This was the natural next step after playing Electrosphere. Spoilers for all three games, obviously.

Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies - ★★★☆☆

People were talking about these games when I was still in high school. Somebody I used to talk to on AIM convinced me to pick up a used copy of Ace Combat 04 from Gamestop back in like, 2008, which I proceeded to play about 3-5 hours of before moving on to Persona 4. As I played Ace Combat 7 in 2020-ish and learned more about the franchise, friends who were more familiar with the series would talk about 04 in the same tones as one might speak about... well, Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne.

Like Nocturne, its "soft franchise reboot on the PS2" compatriot, Ace Combat 04 possesses a sort of mythic lacunosity (or, more sardonically, a bubble-like quality). There's not really much to them, but they're cleverly presented such that if you step back, squint a little, and get into the right headspace, a grander tapestry is evoked. They both have a silent, memetically-powerful hero in an almost mythological sense, a demigod slaughtering their enemies by the hundreds. They both cast long shadows upon their respective franchises, shadows that have arguably yet to be escaped.

Electrosphere's narrative is built almost entirely around introducing you to its futuristic cyberpunk setting and how its multiple layers of factions and actors interweave. Relatively speaking, it's ambitious and complex. 04 goes back to basics: it's a war story focused on big machines that people climb into and use to kill each other. Which is to say, it's mecha, a storied genre with well-established narrative conventions. Big Them are Winning The War and only one man in his experimental Mobile Suit RX-78 Gundam Air Superiority Fighter F-22A Raptor can beat them back, one episode mission at a time. Enemy MS-06 Zaku IIs Multi-Role Fighter Sukhoi Su-27s are mere chaff before your scythe made of 74 loaded missiles. War is bad and planes are cool.

You play as Mobius-1, the aforementioned silent pilot who grows from untested rookie to unstoppable god of battle over the course of the time it takes your PS2 to load from the briefing into the first stage. The ISAF (Independent State Allied Forces) seemingly do not ever win a battle without you there making sure of it by singlehandedly wiping out entire fleets. Your legend inspires allies and strikes fear into the heart of your enemies. By the game's halfway point, Erusean pilots are pissing themselves over radio chatter from the mere sight of "The Ribbon Fighter" in the skies. By the final mission, the game's soundtrack positions you as the literal Messiah purging Erusea's sins from the world.

This simultaneously histrionic and perfunctory epic is accompanied by the part of the story that gets put into "Ace Combat 04 All Cutscenes" videos on Youtube and tricks everybody (including me) into thinking Project Aces is capable of any sort of nuance. Occasional between-mission slideshows show the war from the perspective of a man reminiscing over his childhood in the city/state/city-state(??) of San Salvacion, Erusea's first target in their blitz across the Usean continent. By showing this all through the eyes of a child, there's less pressure to elaborate on precisely why Erusea is invading; they simply have, and it's upended every aspect of the narrator's life.

Said whys are vague, with only broad strokes touched upon in-game. The Ulysses 1994XF04 asteroid hit (the series' fictional version of) Earth in July 1999, exploding into thousands of fragments in the upper atmosphere that showered the planet's surface for weeks. Global implications are explored mostly in supplementary material or other games. When it comes to 04, one thing and one thing only matters: they built a big fucking gun in the desert. As the narrator puts it upon starting a new file:

"I was just a child when the stars fell from the skies. But I remember how they built a cannon to destroy them. And in turn how that cannon brought war upon us. War was an abstract idea, nothing more than a show on TV. As a child I only saw it as something that happened in some far away land... Until that final day of summer..."

Honestly the barometer for if you're the kind of person who can enjoy Ace Combat writ large is if you think an encirclement of giant railguns in the desert built to blast asteroids out of the sky on a continental scale and named "Stonehenge" is stupid (bad) or stupid (good). Stonehenge is the fulcrum of the entire game, arguably the entire series from then on. It codifies how Ace Combat isn't just about cool planes, or the horrors of war, or its strange-but-real constructed reality, it's about how you are the coolest ace ever and can defeat multiple absurd superweapons every game. For every atmospheric slideshow where the narrator describes in a slightly bizarre monotone how the occupying soldiers were charming and friendly to a child like himself and provided companionship to a boy whose family died due to their direct actions, there are two or three missions about Mobius-1 being the coolest dude.

