Note: This is only a partial review. I will eventually go back to it and finish the game when its performance issues around visual memory and storage have been resolved, but as a note I bailed out on Mission 25 out of 30 – meaning I finished approximately 83 percent of the campaign.
Ace Combat is one of those game franchises that you aren’t really supposed to take too seriously. One video essayist’s summation of the series rings true to me when they say something to the effect that these are games less about being a fighter pilot and more about capturing the sense of being a kid whipping die-cast fighter jet models around in the yard, imagining all the epic dogfights and romantic battles of wills they entail. Personally, the games occupy the same space in my mind that I’ve carved out for mecha anime and games like Armored Core and Daemon X Machina. Planes is mechs, the preternaturally gifted ace is a newtype/augmented human, et cetera. I have been a prime target for a new Ace Combat game for years at this point. I even went back and played through Ace Combat 7 this fall to get ready for Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve. It was a game I fully expected to finish, and to really be chewing on, and to be excitedly chatting about in my DMs, and to come here and write something glowing about it.
Instead I’m six missions away from credits and I’m clicking “remove” in Steam. I’m so fucking close, but I can’t do it, man. I have other shit to do.
Performance issues abound
The first thing Ace Combat 8 told me after I finished downloading its massive 140-gigabyte package onto my relatively cramped 500gb SSD was that I needed to download the Nvidia app and update my graphics card drivers, because there were major known issues with the drivers I had installed. This is the first time a game has gone out of its way to tell me to do something like this and so I did it, not wanting my experience to be hampered by whatever errors or issues might be caused by ignoring the clear warning signs. When I finally finished downloading the app, downloading and installing the drivers, restarting my computer, and restarting the game, I still had to wait several minutes for it to compile shaders – a thing it has done every single time I’ve started it since.
Now, me, I like to think I’m pretty good at ignoring or at least accepting software stuff like this. I don’t get mad very easily. I played damn near all of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and Final Fantasy XVI on a Steam Deck (the latter through Nvidia’s GeForce Now stuff) and I let those awful graphics wash over me like water over a duck’s back. This was mainly because the performance was good and I could at the very least see and understand where I was going and what I was doing during those playthroughs. With Ace Combat 8 my experience has only gotten progressively worse.
It started with a few frame stutters and audio cuts that seemed to only happen during the first few minutes after I booted up the game. It not-so-gradually grew into a problem that plagued me every time I started it up. Waiting up to a half-hour to play Ace Combat 8 every time I turned it on became the expectation, even after turning my graphics settings to Low. So I stopped quitting the game after each session, and fucking bafflingly, I had fewer problems (except the very big one of leaving a monster game like this on when you go to bed). This culminated in what I can only describe as the worst case of lag spike, frame drop and texture pop-in I have ever seen as I booted the game up for the last time only to be physically incapable of playing the fucking mission I was on. I was getting maybe 5 frames per second on a laptop I bought last November with an RTX 4050 inside it. This was the last straw, for me; it unfortunately wasn’t the only straw.
Press X to…
One of the big changes to Ace Combat 8 was in making our pilot, callsign “Rex,” the “focal point” character in the interstitial storyline that took place between missions. This is unusual for the Ace Combat series, which has always previously utilized third-party outsider perspectives to tell the story of a given war. Ace Combat 7‘s whole deal, for example, was that we got internal monologues from a handful of crucial characters, namely the gifted prisoner-mechanic Avril and the scheming Dr. Schroeder. As the game progressed and these characters converged in real-time, hearing them over our comms channel during sorties felt more meaningful; these characters had been off doing their own thing, which coincided with us doing our thing, and now we all need to end the war together in our own ways. In other games, the interstitial story followed characters who weren’t military at all, like Ace Combat 6‘s focus on an Emmerian refugee looking for their daughter, or Ace Combat 4‘s depiction of life in occupied San Salvacion told through letters to Mobius 1.
With Ace Combat 8, the focus is on – and through – Rex at all times, starting in the prologue when you’re stranded on a life raft with an Air Force mechanic as he tells you about the war you presumably just experienced. This insistence on a first-person perspective means basically that anything we don’t personally witness doesn’t really matter. And this kinda sucks, man! The entire game is about the value and utility of propaganda, especially in a world with AI slop in it, and we rarely get the perspectives of the people being propagandized to. And when we do get those perspectives, they’re solely from other military units. It isn’t until near the very end of the game that we get a distinct voice from someone else at all, and it’s just a random IRL streamer broadcasting his own footage of the war as he happens to be witnessing it. And when I tell you this isn’t consequential at all, I mean that it’s a struggle to even hear the guy over the competing radio chatter.
