Despite providing some of the most profound experiences I’ve had with media of any kind,
there’s arguably something of a paradox that exists at the heart of almost all anti-war
war games.
The titles that convey anti-war sentiment, but whose gameplay revolves around the same
kind of militaristic bravado inherent to some of the medium’s most straight-ahead gun-fests.
There have been a number of attempts to navigate that conundrum more effectively over the years,
with games exploring less typical genres to highlight the powerlessness of the people
caught in the crossfire—recognising that while there’s not anything wrong with violence
or guns in a video game, to incentivise and reward those violent interactions while also
trying to tell the player how terrible they are for carrying them out might come across
as a little disingenuous.
Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown, on the other hand, decides to ignore that train of thought
completely; leaning hard into the dissonance as it sensually fawns over every nook and
cranny of every plane; giving you absolute control over exactly how you’re going to
dismantle your foes in the coolest ways possible, contributing to an arbitrary arcade scoring
mechanic… all while using its fake sci-fi conflict between fictional nations about drones
and a princess with a VERY GOOD DOG and a space elevator that the good guys… or bad
guys… want to control… or destroy… all in order to tell us that… war is bad...
but also that pilots should be fighting wars?
It’s a lot, but as games like Metal Gear Solid have shown us, your story doesn’t
have to be super dour in order to make a salient point about the nature of conflict in the
digital age, for example—you can have some fun with it.
I usually end up cherishing the stories that embrace the absurdity of the medium they find
themselves in.
And with its allusions towards headier themes of the prevalence of civilian casualties even
with the use of unmanned aircraft, or what purpose fighter pilots serve when the jets
fly on their own, you can see the potential narrative throughline between a game like
MGS and Ace Combat – that kind of cold hard military fetishism butting heads with sci-fi
anime nonsense.
Or rather, that’s how it should be.
Instead of butting heads, it’s perhaps more accurate to say the two things are placed
next to each other and rarely the twain meet.
In reality, Ace Combat feels like it’s telling two separate stories – the plot delivered
in-mission through radio transmissions as well as your mechanical interactions of your
mute pilot who ends up leading a squadron of flying prisoners to take down the drones
and the somehow weirder tale of the Erusian federation’s development of said drones
using the DNA of… this guy and there’s someone calling herself the scrap queen who
gets taken prisoner after flying a drag racer built by her grandpa, all of which apparently
draws upon the lore of this series that somehow dates back to the 1100s, and yet is told entirely
through lengthy, droning expository cutscenes almost completely distanced from your missions.
Said cutscenes make out its characters to be the protagonists for a good chunk of the
game, but on the rare occasion they make their presence known outside of these uninteractive
interludes, they present themselves as enemies to be taken down.
It all meant the narrative of my opposing squadron inevitably drew my sympathies thanks
to my active participation in these unfolding events, but I was never sure if that was the
takeaway the game wanted me to come away with because the cutscenes were telling me one
thing while the missions were telling me something wholly different.
It never struck me as a clever subversion of player allegiances; it felt more like storytelling
so contrived that even the developers weren’t on the same page about the fundamentals of
its delivery.
As much as I’ve joked about it though, the problem isn’t a lack of coherency; the tos
and fros of Ace Combat’s territorial conflict aren’t all that difficult to follow.
The problem is that the overarching narrative’s monotonous delivery lacks the bombast that
could at least elevate it above said tedium.
Even with all of that said, however, none of this would be anywhere near as much of
a sticking point to me if the gameplay it distracted from didn’t far more convincingly
sell me on Ace Combat’s themes of the complicated horrors of war; or, more importantly, if said
gameplay wasn’t so utterly, utterly thrilling.
Seriously, it’s a rare thing that I’m way more concerned about gameplay spoilers
than story here; some of its set-pieces are so viscerally exciting that I genuinely think
they should be experienced blind.
In my 20 hours of play I craved the end of the cutscenes to get to the mission briefings
that followed—the tantalisingly dense series of maps and objectives that trusted me to
internalise and execute on its layered strategies; whose subtler story of the corruption at the
heart of military hierarchy felt at least somewhat related to what I was actually experiencing.
I got lost in the sea of new planes and weapons at my disposal; realising quickly that the
slightest changes to my loadout could have a drastic impact on the outcome of a sortie.