I find myself thinking less about what the game actually presents to me, which isn't all that much, and more about what people have told me about Ace Combat 04. The legend of Mobius-1 is what people remember, what endures in the zeitgeist, despite the character's vacuity. Even the narrated cutscenes eventually pivot away from the quiet doldrums of living under occupation to focus on how Yellow-13 was the coolest dude, and because he was the coolest dude, you must be even cooler for shooting him down.

To be clear, none of the player characters in these games show any real character other than the buttons you push. They are all ciphers. It's just especially bizarre to see everyone lining up to suck off Mobius immediately after I played Electrosphere, a game that directly acknowledges how the player character is a faceless killing machine.

The temporal friction strikes again, I think. For me, the legend of the Continental War and Mobius-1 is that everyone keeps talking about how he's the coolest guy and then I finally play the game and it's really just that he's the only plane in the sky controlled by a human being. For others, there's been decades of mythologizing. The game's framing device only grows in power. Someone who played it in the 00s was likely also a child watching these grand heroes clash over a world-shattering weapon, and is now an adult who'll probably think, "What was Yellow 13 thinking as he disappeared into the blue skies? Did he smile as The Grim Reaper shot him down, content that The Coolest Flight Stick Alive had finally surpassed him?"

I'm out here wondering instead, "So why exactly did Erusea invade in the first place?" What was the point of it all?

Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War - ★★★★☆

I played the Arcade Mode first because I heard it unlocked the F22 earlier than normal in the campaign. Arcade Mode opens by saying Mobius-1 has the power level of an entire squadron and is the only dude bad enough to defeat the Erusean remnants. In case anybody was thinking I'm being too hard on how much the series idolizes him.

I describe 04 as basically mecha, and 5 kind of cements this vibe by starting to build an actual history of this strange but real world, not unlike Mobile Suit Gundam's Universal Century. In some ways, Strangereal is even more complex than the UC, which usually simplifies things into "Earth" and "Space," occasionally "Neo-Space." Similarly, Erusea might as well have been Enemy-topia; it was them against the "Independent State Allied Forces,", a vague entity representing Everybody Else on the Usean Continent. Now we're dealing with Osea and Yuktobania, Belka and Ustio, names that imply at least a smidge of specificity.

5 opens up with, "15 years ago, there was a war." In 1995, the Principality of Belka blitzed across the Osean Continent only to get completely wrecked by the Allied Forces (composed of the Osean Federation, former Belkan states Ustio and Sapin, and Yuktobania across the western ocean). To prevent a full counteroffensive, Belka detonated seven nuclear bombs on their own border, kicking their own ass so hard that everyone agreed to stop fighting. Some basic math (citing onscreen dates) thus places AC5 in SR 2010. 04 took place in... well, SR 2004, five years after the Ulysses asteroid hit in SR 1999.

(And, if one were so inclined to include it, Electrosphere's Intercorporate War happens in 2040... of the UGSF timeline, making it a prequel to Mr. Driller.)

Notably, we're dealing with completely different continents from last time. Usea is visible on the world map, and that's about it (other than the aforementioned Arcade Mode, which has no narrative influence on the main game). This massively expands the possibility space in the way that any good fictional world map at the front of a fantasy novel does. To a certain kind of person, this is catnip. It's one of my favorite types of sequel: the kind where it's barely a "sequel" at all. We're simply dealing with other things happening to other people in the same world. The previous stuff happened, of course, but that doesn't guarantee it's relevant to the matter at hand. We're five years later and on the other side of the planet. Stonehenge what? Megalith who? That's old news. Now we've got the Arkbird and the SOLG orbital weapon.

The plot proper is earnest melodrama of the like that continues to draw me to anime and Japanese games. The 15-year post-Belkan War peace is shattered when Yuktobanian forces attack Sand Island Air Force base, killing nearly every pilot there. The surviving rookies (including callsign Blaze, aka You) are reorganized into Wardog Squadron and find themselves on the front lines of the Circum-Pacific War, a bunch of fresh eyes on fresh wartime atrocities. They also become the public faces of the war effort to Osea, providing at least a nominally plausible reason why you're directly involved in pretty much every notable battle.

Rather than the lens of childhood memory and subdued melancholy, the story is framed through Wardog Squadron's embedded journalist, Albert Genette (that's right, the characters have names now!), who can comment freely on the unfolding theatrics. This immediacy allows for more conventional war-movie-style storytelling with accompanying archetypes like the grizzled father-to-his-men captain and the seen-it-all mechanic, and the accompanying focus on character dovetails with the brand-new wingman mechanics, where not only can you order your little plane posse to fire, focus, or fan out, but you can also perform the unprecedented in-flight maneuver of answering basic Yes/No questions.