Now, the way I just described this, you might assume that this is a typical first-person-perspective adventure game, or something similar to a modern Call of Duty at the very least: you’re in control of your meat suit to some degree, even during cutscenes. I wish that was the case, but no – Ace Combat 8 completely restricts your movements and actions to hitting a flashing green QTE button. Want to shake someone’s hand? Press X. Want to move from cover point to cover point? Press X. Want to drink tea from a cup? Press X. It’s quite silly, and I simply did not enjoy this – especially when the game forced me into it while flying the fucking jet airplane. That’s right: the game will make you look at something like land battleship tracks on occasion by hitting the fuckin QTE mark. And it will not go away!
It’s not all bad
I want to be clear before I get into my final gripes with Ace Combat 8 that I did not hate everything about my time with it. When the game isn’t lagging or dropping frames, it looks gorgeous, even on Medium and Low settings. The work Project ACES has done on multiple cloud layers is quite frequently breathtaking. The same can be said about the way they’ve laid out the terrain, and made cities feel more dynamic during battles with things like building damage. There were a handful of dogfights which felt really special to me. And of course the music, composed once again by Keiki Kobayashi, is pulling overtime to boost the overall vibe of the game. There’s one track in particular, which plays in the hangar and airplane tree in the latter half of the game, that sounds so good I literally spent 20 minutes letting it bop on repeat.
I wish I had more to say here. It feels bad to be like “yeah I mean the music tries valiantly to carry it” and end it there, but it is what it is.
Ground pounding
Part of the romance of an Ace Combat game is getting to live out the fantasy of whipping metal jet models around your head as a seven-year-old again – that is, dogfights. Some of the series’ key moments come from feverishly performing endless high-G turns and stall maneuvers, you and your enemy-equal surrounding each other in an Itano Circus of ordnance while they finally reveal their ultimate ideals, what it means to be a knight of the skies, to them. It’s goofy, often nonsensical, usually has nothing to do with why the countries you represent went to war in the first place, and just as frequently ends with you besting your foe, and their final words bestowing you with the honor of Being Da Best Fighter Pilot In Da World* while telling you how to end the war swiftly and decisively for honor’s sake. Ace Combat 8, up to the point I’ve stopped playing, is lacking in this to a pretty significant degree.
This isn’t to say there are no missions with difficult, interesting or pulse-pounding dogfights, but part of the problem is that the enemy faction of Expert Fighters in AC8 – Lux Lunae, aka the Shadows of Sotoa – basically don’t take you seriously at all until the last minute, because the whole conceit of you in this game is that you are supposed to be a fiction thought up by a corporate marketer trying to ingratiate himself with your country’s panicked and desperate military. You’re literally just supposed to be a propaganda device, not someone with actual skills. As a result, most, if not all of the interesting aerial combat missions take place in the latter half of the game when they start to get wise to your shit. What we are left with is a seemingly-endless procession of ground-focused missions where our job usually is to take out as many targets in a limited amount of time as possible. And like…
It’s not that I hate ground missions…
I’ve just… I’ve come to despise them just a little bit after playing through the bulk of AC8. They drag on for a long time, a good deal of them are single-checkpoint runs, which means any mistake sets you back to zero, and just… I don’t think the game gives you good enough anti-ground weaponry early enough to make these missions anything other than a slog. I spent a lot of time in these missions, of which there are a significant number, sort of just lazily flying in circles above clusters of targets, taking them out two at a time with regular missiles or hoping my unguided bombs hit their marks. It was either that or try to spread myself out between two or three fronts in an escort-flavored ground mission where I had to do the job of two or even three full fighter pilot squadrons – either because my wingmen wouldn’t disperse to take out targets or the story-provided “other” squadrons were so incompetent they got taken out by easily-dodged weaponry. Either way, I didn’t find these missions particularly fun or interesting, and more importantly I found their ratio to the types of missions I did enjoy to be way too high. Add in the aforementioned performance issues and maybe you can understand why I quit the game early.
Electric Dreaming
I do desperately need to talk about the story and characters in this game, because even if they’re about at the level of previous Ace Combat games in terms of silliness, I could still feel this very strange and… immense…? sense that with Ace Combat 8, Bandai Namco and Project ACES are that much closer to finally closing a loop they opened 27 years ago. So I kind of need to talk out of pocket for a bit.
