In the Ace Combat series, developer Project Aces emphatically wants you to know that Strangereal, the earthlike setting of their nearly-3o-year-long string of games spanning four console generations, is not Earth.
As a new-to-the-series player logging into Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown for the first time, I took this for granted. Yes, it’s very strange that almost every plane in the game is a real warfighter on Earth, made by a real defense company for militaries all over the world, but none of these companies are named (just paid handsomely by the publisher for the use of their likenesses). So I’ll fly around in my F-14A Super-Tomcat (a plane manufactured by Northrop-Grumman), shooting down Erusean enemies in their inferior MiG-21s (a plane manufactured by the Soviet Mikoyan-Gurevich Design Bureau) until I have enough in-game currency to buy the F-35 superjet (created by Lockheed-Martin), and think nothing of it. But when an NPC tells my squadron that he’s taking us to an Italian bistro after our mission? Well, that’s just fucking bonkers. Total loss of immersion. I’m devastated.*
I don’t know how many layers of abstraction you need to apply to your war video game before it stops being pure militarist warmongering propaganda but I… think Ace Combat 7 makes it there. It’s a wild goddamn game that reminds me more of various mech anime than any other military-themed game I’ve played. It doesn’t hurt that the plot involves the player being a preternaturally skilled pilot, framed for murdering the former president of the Osean Federation, who claws their way out of the prison regiment they’re assigned to and into being the literal singular pilot who wins the war against Erusea. This is so tropey the game even gives you a nemesis to fight against who comments on this, saying he’s killed every pilot like me for generations. His name necessitates a paragraph break:
There are plenty of moments in the game that I felt were much more critical of war than other games in this broad genre of “military sim” tend to be. During the prison squadron arc, we even meet an anarchist ally character – Tabloid is his callsign – and he remarks that we wouldn’t need to be bombing this oil refinery if there weren’t any states. Like, as simple as this portrayal is, that’s a legit anarchist position! Color me shocked as hell. (Tabloid isn’t ever portrayed as cowardly, either, especially toward the end of the campaign.)
Principle characters don’t just grimace about how war is hell but it’s necessary. They actively call the war stupid in some parts, question why they’re even fighting in the first place, and by the end of the conflict when everything goes completely to shit, the two warring factions team up to defeat the real threat of endless, automated drone warfare. (I made a joke to Ace Combat veteran Autumn Wright that the end of Ace Combat 7‘s campaign was literally everyone on Strangereal teaming up to stop NieR: Automata from happening, but while that’s not entirely accurate, it’s also not not entirely accurate either.)
I think if there’s anything at all that bothered me – even a little bit – about Ace Combat 7, it’s the portrayal of fighter pilots as the truly honorable warfighting class, and that drone warfare is bad, not necessarily because of the immense damage and trauma it has caused – but because it somehow disrespects that warrior class. I have no idea if this is something actual military pilots feel, I’m not particularly interested in finding out, but it is a weird question the game brings up toward the end.
Still, I can’t remember the last time a game compelled me to immediately restart its campaign upon finishing. If you’ve got Xbox Game Pass, go check it out. Otherwise, it’s worth the purchase.
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