Blow the Dust Off: Ace Combat 4: Shattered Skies

Ace Combat 4

Last week, I got the flu and I stayed home from school.  I didn't feel like sleeping some more so I was wondering what I should do that wouldn't be too involving yet still entertaining.  I got Ace Combat 4 out of my PS2 collection and threw it in.  I played through the campaign on the hardest difficulty in one sitting (if you don't count the times that I got up to blow my nose and cough my lungs out).  It took about 7 hours to play through it.

Compared to today's standards, most people would critique a story mode for being so short.  But for its time, seven hours was about right.  And actually, the game is designed to be played through multiple times.  Upon beating the game, you are given the option to start a new story and carry over all of the planes, weapons, and money you obtained during the previous play through.

Needless to say, I've played through this game so many times that not only do I have all of the planes and weapons purchased, but I have enough money to buy all of the planes and weapons over again about three times.  Clearly, I like this game a lot.

What do I like about this game?  Well, back when I got my first PS2 for Christmas, my parents had also bought this game for me.  All I could remember was how impressed I was at how great the game looked that first moment I put it in (12-ish years ago).  Ace Combat 4 was one of the first Playstation 2 games to come out but you could tell that it was a next gen game.  The aircraft models look phenomenal, the environments are more detailed (ie, way more 3D buildings than PS1 counterparts), the audio quality of the game is really good as well.

The gameplay is really fun.  Every level is a different kind of scenario which serves as good variety.  If you're looking for a flight simulator, this isn't it.  All of the aircraft are unrealistically mobile and have unrealistically high payloads (the best plane in the game can carry 82 missiles!).  I always loved the high payloads and how you could literally be a one man army flying around.  The in-game radio transmissions I also thought were a nice touch to an already proven video game franchise.  The in-game radio transmissions really make the battle come full-circle in that you see the impact of your bombing runs and how you are changing the war on the ground.  It really makes it different than just shooting generic tanks and howitzers.

One of the best aspects of this game is how good the story is.  It's the first game I had ever played and may even be the first game ever made that approached the idea of war from various angles.  I talk about the story a bit in my Top 10 Favorite Video Game Characters List  because Yellow 13 has to be about my favorite video game antagonist of all time.  The plot to Ace Combat 4 is actually pretty three dimensional.  It would be hard to call the story with Yellow 13 a side plot nor to call the story of Mobius 1 a side plot.  This game literally has two main stories going on in parallel.  I won't go into too many details about it here but it's a very heartfelt story that you will remember many years after playing the game.

One more thing I wanted to mention about the story is how it is portrayed.  It's actually portrayed in not only an incredibly effective way, but also a surprisingly effective way.  The story cutscenes involving the Yellow 13 story line are told in what's basically a colorized storyboard.

Now, hear me out.

In most cases, this would not only be viewed as lazy but also unfinished; like there was no budget to make actual cutscenes.  Here though, the impact of the Yellow 13 storyline is told so well in these hand-drawn stills that it wouldn't make sense to do otherwise.  Every emotion, every action, every facial expression is held onto in one still picture.  In Ace Combat X for the PSP, they did a similar approach to cutscenes.  Though the story in Ace Combat X was not quite as good as Ace Combat 4, the delivery was still excellent.

One thing that I noticed during this last play through of Ace Combat 4 is that in the Yellow 13 cutscenes, there is no background music.  I thought about it and I think that if there was music in these cutscenes, it would completely ruin the mood.  Why?  Well, Yellow 13 has a very quiet demeanor.  He doesn't boast about his kill record or his skill.  He has this kind of inner-peace that can only be portrayed in silence.  I think this part of his character also connects well with flying in the vast and open skies in silence.  I suppose, now that I think about it, the depth of the Yellow 13 character in such few lines of dialogue is quite impressive.

Anyways, there is only one critique that I have about this game.  This game has no checkpoints.  If you are to beat a mission, you have to do the whole thing without dying.  This can be frustrating.  Especially in the second to last level when the boss at the end is Yellow 13 in his five-wing formation.  The rest of the level up to that point is relatively easy.  But trying to fight five ace pilots at once on the Ace difficulty?  Not so easy.  So when you get shot down trying to defeat the Yellows, you have to play the twelve minutes of shooting ground targets all over again.  I say twelve minutes because despite your performance, you always have to wait for the timer to run out.  This is also boring because I'm good enough at the game where, even on the Ace difficulty, I can take out all of the ground targets and fly around just shooting down the randomly spawning aircraft for about two minutes until that timer runs out.

But yeah, it's a pretty minor complaint amongst all of the great things that this game has to offer.  If you have a PS2 and like flight shooters, this game is the best.  Although the dog-fighting is much more intense in Ace Combat Zero and the Dog-Fight mode in Ace Combat:  Assault Horizon is pretty cool, no Ace Combat game, or any flight shooter for that matter, has quite captured the spirit of the story or the ingenuity of the level design that Ace Combat 4 brought to the table.

This game is a must play.