The geopolitics of Strangereal have always been incoherent. These are countries whose traditions and histories we’re only ever seeing bird’s-eye glimpses of, and almost always in the context of a war with another evenly matched country or enemy faction. Attempts have been made with previous Ace Combat games to square this circle, and Bandai Namco themselves have published resources which attempt – or claim – to help in this regard, such as the Aces At War artbooks – but trying to make sense of the geopolitical, historical and ideological flows of this world, especially against the context of IRL, has always been a little foolish. Nationalism(s) exists, very clearly in some cases; does imperialism also exist in this world? Are there other socioeconomic and political formulations in Strangereal than contemporary neoliberal capitalism? We don’t know and the games rarely bother to give us hints. It doesn’t help that not all Ace Combat games bother with stories, and that not all of those stories are even set in Strangereal itself. Most germane to this discussion, it wasn’t until Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere that the “arc” the main numbered Ace Combat games have followed was established in the first place.
Electrosphere… is a weird game to talk about. Chiefly because I haven’t played it, but relatedly because when it came out in the US, Namco Hometek basically stripped the game for parts, leaving only the bones of its main storyline behind. The full game – with all the different characters, factions, and permutations of the story – has never officially been translated into English, and fans have put in significant amounts of effort into trying to put the game back together again. Project NEMO, the chief fan translation project for the game, was still working on revisions as of 2023. But there are key details about the game that are pretty well known which help me establish the timeline and endpoint of the series arc: Electrosphere is set in the 2040s during a so-called intercorporate war. Nations have been abolished in favor of what extremely charitably might be called an anarcho-capitalist utopia (or more realistically, a corporate fiefdom) on the Usean continent; people have uploaded their consciousnesses into the Internet; and fighter pilots are still mercenaries, pseudo-knights, terrorists and everything in between. It’s worth mentioning that Ace Combat 3 is the canonical first entry in the so-called United Government Space Force History, an official Bandai-Namco chronology that includes Galaga, Galaxian, Star Ixiom, Dig-Dug and Mr. Driller. And also fucking Pac-Man through Shadow Labyrinth. Completely separately, Ridge Racers 5, 6 and 7 all connect at least tangentially to Electrosphere as well. Bandai pls
After Electrosphere, Project ACES rolled Ace Combat back into more attainable territories, with each entry either telling a story about a past war (Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War released in 2006 but took place in Strangereal’s 1995) or sticking close to the game’s release date. I want to say that the idea behind this was to give players a sense of contemporaneity, a feeling that, through the thin glass portals of their television screens, a war was happening in a place much like (but not quite) ours, and it was one they could not only win but end. So Ace Combat 4: Shattered Skies (2001) detailed the “2003 Continental War,” Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War (2004) takes place in 2010 during a war between the thinly-veiled superpowers of Osea (USA) and Yuktobania (Russia/China), Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation (2007) details “the 2015 Emmeria-Estovakia War,” and Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown (2019) is all about the “2019 Lighthouse War.” (“what about all the other games” shut up)
Throughout all of these games, which, mind you, feature licensed and lovingly detailed depictions of real-life fighter jets from the real world’s top defense contractors and weapons manufacturers, the message they all ultimately try to send is:
- War bad
- Countries/borders probably also bad?
- War worse if technology used to make war easier
- World peace 🙂
I’ve seen it said that this makes these games particularly strange, being war games that end up being opposed to the kind of atrocities and heartaches real wars cause. They’re games that are very much concerned with the human costs of war, and not in like a “Spec Ops: The Line heh I tricked you into white phosphorescing a bunch of refugees” type of way, but in a way that feels earnest and naive, almost childlike. The last game in the series, Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown, ended its conflict with an all-out battle between human forces comprised of both Erusean, Osean and international peacekeeping forces, versus an entirely automated dreadnought controlling an army of drones and AI-controlled fighter jets trained on the flight telemetry of Erusea’s best pilot, [inhales]
And when that mission is over, the princess of Erusea abdicates the throne and helps establish an anarchist commune at the base of the international space elevator in honor of the anarchist ex-con who saved her life.
And I mean, it’s a nice thought, right? That Ace Combat has secretly been the most radical video game franchise of all time right the fuck under our noses, that Project ACES and (bewilderingly) Bandai-Namco have surpassed Chumbawamba in the art of “ingratiating themselves with the warmonger just to spit in the warmonger’s face.” I think that it’s probably too nice a thought, and that the answer, depressingly, is much more cynical.
Wings of Scheme
Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve is a 2026 military game where you portray a fighter pilot, callsign “Rex,” alternately “Joker 1,” “Ray” (as in Amuro (not really (kind of really tho))), “Wings of Theve,” “Wings” or “Featherhead” by people who hate you. While most of those callsigns are concrete, actual nicknames for you, “Wings of Theve” is a fiction crafted by Lucas DĂez Doniphan, a literal fucking venture capitalist corporate ally taking refuge on the aircraft carrier you’re on, in order to generate (yes I mean that in the way you’re thinking) positive, uplifting propaganda on social media while the Federation of Central Usea, your country, gets torn apart by the marauding Republic of Sotoa. This is explained to you, the player, in the form of a 25-minute nigh-unskippable segment where you do not fly an airplane and everyone talks to you about it. Ace Combat 7‘s initial time to sortie is like two minutes by comparison, and everything we need to know is explained at the briefing or in the air. But I digress.