This is not to be underestimated. Providing the player with even cursory choice of contribution and corresponding conversation creates considerable cohesion in the chronicle of Wardog Squardon. You can interact with them, so now they have names. They are characters who talk to each other. They may be cringe, but they are also your precious wingmen who carry extra QAAMs. And hey, maybe your wingmen being a little cringe makes you look a bit cooler by comparison, since you must always be the coolest person in the room.

Ace Combat 5 looks at 04's Yellow-13 and dares to ask: What if you played as the cool ace from the story cutscenes who's captain of a whole squadron of badasses and whose wingman is a hot lady? And what if basically every character including The President repeatedly noted how your deeply devoted wingman who's sworn to protect you and follow your orders is very pretty and attractive and lounges around the air base in a tank top? 5 arguably gasses up the player just as much as 04, but at least has the decency to include the rest of your team in the proceedings, even if only by association. In-story, it is less Blaze himself who rises to mythic status so much as Blaze and the Pussycats.

After they blow up a Yuktobanian mega submarine, the legend of Wardog Squadron is cemented when Yuktobanian soldiers assign them the epithet of the "Demons of Razgriz," after an in-universe fairy tale about a demon that causes destruction, dies, then rises again as a hero. This poses a problem: now they're a symbol, to both sides. A symbol that doesn't do what the people in power want is an inconvenience. This culminates in a mission where you have to do a ceremonial fly-by over a stadium while the Vice President of Osea makes a pro-war speech. He is summarily booed off-stage by the entire crowd singing a peace anthem.

The very next mission, the extremists in control of the government try to have you killed. Wardog Squadron are branded as traitors and fake their own deaths to escape. This sudden turn is attributed to... gasp, the true enemy behind it all! Turns out that hardliner Belkans ("The Gray Men"), still pissed off about kicking their own ass, have basically infiltrated major institutions around the world and also founded Lockheed Martin for the express purpose of instigating hostilities. The heroes, now dubbed the "Ghosts of Razgriz," and their small band of allies on both sides must fight an unsung war (eh? eh?) to end this pointless conflict, et cetera.

Attributing the entire war to The Secret Bad Guys feels a little too neat, or at least it did a couple months ago when I first played this. Over just a matter of weeks, it's become keenly obvious that the assholes at the top don't need a good reason to go to war, and will in fact do so for any number of stupid, petty reasons, including just because they feel like it. Targeted global destabilization on the grounds of "make Belka great again" is frighteningly plausible.

What still does feel a bit too neat is how it wraps up. Both the Osean and Yuktobanian heads of state, who are pro-peace, were kidnapped and detained (not simply killed? for some reason??) by the Gray Men, leaving right-wingers in their respective governments free to wage war for plain ol' jingoism. You save them, they give a big joint speech about peace and harmony, and everything turns out fine after you blow up the evil satellite.

In certain flavors of media, "war" as a concept is often akin to some kind of infection or festering wound. It will continue to expand and harm unless the pathogens are dealt with, the splinter removed. Then society will simply reverse course and heal; if you're lucky, there might be a narrative scar. In other contexts (bonus points if you can figure out which middling one-off seasonal mecha show of the past decade specifically inspired the phrase) I have referred to this as the protagonists pushing the "Stop-All-War Button." Peace reigns one again. Roll credits.

I feel like I'm perpetually torn on this. I've never quite been comfortable with the "war never changes" school of narrative thought, the idea that humanity is always fundamentally flawed and that media depicting our atrocities is somehow more spiritually True. But I also can't deny that solving all our problems by defeating the great evil can feel somewhat childish or simplistic. Is this just negativity winning out? Have I lost all hope to the point where I think "we will always destroy ourselves" somehow has more nuance than "we will one day make it through," or is it just the ebb and flow of depression and the times?

At minimum, we've definitely improved over 04 and the great messiah-god-soldier Mobius-1 singlehandedly beating back the hordes of Enemy-topia. By adding more data points to the timeline, the series' modern myth-making has gained context and room to explore. What was Usea going through in SR 2010? How did Yuktobania react to the Ulysses impact? These are questions we can ask and honestly feel like there might be answers. We see firsthand how the Ghosts of Razgriz are as much Osean propaganda as demon legend. And even past that, they have names. They are simply human in the end.

But. They are humans who live in the Strangereal. As we've established, Ace Combat is mecha, where melding of machine and man can move heaven and earth. Put them in a cockpit, and a human can become something more.

