Hello aces, Ace Combat Fan speaking here
in the third episode of Stuff About Ace Combat
I am really really happy that you guys
are enjoying this series.
I see the view count, I see the likes on the videos,
and most important to me:
the comments.
I might not reply to all of them,
but I do get the see a lot... all of them.
and I have seen some pretty interesting discussions
coming out of the comments section.
Discussions about the game mechanic,
aircrafts, superweapons, and you know, other stuff...
and I'm taking note of them,
but I already have chosen the topics for the
Episode 3 and 4 because I'm going to talk about
some topics that will serve as a reference
for future videos.
Now, let's get to today's topic:
the Ace Combat world
also known by the fans as...
You know, that fictional world we all love
that is full of awesome countries and places
just like...
Erusea,
Osea,
Belka,
Yuktobania,
and so on.
And I think we all know this world very well.
Or do we?
What if I told you there is not only
one Strangereal world
but there are actually
three of them!
Believe it or not,
that's what I'm going to talk about today.
First, though, let me explain how Ace Combat's world
got its name.
It comes from the Ace Combat 4 trailer
featured in the Tokyo Game Show in the year 2000.
In the trailer, the caption shows
THE STRANGE,REAL WORLD
where it's referring to the Ace Combat world.
However, due to the lack of space between the words:
STRANGE and REAL
some fans assumed that it was the name of the world
even though there's a comma in there...
But ok, the name became official just after
Ace Combat 7's announcement as
Project Aces tweeted this.
All right, now let me tell you about
three versions of Strangereal
but just as a heads up,
this is the way I personally call them.
These are not official names by any way.
Strangereal 1 is the way I refer to the universe
where the first games of the Ace Combat take place.
That is Air Combat,
released in 1992 in the arcade versions
or in 1995 for the PlayStation version
and Air Combat 2 2 or 22,
released in 1995
in the arcade version only.
This variant of Strangereal is pretty generic
and by that I mean that there's not much details
of the world.
You cannot identify any city, region, country,
or specific faction in this game
and all it says that a certain country suffered
a coup d'etat performed by some rebel
or terrorist forces.
As for a geographical representation of
Strangereal 1 opens.
All you can pretty much see is a little map
when choosing missions in Air Combat and
that's about it...
As you can see, this is a fairly small region of the world,
probably just one country
and you don't get to see the big picture.
So this is where it gets tricky
because not many people know about Strangereal 2.
Strangereal 2 is the universe where the games of
are set and do not confuse it
with the version of Strangereal in the later games
because they are fairly different.
Interestingly, the games mentioned earlier,
they only take place in the continent of Usea
and therefore we aren't really able to get a world view
while playing the games,
so there are only two ways of noticing that
Strangereal 2 is different compared to Strangereal 3,
which is what we know as Strangereal today.
The first way is by buying the
Ace Combat 04 Official Guidebook by Famitsu
which I fortunately managed to buy
when I was in Japan.
Once you have the guidebook,
all you need to do is look at the very first page
until you see this
which is Strangereal 2 world map.
As you can see Usea is located right in the center
of the map but it's a fairly small continent.
If we take a look at its left side,
we can see pretty much Asia, Africa, and Europe
not in the same shape as in our Earth
but in a fairly recognizable way with some distortions.
Over Europe and Asia, we can see the continent of Anea
which is really really close to Usea
and if you keep going to the right,
we can see something that kinda looks like
Alaska and the northern part of Canada
with Hudson's Bay, Greenland, and Iceland
on the far right and by going south,
everything seems pretty much original content
except for the Great Lakes region
which looks pretty much the same as in our Earth.
Also note that New Zealand and Antarctica,
or the South Pole,
looks pretty much the same.
Now that was the first method of knowing that
Strangereal 2 and 3 are different.
The second method would be by comparing the
geographic coordinates between Ace Combat 4
and Ace Combat 3D.
Some missions take place in the same area
but their geographical coordinates have a
difference of thousands of kilometers.
It didn't make any sense
if they are in the same world after all.
As the Ace Combat was growing in popularity,
Project Aces really felt the need to create
a Strangereal in a more original way
after Ace Combat 4 was released.
So between Ace Combat 4 and Ace Combat 5,
they really did make a new Strangereal
that's and it is what we know as Strangereal today.
I'm not going to get into much detail on Strangereal 3
because I don't really know quite a bit about it
and for me, I'll continue it for a future video
but I hope you enjoyed this video
as with the difference between
Strangereal 1, 2, and 3.
In the video description, I'll leave some of the links
to some of the maps I used in this video.
Then again, I hope you have enjoyed this video
and that you learned something new about Ace Combat
which is my goal at the end of the day.
So see you guys in the next episode of Stuff About Ace Combat.