Does the color of the sky mean anything special to you?
I’ve been struggling to decide on what to write about Ace Combat 7.
Arguably it is the most complete Ace Combat experience, which is proven by the fact that it is the most popular game of the series with over 4 million copies sold.
For me, AC7 is a remix of the PS2 era games of the series. It’s greatest strength is in its visual quality, spectacle and gameplay, rather than its story or its message.
AC7’s main ideas have been confusing to me. It tackles so much and so little at the same time. It has an anti-drone message, but a pro-pilot one. It tries to tackle communication warfare, displaced people, the military-industrial complex, espionage, drone warfare, artificial intelligence all to not say much about it.
Which I can forgive, for the spectacle we are treated makes up more than enough for it. Still, some of the repeated plot points made me disappointed the first time I played through the game.
There is no point in going through its story beat by beat. Drones go haywire, the Eruseans and the Oseans team up to beat them. Oh, and Belka was behind everything, again.
Ace Combat 7 feels like a video game. It is the most video game video game out there. And that’s completely fine. But it has led me to struggle what to think or write about it.
“And yet what is a nation?” The game’s antagonist Mihaly asks to a table of pilots at one point. But the game doesn’t give a straight answer, nor do we learn about Mihaly’s beliefs.
It turns out that Mihaly’s true kingdom was the sky all along. As explained to us through a dramatic monologue. A point we undercut pretty much immediately as the player as we shoot him down without a second thought and ground him indefinitely, taking his kingdom away from him forever.
Ace Combat 7, in my opinion, was a deliberate restart point for the series. A haily mary, if you will. After the disappointing sales of the previous games in the series, it was all or nothing for the Ace Combat series. If 7 didn’t sell well, it would’ve been it.
Which is why I think there were a lot of repeated points and a lot of returning locations from previous games. A worst case scenario. The developers wanted to make a good sign-off for the series.
But that didn’t happen, Ace Combat 8 has come out to decent public perception. I am yet to play it, but the time will come that I take to the skies yet again.
With everything going on around the world, it feels hard for me to pay full price for a game that has physically given money to Boeing or Northrop for the use of their “products” when said “products” are contributing to crimes against humanity on a daily basis.
There’s only Ace Combat 3 remaining that I want to talk about, and there is a reason why I left it last. Because how on earth does one talk about Ace Combat 3?