(Go Nagai's Mazinger Z, 1972)

Perhaps a human could become an Ace. I'm told there are three kind of Aces.

Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War - ★★★★★

As corporate greed guts game developers globally, the concept of rapid, iterative, asset-flip franchise entries that build upon each other feels increasingly like a lost art, a fading flight of fancy. Some all-timer franchise entries like Yakuza 0, Majora's Mask, or Fallout: New Vegas re-use old systems wielded with the power of experience and hindsight, often to the point of being considered superior to scare-quotes "mainline" titles. And really, they made up a whole second war in 5 that we didn't get to see, so why not use every part of the buffalo?

What Zero immediately has over its PS2 siblings is sheer style. Ominous Latin chanting is all well and good (and it's still here), but the flamenco guitar immediately establishes a vibe. It feels more specific and pointed than the broad wartime grandeur of 04 and 5. The new terminology is also instantly evocative: Area B7R, a massive desert flat on the Belkan border that serves as principal battleground (read: boss arena) in the war, comes to be known as "the Round Table." So, naturally, the aces who duel in the skies above are the "Knights of the Round Table." Goddamn. That rules.

Aside: I wish I was as brave as the writers of Ace Combat and willing to just straight up use real folklore in a secondary setting, something I still have weird hang-ups about that I wish I didn't. Like, "Stonehenge" is generic enough to work without too many caveats (presumably a notable henge made of stone existed at some point in the Strangereal) and Razgriz is mostly original, but if you're a certain kind of person, Belka's big laser tower being called "Excalibur" starts to bring up questions.

The entire Belkan War was just a quick montage in 5; we get a bit more detail of the lead-up here. Between SR 1987 and SR 1992, Belka was going through an economic crisis. They allowed some of their eastern territories to secede (including Ustio) and sold part of their western territory to Osea. Following this, "an extreme right-wing party" won control in the next round of Belkan elections, dismantled federal separation of powers, packed the Supreme Court, and cranked up the military spending that caused the recession in the first place. Upon discovering a wealth of vaguely-defined "natural resources" in Ustio, they began their blitz across the continent in a bid to make Belka great again.

(Aside, again: oof)

The player character here - Galm-1, callsign "Cipher", alias "Demon Lord of the Round Table" (hell yeah) - is not part of a state military. Instead, he's one of many mercenaries hired by Ustio after most of their Air Force is wiped out in the first days of the war. Mobius might as well have been the divine sword signifying the mandate of heaven, and Blaze the chosen king leading his army into glorious battle. They fight to prove that heroes will always rise against the darkness, to protect the end of history from the sickness called war. Cipher fights to get paid. Like Electrosphere's Nemo, you're just a bullet loaded into a gun and fired toward the enemy. Your only agency is in how you slaughter the opposition.

This takes the form of your "Ace Style," a pseudo-morality spectrum based on your piloting. Ruthlessly destroying as many targets as possible for the biggest paycheck moves you towards Mercenary ("those who seek strength"), ignoring neutral blips and sparing disabled planes pushes you towards Knight ("those who live for pride"), and threading the line between the two keeps you in the middle Soldier zone ("those who can read the tide of battle"). The events of the Belkan War itself are broadly set in stone, but what kind of pilot Cipher was changes the context of the narrative.

Said narrative uses a style of presentation I have a soft spot for: the mockumentary. Rather than an embedded journalist, all the non-gameplay cutscenes are stated to be from Warriors and the Belkan War, an Osean TV programme airing in SR 2005. This hits the perfect midpoint allowing the half-remembered, folkloric tone of 04 to meld with the war film melodrama of 5. It also lets the narrative glide off 5's groundwork; as the trailer notes, this game is in "An Unchangeable World." We already know exactly how the Belkan War ended, including how - for many - it never truly did. In later sequels and remakes of older games alike, the specter of Belka looms.

As the game progresses, the documentarian interviews other Knights of the Round Table, with different characters appearing based on which bosses you fought, whom are in turn based on your Ace Style. Though Cipher is perhaps just as much a mythic being as Mobius, his influence ripples outward in a more material sense. The nameless child remembering Yellow-13 could be anyone; the people here have names. This all happens in gloriously cheesy FMV with live actors being dubbed over with voice actors; the effect is both utterly comical and surprisingly grounding. Seeing actual human beings - no matter how silly the dialogue - helps sells the idea that the world is real, despite its strangeness.