Crucially, Wings has never actually shot anyone down, despite being lauded by Doniphan and the FCU Navy as a double-ace (ten or more aerial enemy kills). The original inheritor of the title, Jan “Rex” Cope, who dies within that 25-minute unskippable segment, is happy to use his aerobatic skills to inspire friends and instill fear in the hearts of enemies, but no further. And the flight he led, Joker Flight? Just as allergic to pulling the trigger. Still, when Cope is shot down by an enemy ace, and you, his one-time weapons systems officer, grab his dog-tags as you swim away from the wreckage, you are asked to step into his shoes and become Wings yourself. The rest of the game is you establishing your own legend in the face of corporate subterfuge, rampant dis- and misinformation spread, and increasingly dire stakes. You develop a new and different relationship with your flight, which includes a genius teenage pilot whose mother was incapacitated in a previous war, a botanist-astronaut-university-lecturer with many of the best lines of dialogue in the game, and a bassist. They come to think of you, and themselves in relation to you, differently. I honestly don’t hate some of the beats AC8 runs through with them. I am endeared to my squad in a similar way to how I was endeared to Trigger’s many different squadmates, and how I came to really love Pixy, etc.
But maybe due to the way the game tries to railroad you from scene to scene, or because of the sometimes-overt and heavy-handed Gundam references and nods I was picking up, or because of the frustrations I was feeling with regard to the performance of the game, I felt my patience running thin. And that’s probably why, when I got to a very crucial moment in Ace Combat 8‘s story, I realized the jig was up.
Explicit story spoilers for AC8 ahead.
At some point, the XO of the carrier you’re stationed on, Jessica Pike, begins to suspect a spy in your midst. Not a spy for Sotoa, specifically, but a corporate one. Immediately all signs point to Doniphan, who is just kinda sleazy in addition to being a stooge for Enso Order, the company he works for. He starts doing a bunch of work that singularly benefits the FCU to re-ingratiate himself with the Navy, and this eventually leads to Enso Order firing him and frying his smartphone. Lucky for the Navy, Doniphan is sleazy, and decides that his summary termination means any NDAs he signed are null and void. So he spills the beans on what Enso Order was trying to do the entire time, and reveals that the company is a DAO, or “decentralized autonomous organization.” Basically imagine Amazon, Microsoft and Palantir but nobody knows what the org chart looks like. Enso has been trying to manipulate countries around the world into essentially dissolving while letting it do all the work of running things for them for a generous fee. Their goal is to essentially eliminate all borders under the unifying freedom of, essentially, anarcho-capitalism. To that end, Enso has been playing both sides of the war, with Doniphan creating propaganda around Wings of Theve and a secretive org within Enso working to prolong the fighting between Sotoa and the FCU through tactical disinformation. This is where I figured out where shit was inevitably headed before I figured out where shit was actually headed.
See, after the military threat of Sotoa is dealt with, my understanding (these are, fucking tragically, the missions I haven’t yet played due to see above) is that Enso Order is summarily smashed up by Joker Flight and our allies and then, at least according to the Ace Combat Wiki, they go bankrupt, burn a bunch of incriminating evidence, and their patents and projects, including the development of the X-49 Night Raven, are sold to General Resources, one of the two main warring corporate factions in Electrosphere. The implication is that this war, and this outcome, is in fact what gives General Resources the power and ability to become one of the two corporate superpowers we see in Electrosphere.
Everything in Ace Combat 4, 5, 0, 6 and 7 has been leading up to this, and I’m disappointed, because it not only constrains what Wings of Theve is and could have been, but what Ace Combat has been all this time. All of the pointed references to anarchism, the prima facie antiwar messaging, the complex ways in which these games seemed to grapple with the evolution of technology such as AI and all the various superweapon permutations, the role of nongovernmental and corporate mercenaries in war, all the various incredibly affective dogfights and last-minute aerial maneuvers—it’s all seemingly, cynically, been in the service of making Electrosphere and the UGSF timeline make sense.
I don’t know, man. Kinda don’t like that. Feels really fucking small.
Anyway. I’m not trying to be a hater on this one. If you enjoyed it, cool. If you didn’t have any issues, performance-wise, fine. I hope my explanation at least makes sense. As an upside: hey at least I can play AC0 whenever I want
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