Thoughts on Planes
On December 11, 2025 fiend and miscreant Geoff Keighley, as part of his yearly profane rituals, announced to the world that Ace Combat 8: The Wings of Theve would be releasing sometime in 2026. And lo, there was much rejoicing.
For me, it was a reminder that I quite enjoyed Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown, and that PlayStation 2 emulation had finally reached the point where the games dubbed the “Holy Trilogy” by fans would run mostly out of the box. So there was only one thing to do: install a PlayStation 1 emulator and play 1995’s Air Combat.
Air Combat and Ace Combat 2
Released as a launch title for the PlayStation’s American release, Air Combat is a simple game. Run missions, buy some low-poly planes, run more missions, and try not to run out of lives. It’s pretty fun! But there’s not much to talk about. Maybe if I was more familiar with the history of flight/dogfighting sims I could say something, but as it stands “It’s fun!” is all I’ve got for you.
Its sequel, Ace Combat 2, is in some ways more of the same. Analog control is a welcome addition, and Namco had more time to get their feet under them with regards to the PlayStation itself, so the game looks much nicer. Mission variety here is the shining feature. As I played I was frequently surprised by the things the game asked me to do. One mission you’ll be asked to fly as low and flat as you can to shoot the small openings of a mineshaft, and in another you’ll be frantically racing a cruise missile as it careens towards the capital city. Right up until the end the game keeps throwing new fun little surprises at you. Both it and its predecessor are very fun arcade flight games! I like them.
But I don’t love them. And I’m here to talk about something I love. Something so good it helped break me out of my weeks long writing rut.
Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere
Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere released in Japan on May 27, 1999. Its American release would, allegedly, be a year later. I haven’t played that version. This is because we got a version of Electrosphere that removed several mission and just about all of the cutscenes. Given that this was the first time the series put a real focus on its story and writing, that seemed an unacceptable compromise.
Fortunately, 25 years is a long time—long enough for a fan translation to exist in a fairly complete state.[*] With the magic of the internet and modern computing, you too can play the best that 1999 had to offer! And you really should.
Compared to the arcade purity of the first two games, Electrosphere is a decadent display of technical and artistic mastery. The capitalist dystopia of 2040 is brought to life with animated cutscenes from Production I.G (of Patlabor: The Movie and Ghost in the Shell fame). Missile trails now look like something right out of Macross, and if you look carefully in some missions you can even see your plane’s reflection in the water below you. It’s up there with Namco’s own Ridge Racer Type 4 in terms of most beautiful games on the PlayStation.
And like R4 before it, Electrosphere decides to try its hand at having a story. And I really liked Electrosphere’s story.
Set in the near future, Electrosphere plays all the cyberpunk hits. Nation-states are a thing of the past. Two megacorporations all but control the world, and you’re stuck in the middle as a member of the (antiquated and impotent) New United Nation’s peacekeeping force. There’s an intercorporate war and then a man named Abyssal Dision decides it would be great if we were all just computer programs and leads a coup d’état against the tyranny of the flesh with the aid of several ace pilots and a flying carrier.[†]
I won’t tell you how this all shakes out. Part of the fun is piecing together exactly what is happening through the five playthroughs it will take to see each ending. But I will tell you what makes this work.
See, in Ace Combat, you ostensibly control a human being piloting an airplane. We are told that this isn’t a world of machines, that people exist down there, and that your wingmen are flesh and blood human beings. So your silent protagonist must be one, too. But that’s not really true, is it? You control a plane. Your pilot is almost never seen, and certainly never speaks.
Electrosphere identifies this aspect of the series and zeros in on it with an unrelenting ferocity. What does it mean to be a plane, for the essence of your very being to be a weapon?
Your various wingmen are themselves grappling with this question of identity. Maybe abandoning the flesh and becoming one with the plane is just the way things are going, the way they ought to go. Or maybe that’s just despair talking, and an embrace of our fragile fleshy existence is the only way to survive in a world that wants you dead. Or maybe this is all just one man coping with getting cucked by himself.
There are no dialogue choices to guide you through the game’s five routes. Instead, you choose who to side with by flying near them, communicating through your flight pattern. Like any good robot anime, Electrosphere marries the machine with the perception of the self so thoroughly that you might not even notice it happened.
