It's new to me: Ace Combat 2

The first sequel to Air Combat makes good on the promise of the original.

This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Air Combat — known as Ace Combat in Japan — was a fun game, but it was also a proof of concept in a lot of ways. Of a certain kind of gameplay on the Playstation, of the tech needed to power it. It was more promise of a future game that could deliver on it than anything else, a canvas to paint on, a foundation to build upon, whatever metaphor you want to roll with here.

Fans of Air Combat did not have to wait long for Namco to deliver on that promise: Air Combat released in the summer of 1995, and its sequel, Ace Combat 2, reached North America just two years later. Everything about it is an upgrade on its predecessor: the graphics, the feel, the mission variety and structure, the enemy and ally AI, even just the general flow of losing and trying again. Air Combat was a solid game that seemed more limited than it should have by the Playstation’s tech — or, more accurately, a lack of familiarity with said tech, given it released within the first year of the Playstation’s life. Ace Combat 2 is the kind of jump possible from developers who have gained that familiarity and experience, and it shows from the start.

In a bit of a twist, better harnessing the console tech of the PSX allowed for a more arcade-style air combat game than Air Combat was, which was made for the Playstation due to the popularity and success of Air Combat, the arcade game. The missions are tighter, they’re tense because of the odds thrown against you instead of concerns that you can’t find your opponents in the mess of muddy polygons or won’t have the controls respond to you exactly how you expect them to. Stalling is still prevalent, but not like it was in Air Combat, which helps keep up the flow state you can develop just flying around, dogfighting and bombing targets from above. Everything feels, and is, faster and smoother. Air Combat strayed a little closer to flight simulator at times due to its pacing both in mission structure and from moment to moment within them, but Ace Combat 2 is very clearly a flight combat simulator, which is why it can replicate the arcade feel of the original in a way its predecessor could not.

Image credit: LaunchBox Games Database

By designer Masonori Kato’s own admission, the Air Combat team wasn’t made up of people who were enthusiastic or knowledgeable about fighter aircraft. Which showed up in quite a few ways, including but not limited to the fact that bombers and fighters were just kind of thrown together with indiscernable loadouts. In Ace Combat 2, however, the game feels like it’s a love letter to the very notion of fighter aircraft, and just how fucking cool they must feel to fly. In the same way something like OutRun was clearly put together by people who just think fast cars and highways are sick and wanted to create a game that made you feel the same, Ace Combat 2 was designed to make you think that flying at incredibly high speeds through the air and pulling off impossible turns and dives toward the ground is the greatest rush in the world.

What’s fascinating, too, is just how much the focus is on that insistence. Ace Combat 2 is obviously rife with violence: the setup for the story is that there was a military coup, and you along with some other mercenary pilots have been employed and deployed to help put a stop to it. While the story is narrated in the game’s intro, it’s essentially the kind of stuff you’d find on one page of an instruction manual before they tell you which buttons do what. There’s a real lack of detail there — was the coup justified or unjustified, what are the political alignments, who are the targets, which side has committed inarguable sins, etc. — but all of that “missing” information isn’t missing, so much as it doesn’t matter. You’re a mercenary, and you’ve been paid to do a job, and that job involves flying some high-tech impossibilities through the sky at a speed that makes the air itself scream.

I’m no “keep politics out of games” person by any means — this is an understatement, really — but there’s an expectation when it comes to the politics of a game centered around war waged with real-world machines. There’s a reason something like Spec Ops: The Line exists at all, as a response to the casual disregard for victims and destruction and the casual violence of other military-themed shooters (and why an entire issue of Bullet Points could be devoted to its messages, intentional or otherwise.) Call of Duty games… listen, they didn’t make a hyper-detailed Ronald Reagan in Black Ops: Cold War because they wanted to criticize the guy or his policies. Something like Jungle Strike, which is really “just” a shoot ‘em up showing off what a highly advanced attack helicopter could do in a (more) realistic world instead of one designed by Toaplan, was made by a xenophobic and jingoistic conservative with an agenda for increasing military spending, for America. If you’re anti-war and not on the right, you have to turn your brain off to play games like this sometimes, and just enjoy the expertly tuned gameplay systems instead. Ace Combat 2 did everyone the favor of making the whole experience out of expertly tuned gameplay systems, and leaving all the details of the missions and the game world to those whose pay grade is above that of the mercenary pilot and the real-world player controlling them.