Most importantly, however, after a couple of missions whose wide-open spaces and predictable
circling of the enemy made me feel like the dogfights were more fun to watch in end-of-level
replays than they were to, well, play, I found myself totally hooked; I could not get enough
of its immensely high-stakes engagements.
These missions, while occasionally frustrating, placed such an emphasis on my own moment-to-moment
decision making that I felt empowered in a way that few games make me feel; and after
pondering why that was, I found that it largely came down to one thing—mission design.
See, if there’s a sentiment that sums up the mission design of Ace Combat 7, it’s
that restriction breeds creativity.
Instead of constantly adding to your arsenal in order to make you feel like some kind of
badass hero as other combat-themed games might do, the mission designers go the other way;
gradually restricting your access to certain features in order to force mastery of the
systems that remain - those that you may previously have taken for granted – and in doing so
drastically expand the scope of its arcade dogfighting into something far more varied,
challenging and rewarding.
For example, you might become used to your special weapon over time—often more powerful
or with greater homing capabilities on more targets than your standard missiles.
Well, how about a mission where you’re forced to drop said weapon in place of a laser guidance
system—forcing you to get closer to your target as well as hold your position as the
bomb drops, made all the more terrifying by how perilously low you have to descend into
the mountains in order to do so.
Up to this point, it’s been a case of getting your radar in the general vicinity of the
target and hitting a button.
Now, the designers force you to stare your target in the face for a prolonged period
of time; testing your aim as well as your nerve as every fibre in your body screams
at you to pull up.
It’s the same systems, it’s largely the same setting of open sky and rocky ground
as any other mission, but by removing just one potential crutch the player may lean on,
the game presents what feels like a completely fresh scenario.
Multiple missions will remove the radar to differing effects; a lightning strike in a
canyon filled with jagged rocks will force you to remain prepared to focus more closely
on your target—following it through these hazards as your HUD intermittently cuts out.
A sandstorm will mess with the electronics forcing you to seek out ground targets manually
while only being able to see a few feet in front of you.
A universal outage will require you to get unnervingly close to targets for visual confirmation
on whether they’re friend or foe—always weighing up risking friendly fire against
the time it would take to properly identify, turn around and make another pass at taking
them out.
All wildly varying challenges, all stemming from the simple removal of your reliance on
the radar.
Hell, this is a game where you fly massive planes at Mach speeds in order to cause spectacular
explosions, that manages to create a believable, honest to god stealth mission simply by taking
away your ability to gain altitude and, by setting it in a narrow canyon and restricting
your movement, your manoeuvrability is put to the test in a way it previously wasn’t.
What’s more, it’s a moment of quiet in an experience that is otherwise relentless.
The developers’ more restrictive approach to mission design ends up as much a pacing
device as it is a joyously tense gameplay set-piece.
This process of restricting your abilities in missions both trains you to become an absolute
powerhouse against the game’s tougher foes, zigging to meet their zag at the drop of a
hat, while really making you feel like you earned that power—like your mastery of the
systems is what drives the game’s progression.
And Ace Combat really is a game that forces this mastery.
I’m a big fan of action games that allow you to pull off the crazy moves you see in
their cutscenes, but here doing so is not only encouraged by the game’s immensely
flexible controls, but it’s often a very strict mission requirement—fail to pull
off these incredible feats of airmanship and your punishment is severe.
One of the reasons the aforementioned set pieces are so tense – the high stakes at
play here – come down to the fact that, in what can often be incredibly chaotic situations
(whether due to the obstacles you must navigate or the weirdly aggressive time limits the
game sets you), a simple graze of the wing in minute 20 can send you all the way back
to minute 1.
To say it is unforgiving would be an understatement.
This difficulty, however, was the element that made the game for me in a lot of regards,
because it’s one of the few titles I’ve played recently in which you can truly say
that every move counts.
It turned every bombing run, every pursuit of an unpredictable enemy, into a taut game
of risk and reward.
Every mission contained several of those delightfully Hollywood-esque scenarios, where you’re
tailing the guy but there’s a bogey on your six that’s got a lock on you; you’re out
of missiles and having to use your eyes to orient your machine gun fire.
Your radio is begging you to evade, leading you to either get out of dodge or wait that
agonising second longer to get that shot before pulling as hard as you can on the joystick
to avoid the obstacle that awaits you.