The game’s fun, too. You’ve got a much more realistic flight model that makes Electrosphere just feel good to fly around in, and the introduction of subweapons adds a little more flavor to the high-speed dogfights. As far as missions go, the game uses its branching structure to let you see most missions from multiple perspectives. If you defended a base in one route, you can be sure you’ll attack it in another. Throw in a few one-off gimmicks like a high-altitude engagement in a Blackbird and again you’ll never find yourself short of surprises.
If you take nothing else from this post, at least play Electrosphere. Hard to play retro games are good for you. Builds character.
Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies and Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War
So they took the PlayStation and made it 2. That means Ace Combat got a big overhaul, and for many people this is where the series truly starts.
It is perhaps unfair of me to lump AC4 and AC5 together like this. They are both very good games on their own merits, and both have several aspects that make them unique.
I quite like AC4’s narrative structure, where the bombastic missions track the rise of Usea’s ace pilot Moebius-1 while somber interstitial cutscenes follow the fall of Erusea’s Yellow-13 and the fascist occupation he represents. Mobius-1 and Yellow-13 never meet, the respect between the two is forged through gunfire and missiles rather than words.
AC5 takes a different tack. CG cutscenes follow you and your squad trying desperately to survive a war between nations that no one can really quite understand. The nuclear scars of previous wars linger over everything you do. Once more, nationalism and imperialism and fascism throw the world into turmoil. It’s a bad time for everyone involved.
Then, in both games, the sky opens up and starts singing[‡] in Latin.[§]
The real innovation the PS2 “Holy Trilogy” of Ace Combat games makes is not anything pertaining to the graphics or the increased scale of dogfights or finally giving a concrete shape to the “strange yet real” world of Strangereal, though these are all quite nice to have. No, the real innovation is the injection of myth to the profane world of aeronautics.
By now it is clear that you won’t save the world in these games. I mean you will, but only in the short-term. The motion of history that burned Belka to the ground marches forward and razes Usea. You can stop Stonehenge, but Megalith is being built by people still caught up in the fever of patriotism. You can even stop that, too, but what of Arkbird? Solg? As long as the world is divided into nations it will be united in warfare.
So Ace Combat shifts its focus towards smaller victories: the spiritual rebirth of a single man or the survival of a single squadron. It then blows up and exaggerates those small victories to epic proportions. Starting in AC4, the player no longer controls a single soldier bound by human mortality. Now you control a Hero—a Gilgamesh or a King Arthur. As Christ descended into the tomb for three days, so too does Mobius-1 in his Su-37 descend at subsonic speeds into the Megalith in anticipation of a profound resurrection of the self.
In Strangereal, saving the world begins with saving yourself. You must get your shit together. The apocalyptic conflicts portrayed in these games match the anguish that each one of us suffers from being alive. Your victories, small enough to seem undone by the next game, are made momentous to match the ecstasy we feel only at the end of long and personal struggle.
There’s just one slight problem. Those fucking nation-states won’t stop waging war.
Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War
We are introduced to the world of 1995 through the lens of 2005. A journalist, seeking to uncover the truth of the Belkan War, has tracked down our former wingman Pixy and got him and several other ace pilots to sit down for interviews. These interviews are presented as live-action FMVs. For a console game released in 2006, this is a bold move. I love it.
The first half of AC0 is fairly standard for the series. Fly missions, unlock new planes, fly more missions. The missions are good, the game plays much like its two immediate predecessors.
Of note is the new Ace Style system. You can shoot or spare non-hostile or incapacitated targets to move along one of three different tracks. If you’ve ever played a game with a morality system, it’s something like that. What makes AC0 stand out in this regard is that your Ace Style determines which enemy squadrons will be sent to face you at certain points in the story. This in turn determines exactly who the journalist will later interview. Your limited self-determination does not change the course of your story, but it does change who you meet along the way.
About halfway through the game things break bad. The Belkans, unwilling to let themselves be counter-invaded by a hostile nation, drop seven nuclear bombs along their borders. Pixy, saddened by the wanton cruelty displayed by both sides of the war, defects. He decides it would be great if we could all just be people, and leads a coup d’état against the tyranny of the nation-state with the aid of several ace pilots and a flying carrier.[**]
Pixy is why I’m writing this at 5 in the morning. I cried for about an hour after finishing the game because of that man. But I couldn’t just write a blog post about AC0, because to explain Pixy’s vision of A World Without Boundaries I first had to discuss Electrosphere.
It’s a damn shame we never got Electrosphere in its full form in the West. The so-called “Holy Trilogy” of PS2 games takes on a new dimension when considered alongside Electrosphere, and I intend to do exactly that.