Ace Combat 2 also kind of makes it feel as if no people were harmed in the completion of these missions. Pilots can eject from fighter aircraft, and you’re kind of just left to assume that happens to everyone whose craft you blow up, because if you fail a mission, you get a note from the military higher ups essentially saying, “hey, tough luck on the last mission, we replaced your exploded plane with a new one and docked your pay just a little bit to help cover that, hope the next attempt goes better!” It’s not a death and retry, it’s not the first game’s insistence that you lose the craft entirely and have to buy another to replace it at full price, it’s “uh, well, let’s do that again, but better this time.” Clearly, you survive every near-death experience, so why not your supposed victims, too? You’re mashing toy planes together, and whoever runs out of planes first, not pilots, will be the loser of this war.

Sure, realistically, tax dollars are paying for these new aircraft, and yeah, it’s unlikely all hands jumped off that cruiser before you descended to 100 meters above it and let loose a barrage, and then survived either the explosion or the waters they were floating in, but it never feels like killing when you pull that off. Which maybe means Namco, intentionally or not, represented how the people who fly these things can live with themselves after actually doing all of this killing — with rationalizations, with a focus on the mission, by ignoring the details and just doing what the brief and your superiors tell you to do — but the goal here was likely just to let you focus on how great it feels to shoot through the skies, to change directions so abruptly that it feels like the world itself is shifting around you, to dive bomb, to climb higher, to give chase, to dodge, to fly. And they succeeded.

I could see taking issue with what could be perceived as a sanitization of the ugliness and violence and devastation of war, but the narrow focus of the missions does help alleviate some of that: you are clearly always going up against military targets, often in remote regions without any civilians or civilian infrastructure in place, and when you do have a mission in a city, the game is explicit about the need to be very accurate with your assault so as not to harm any of those people or their city. Military targets only — whereas something like Jungle Strike is designed for you to blow up every home you see in case there’s a power-up inside of it, Ace Combat 2 wants you to stay on mission. In addition, since the game presents itself as, again, the OutRun of air combat… I mean, I don’t think people should be driving 180 mph down the highway where other cars that don’t realize they’re part of a race are also driving, but that doesn’t detract from how fun OutRun remains, or how we just roll with the result of a crash being that the car launches itself through the air, flips multiple times, and everyone just walks back in and starts racing again, with the “problem” being that you just made things tougher on yourself as far as succeeding goes due to how much time that chewed up.

If Ace Combat 2 was trying to be more realistic, things might be different, but it’s clearly an arcade-style game featuring some vehicles and maneuvers the developers think are sick as hell, and they did their best to convey that sickitude to you by simplifying systems to emphasize this over pure simulation and reality. Story ends up being more of a focus in future Ace Combat games right after this one, too, so while Ace Combat 2 might not be the most wholly refined in the series on a gameplay level, it would not surprise me if it’s the purest representation of this kind of blemish-free approach to flying a war machine.

Image credit: LaunchBox Games Database

Why does it feel so good to fly in this game? The dogfighting, for one, is far more intense this time around, with a greater sense of urgency attached. It’s not perfected just yet, but the sense of urgency it does have and the danger it possesses and makes you feel has allowed the game to age splendidly in a way that Air Combat has not. The graphics as a whole look the part of 1997, but the jet models themselves are still excellently rendered. If you go to them right after playing a more modern Ace Combat title then sure, they’ll look their age a bit, but it’s clear that a ton of focus was given to making them look great back in ‘97 in case you decided to play from a third-person view. Which is also much more enjoyable here than in Air Combat, since you feel as if you have more control over what’s going on with your craft, and therefore not like using anything but the cockpit mode is going to make your head spin as you try to find yourself and your direction in the skies.

As was explained by the developers in an interview with the magazine CVG in 1997, all of this was a priority for the team after what they felt was a disappointing technical showing in Air Combat. “As the flying isn't very complicated it obviously can't be compared to a proper flight simulator. However, when you consider the fighter plane and all the thrills and excitement that you can enjoy as you battle your way across the skies, it's much more fun than a flight simulator.” Emphasis my own in the quote, emphasis Namco’s in Ace Combat 2 itself.

The support system has been simplified, with you having access to a support pilot in various missions, your choice of two. They choose their craft based on what you want them to do in a mission, such as take a defensive position around a target you’re meant to protect, or to watch your tail to keep opposing pilots off of it, or to focus on softening up the area around ground targets to remove enemy anti-aircraft guns or even the ground targets themselves. They still cost money, but there’s no need to shell out significant dollars to get one of the “better” support pilots, with better in quotes there since it didn’t actually feel like your support units did much of anything in Air Combat, anyway.