And it's not just limited to the faces in the doc. Every ace across every single mission gets a name and bio in the records menu. That loser in the MIR-2000D you shot down in the second mission had a family. This further increases the feeling of specificity, the illusion of depth. Hundreds of aces were out there in the skies. They all contributed to the war, offscreen or on. In theory, any of them could have been interviewed. It's just that this specific documentary decided to zoom in on the mercenary who ruled the Round Table.

Tying it all together is Larry "Solo Wing Pixy" Foulke, your buddy boy himself, whose interview in November SR 2005 is presented as the game's main through-line. Basically blend all three of Blaze's wingmen from 5 together but substituting all hope for a brighter future with war-weary cynicism, and you'll get an idea. Enemy pilots start out the game fearing him instead of Cipher. He's the type of character who, instead of asking stuff like, "Why must this pointless war continue?" says things like, "You gotta learn to accept what war is, kid."

Since (if you played 5) you know how the war ends, Belka's inevitable nuclear detonation looms over the whole narrative as the ultimate expression of pointless, stupid military excess. It's thus a bit of a twist when June 6, SR 1995 crops up in a mission only about two-thirds through the game and ends with the already disillusioned Pixy shooting you in the back, deciding this whole War business ain't worth it, and defecting to the multi-national organization literally called "A World With No Boundaries." The battle against them is characterized as the hidden truth behind the Belkan War or what have you.

It's made clear that A World With No Boundaries is not the same as the Belkan Grey Men. You see, the Grey Men want to nuke all the world's major cities to make Belka great again. A Word With No Boundaries wants to nuke all the world's major cities to obliterate the concept of nations. Completely different.

Ace Combat is often compared to the Metal Gear Solid series - they both certainly have a certain flavor of military melodrama - but Zero feels the most in conversation with MGS, coming out around 18 months after Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. MGS3 is all about how enemies are defined by borders and the times.

Quoting The Boss:

"Is there such thing as an absolute timeless enemy? There is no such thing and never has been. And the reason is that our enemies are human beings like us. [...] Politics, economics, the arms race - they're all just arenas for meaningless competition. I'm sure you can see that. But the Earth itself has no boundaries."

Meanwhile, Pixy:

"Can you see any borders from here? What has borders [sic] given us? We're going to start over from scratch. [...] There's no mercy in war. People live and people die. That's all there is to it."

Metal Gear Solid uses later entries to examine how a world with no boundaries may be impossible because every individual has a different idea of what that means and how to achieve it. Major Zero believes this means placing the entire world under a single governing body and spends his life creating systems to manipulate global war. Big Boss, disillusioned with how borders and the times care not for the welfare of people within them and how, resolves to make a refuge for soldiers where they aren't beholden to national interests.

Ace Combat Zero isn't that concerned with the specifics of the ideology. Its final confrontation feels born more out of narrative necessity. All three PS2 AC games use the threat of widespread nuclear disaster as their final conflict, and they have to make sure Pixy stays a sympathetic character despite threatening to carry out widespread nuclear disaster. "A World With No Boundaries" is vaguely appealing enough to hit the right threshold of theatrics while staying on theme for Strangereal's adherence to military/mecha fiction.

A World With No Boundaries is doomed to lose not because Zero is a prequel, but because there must always be another war, as there must always be another game. The world of the Strangereal only gets worse as they squeeze blood out every possible gap in the timeline between the Belkan War and Electrosphere's Intercorporate War. However briefly, the final cutscene acknowledges this: Pixy's "unknown battlefield" in November SR 2005 flies the flag of 04's ISAF.

The myth of the hero Mobius-1 is that he ended the Continental War in September SR 2005; forever struck down the vile, fascist Erusean remnants in SR 2006. But that's on the scale of fable and folklore, tales of the stars in the grand stage of the sky. On the ground, the fighting never stops.

"The world won't change for the better unless we trust people. Trust is vital in a peaceful world. But that will never happen," Pixy says. "I'm still on the battlefield."

It's true that it will never "happen." If we could just push the Stop-All-War Button and live happily ever after like in the legends? How grand! How lovely! The myth is fiction. Mobius-1 will not save us from our sins. The myth is propaganda. Razgriz will not rise from the sea and rain destruction on our enemies. The myth is necessary. It inspires the thought that someone will fight the good fight. Cipher is as the name implies. It could be anyone, even you.

The world keeps turning. No victory nor defeat is permanent. The war against fascism, capitalism, ultra-nationalism is a never-ending battle. As long as we're still alive, we can imagine a better world. We can reach towards the boundless sky.