Past and Future
Taken as a tetralogy, Ace Combats 3-0 are an exploration of “a world without boundaries.” We are first presented with the nation-less world of 2040, a world ruled by greed. Here we can think of nothing other than finding new boundaries to break down, praying that freedom will lie behind each new shattered wall. Then we move back to the 2000’s, where nationalism and imperialism repeat over and over the sins of the past. We content ourselves with being taken in by the flow of history, holding onto ourselves and each other as our best means of survival. Finally we return to 1995. The course the next several decades will take has been foreseen, and yet the future must come to pass. It can do nothing else.
Pixy’s rebellion takes the same shape as Dision’s, and in some ways has the same goal: a break from the rigid world order so that something new might be born. But while Dision ultimately is unable to focus his energies towards anything more than chaos and the promise of a false salvation, Pixy is guided by the firm hand of ideology. Pixy has a reason to fight.
Pixy also presents, for the first time in the series, a way out. First, you must face the future head on. You cannot chase Pixy or outmaneuver him. By the rules of the game, he can only be defeated by a headlong attack. You can be neither afraid nor reckless, but, like Pixy, must commit to a course of action and force a way through.
Second, in his own words, “The world won’t change for the better unless we trust people. Trust is vital in a peaceful world.”
Taken on its own this is naive idealism. This is to be expected; Pixy himself never fully develops his philosophy. He ends the game a wanderer still searching for answers. He does not even come to this second step until after his rebellion is crushed. Others will have to take that step, and find what comes next.[††]
The first ending I reached in Electrosphere was Rena’s. Like the player, Rena could not view herself as anything other than a machine. She is manipulated by Dision, taken in by his vision of complete sublimation. In most endings she is the penultimate or final boss. But if you stick by her, a new path appears. The tyranny of the flesh gives way to liberation, and for the first time she is able to smile. The game does not elaborate on what the world will look like in a world with neither nations nor corporations to impose boundaries on us, but we can expect that whatever shape it takes will be one made with love and trust as guiding principles.
Without beginning or end, the ring stretches into the infinite.
Next on my list is The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces. It’s a licensed tie-in/prequel for Mamoru Oshii’s anime adaptation of The Sky Crawlers by Hiroshi Mori. I got the emulator set up, played the first two missions, and thought I would go to bed.
Then I looked at my phone.
It is now almost 7:30 in the morning, on January 3rd, 2026. A few hours ago my country, the United States of America, attacked Venezuela and abducted its president. This comes after a global rise in right-wing nationalism over the past several years. On days like this I find it hard to sleep. If I weren’t writing this blogpost, I’d be doomscrolling. Or jerking off. Or both. The beauty of the internet is that you can do both those things at once.
Pixy is an idealist. He does not have a fully developed political framework. Neither do I, for that matter. But I’m getting closer every day.
This idealism is in some part a result of Ace Combat’s shift towards the realm of myth and heroes. Real politics still serve as set-dressing, of course. The Erusean occupation was explicitly a Fascist occupation and Belka’s troubles began with economic collapse followed by a rise in right-wing politics. But that is not what the games are really about.
I think they’re better for it. I don’t turn to video games for an explanation of the world. Art can’t do that half as well as just sitting down and reading some theory. Instead, Ace Combat seeks to provide a release for one’s personal problems.
And, well, it did that. I’ve been badly depressed for the past couple of weeks, and though I’m still in a very bad place mentally right now I did just write 2670 words (and counting!) about a plane game.
Materially, art can’t save us. Art can’t save the people being killed by capitalism and nationalism and fascism and imperialism right now.
But maybe, at the very least, art can save me. Maybe it can save you, too.
Yo, Buddy. Still alive?
[*] The Load Word team has translated everything except some incidental dialogue, which is only a a minor inconvenience on one of the game’s 52 missions. https://loadwordteam.com/projects/ace-combat-3-electrosphere-a-complete-fan-translation/
[†] I hope you’re taking notes, this will be important later.
[‡] https://youtu.be/dZBoiW460nU
[§] https://youtu.be/hQFI3rWfuEI
[**] Told you.
[††] If it weren’t for a reference to the fall of Communism in Electrosphere, one might be tempted to assume that Karl Marx never existed in Strangereal’s history. As it stands, I can only surmise that Pixy just never got around to it. Understandable, Capital is very long and he seemed busy.