound like a broken record throughout these blog entries, but some of these games are exceptional at highlighting the little things Ace Combat gets right. Not only has that series perfected the use of radio chatter to tell A and B plots, flesh out characters, and give ambiance — all with far larger scripts admittedly — but production values as a whole have always been a major focus. Project Aces know that the way contrails of a missile arc across the sky, and maps that are more than fairly flat green and brown textures is key. Blazing Angels meanwhile has German Panzers invading the shores of Guadalcanal.

To be fair to Ubisoft Bucharest, its seems safe to assume the development cycle was far from perfect, given how common the issue has been in the industry. The team had just pushed submarine simulator, Silent Hunter III out the door in 2005. Of course Blazing Angels was 2006 and 2007 saw not only a sequel to Blazing Angels, but Silent Hunter IV and Chessmaster Grandmaster Edition as well.

Blazing Angels typifies my enjoyment of the middle ground of the genre. In the way fans of muso just keep slaughtering absurd quantities of enemies, I can just keep flying. Just keep getting on an enemies tail and subsequently watching them turn into a ball of fire, speeding to the earth below. Blazing Angels is, as I said at the top, functional at this central feature.

The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces

Initial Release: 2008

Platforms: Wii

Developer: Project Aces and Access Games

Publisher: Namco Bandai and Xseed

“Blue and white stretches out before me forever. I am engulfed in light. I fly in the sky, beyond this I know nothing.”

God damn, is that some primo Ace Combat prose.

In the world of Sky Crawlers, the endless cycle of war is literalized. Battles between nations no longer exist, and yet, humanity can not let go of war. To satiate the vaguely innate desire for conflict, two corporations engage in endless controlled combat. Kildren, bring this cyclical violence to human form. Genetically modified children who do not age, and upon their deaths in battle, are born anew with no memory of their previous self. They have no salvation from this life, no purpose beyond perpetual servitude in the name of their corporate owners.

In Innocent Aces, you are not a Kildren. You are callsign Lynx, identified by the black cat painted on your plane. You’re the youngest member of your squadron of typical human adults who have their own desires and dreams of life after service. You will one day, perish as your body gives way to old age, or is claimed in the fires of battle. Kildren have just arrived, and with only rumors to give shape to their true nature. However, the writing is on the wall. They are here to replace you.

Innocent Aces’ creation is also ironically cyclical. In 1998 the team at Namco, who would go on to be known as Project Aces, joined forces with animation studio Production I.G. to create a flight combat game about corpo-nations duking it out. Production I.G. had been riding the high of the cyberpunk film, Ghost in the Shell, which released in 1995 and was directed by Mamoru Oshii. In 2008 Sky Crawlers, animated by Production I.G. and directed by Oshii released. Later that year, Project Aces once again released a collaboration with the famed animation studio on a flight combat game with a story about warring corporations. Oshii would serve as a special advisor on the game.

In many ways, Innocent Aces feels like a side project. Comparatively, Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation released in 2007 on Xbox 360, and it is a far more expansive and graphically detailed experience. Part of this can be attributed to the Wii being a weaker console, without high definition capabilities. Missions feel like large skirmishes at their grandest scale, and more often than not small dogfights. Something Fires of Liberation went in the complete opposite direction of, arguably to a fault. Within the fiction of Sky Crawlers’ world, this does make sense, given that all out war isn’t what is occurring between these two corporations.

Planes explode with little falling debris and more often than not, objects simply vanish rather than having been replaced with a destroyed model. Combat in general is more straightforward. While sub-weapons exist in the form of unguided bombs, heavy cannons, and rockets, there are no lock-on missiles. There is also a simplistic version of a flight stick control scheme via the Wiimote and nunchuck. A novel, but not particularly enjoyable experience that I suspect greatly altered game balance. Your plane will always auto level out so you’re not upside down, and enemies are not particularly ferocious. Some of this is a result of minimal surface to air threats. Then there is the Z button, which is tied to a maneuver meter. Tail an enemy long enough and a meter fills up. Press Z and the camera takes a more cinematic angle as your plane automatically pulls off some fancy moves and places you right behind the targeted enemy, making for an easy kill. In some ways this feels like a precursor to Assault Horizon’s cinematic dogfight camera.

By in large, this is an Ace Combat. There are trench runs, giant flying fortresses, and a compelling presentation. Comms chatter narrates the battle and the state of the frayed relations of your wingmen, as well as the situation on the ground. Though planes are more in the vein of WWII fighters, than the modern ones of the mainline Ace Combat series, Innocent Aces handles, for the most part, like you’d expect from a Project Aces game.

Narrative spoilers from here on out.

As a prequel to the film, Innocent Aces’ is a story of transition. Conventional warfare has meant conventional soldiers with conventional commanding officers. However, when new leadership arrives, ousting the officer that the troops on the frontlines trust, in comes the more corporate inclined. Deputy Chief of Intelligence, Tohochika Mozuma is an obvious snake. With him, come his “project,” the Kildren. From the player’s perspective, Mozume’s disdain for traditional soldiers is obvious, clearly planning to rise to power with the success of his child soldier experiment. He targets Maumi Orishina, the only female Kildren of the batch within your squadron. Initially fostering a rivalry between you and her via a mock battle, all under the guise of testing out new fighters. The mock battle is cut short, but Orishina’s, who is the voice at the start of the game so clearly intoxicated by the deep blue sky, never fully recovers. She no longer desires the mere freedoms of a pilot’s life, but to fly and fight against the very best. Against you.

Sure, Innocent Aces has win states for each of its 17 missions and for its campaign, but its story- despite the idealistic prose it opens with — is a tragedy. In your somewhat literal meteoric rise to being the deadliest creature in the sky, you are the only one to breach the cloud of shrapnel and machine gun rounds. Mozume’s plan ends in his fiery death, but the transition away from human pilots to Kildren is a success. His plan to turn Orishina against you works, and above a castle situated upon a small island in a sea turned golden by the setting sun, you best Orishina. You grant her the wish to fight against the very best and send her plummeting back down from the skies from which you reign.

Time passes, the fight between corporations “settles” down. You remain at your post, seeing the return of the familiar faces of several Kildren, all of whom have no recollection of who you are. The final cutscene mirrors the opening. Instead of the veterans meeting up at the tavern to shoot the breeze and talk about their plans after retirement, the Kildren sit discussing one of the many fights that will no doubt be forgotten when their time comes.

“Blue and white stretches out before me forever. I am engulfed in light. I fly in the sky, beyond this I know nothing.”

Orishina’s opening narration begins again. She brings her plane down on the airstrip, once more arriving at Hariyu Base. She is mesmerized by the sky as she was in her past life, but this time something different happens. She approaches a pilot near a fighter emblazoned with a black cat. She salutes and calls him, calls you, teacher. Revealing that you are none-other than the Teacher. The feared veteran pilot — the final remaining human — who by the time of the film and the books has claimed countless Kildren lives who dare trespass upon his kingdom in the sky.