You know you can pull this off, you just know you can… even though when you do, it likely
moved so fast that you wonder how the hell you got out unscathed.
It’s the kind of thrill games rarely afford you from a purely mechanical standpoint, for
sure, but what was surprising to me as I progressed was how much more invested I was in these
moments from a narrative sense than the lore dumps the game throws at you; how much more
effectively the game’s little details, its design and mechanics delivered on its more
thematic ambitions.
For example, the hostility shown towards you by your higher-ups do a far better job of
highlighting the plight of your supposed opponents than the cutscenes simply by virtue of the
fact that their talk of making your lowly squadron useful as targets (backed up by missions
that restrict your weapons for that very reason) makes you feel trapped in your predicament,
yearning for any side that’s going to rise up against these incompetent idiots.
They just can’t see that you could handle this if you were given a longer leash.
After making it through these gargantuan tasks demanded of you, tearing through as many enemies
as possible to just make the wild score counts the game requires, repeating the same fifteen
minutes over and over again to nail the final required manoeuvre, you come out grizzled,
exhausted; in full knowledge that the game has tested you to my limits and that you have
overcome.
You feel like you’ve truly proven your capabilities, and what’s more, the game seems to reflect
that.
Air control announcements progressively become less confrontational as your piloting abilities
become more trusted.
The three lines on your tail – previously a source of derision for your character’s
supposed crimes – are subtly redesigned as you become a subject of fear; your name
spoken in hushed whispers you hear from both your comrades and from occasional radio intercepts
as enemies briefly express their shock at the appearance of the now legendary Three
Strikes.
The mission briefings gradually illustrate that your so-called superiors, concerned only
with saving face, have been ousted as more and more voices are heard; highlighting how
meaningless the hierarchy is when you and your prisoner buddies are the ones sticking
to missions even in the face of pure chaos.
As I played through the game, I felt like I’d earned those three strikes on my plane;
I’d clawed back the respect of my squad.
I had become the ace pilot the radio dialogue portrayed me as, and I’d done so purely
through clever, less-is-more mission design bolstered by tight controls.
But then there’s also that moment.
A missile you fire at a radar tower – one of thousands of missiles you fire at countless
radar towers – will be met with the expected “hoo-rah” for conquering yet another target
before a radio intercept will force you to listen to the enemy scatter in panic as fire
engulfs their facility, or eavesdrop on an unknown troop lamenting the sudden death of
his brother at your hands.
It’s a fleeting moment; barely anything in the grand scheme of the mass destruction
you cause.
There’s also arguably a degree of cynicism to the whole endeavour given that there’s
not a way for you to back out of the violence you inflict.
That said, while the personal micro-narrative of ascending the ranks through gameplay was
incredibly satisfying in and of itself, moments like this were as close as the game got to
jolting me out of that arcade-y mindset and actually forcing me to think about the wider
implications, the real human cost of taking out the toy tank in the little green square
for 100 points—the thing my corrupt higher-ups were congratulating me for, expecting me to
forget about in an instant to move onto the next target.
And while this is far from the most profound subversion of player input, the game’s remarkably
minimalist approach in this regard – its willingness to surface these moments for just
long enough that you begin to question the impact of your actions - acts as further proof
that, when trying to convey the horrors of conflict, a million monotonous cutscenes telling
you “war is bad but also pilots should be fighting the bad wars” will always fail
to reach the thematic potency of one finely tuned interaction.
So I hope you enjoyed my review of Ace Combat 7.
If you did and feel like you want to support my work directly, you can head to my Patreon
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I really could not continue to do this without your incredibly generous support and I cannot
thank you enough for that.
Special thanks go to Mark B. Writing, Rob, Nico Bleackley, Michael Wolf, Artjom Vitsjuk,
Ali Almuhanna, Timothy Jones, Spike Jones, TheNamlessGuy, Chris Wright, Ham Migas, Travis
Bennett, Zach Casserly, Samuel Pickens, Tom Nash, Shardfire, Ana Pimentel, Jessie Rine,
Brandon Robinson, Justins Holderness, Christian Konemann, Mathieu Nachury, Nicolas Ross and
Charlie Yang.
And with that this has been another episode of Writing on Games.
Thank you very much for watching and I will see you next time.