There are 30 missions this time around, a significant jump from Air Combat’s 17. There are 21 in a standard playthrough, but there are hidden missions that become selectable after certain secret conditions are fulfilled, and the occasional branching path that’ll cut off access to some other missions, as well. The mission variety is better this time around, and not just because Ace Combat 2 is more capable of rendering different environments and things to blow up. Since the whole feel of it all has changed, and it no longer feels as slow-paced, missions vary much more, and sometimes even within them there are significant changes: maybe you start out needing to blow up a small fleet or warships, but then a squad of enemy pilots emerges, and those need to be dealt with before they deal with you.

There are optional enemies to defeat, as well, which show up as white rather than red on your radar and will grant you more reward money after a mission — money that can be used to buy better, more advanced aircraft for yourself, as well as to fund your support pilots. Engaging them will also increase the danger levels, since the more you fight, the more likely it is you sustain damage or accidentally end up surrounded by craft firing missiles at you. Since dodging is still very much something you have to do entirely on your own instead of through a button combination that, if timed right, will do the dodging for you, that can be a real danger, especially on Hard mode.

Something that helps with the flying, the sense of urgency, how good all of this feels to play, is the soundtrack. It’s often intense in just the right ways: huge chunks of Ace Combat 2’s soundtrack sounds like it belongs in a PC Engine CD action RPG, which, if this isn’t clear, is a compliment of the highest magnitude. It rips:

Are you running around swinging a sword at everything within range, or are you chasing down a bunch of high-speed enemy aircraft, trying to lock on with your missiles and take them down before they can get away? It doesn’t matter, “Fire Away” is perfectly suited for both activities.

Is “Rising High” about a high-intensity mission against dangerous machines of war, or the theme for a highly skilled boss studied in the art of the blade, whom you have to figure out how to slow down if you’re ever to land a blow on them? Again, it doesn’t matter, it’s got the juice it needs for either, which means it’s got the juice I need.

The whole soundtrack is just perfect mood music like this. Darker and slower for night missions and ones involving some level of stealth, full of energy that’s supposed to transfer to you when you’re supposed to feel both in control and close to being overwhelmed by the nature of the task in front of you. It really took advantage of the Playstation’s Red Book audio capabilities to create something that was clearly an homage to the sound and style of Top Gun while also clearly being anchored in the sounds of its own day. In that same CVG interview, the sound team explained that:

The music always reflects the atmosphere of the game. For example, the feeling of tension as you try to avoid the enemy radar, or the invigorating sensation of flying across the sky or over the sea, is all contained in the stimulating music. We created the soundtrack after looking at the missions. During the missions the atmosphere can quickly change. For example, in the beginning you're flying low over the ground, almost touching it. Then all of a sudden an enemy plane appears and so you soar into the sky and start dogfighting. The music is there to emphasise the tension of this kind of atmosphere in the mission.

There was still plenty of room to improve Ace Combat following its first console sequel — like with even more emphasis on aircraft that are better suited for air-to-air or air-to-ground based on their loaded, dogfighting getting even better as movement through the sky on something like a quick turn became even more advanced and full of possibility — but Ace Combat 2 still managed so much that it feels great to play without reservation or asterisks in a way Air Combat could not. It’s a special game, and also much easier to see how the series kept going and kept expanding following this one. And again, this is with me being someone who enjoyed my time with Air Combat.

Ace Combat 2 originally released on the Playstation, and would be included as part of a compilation on the Playstation 2, as well. Ace Combat: Assault Legacy Horizon on the 3DS is a remake, but only of sorts. It kind of just uses the bones of Ace Combat 2 and then makes them inhabit a completely new body, so it’s not really a remake in the traditional sense, but more of a re-envisioning of the original. The same support pilots are there (though, they work differently here), and you’ll recognize some missions, at least in terms of what the overall goal is. But there’s loads of voice acting, more story, someone constantly in your ear throughout, a different soundtrack, different controls, different aircraft, and new missions, to boot. This is a completely different game that retains elements of the one it’s remaking. Which isn’t a complaint, by the way: this “remake” is great on its own merits, even if it was hit with the dreaded “it’s too short!” criticism when it released in 2011. Too short for what? No one ever seems to know the answer to that.

Curiously, this “remake” is named Ace Combat: Assault Horizon Legacy in North America, even though there is an existing Assault Horizon Ace Combat title, and this has even less to do with that one than it does Ace Combat 2. Assault Horizon Legacy would also receive an updated version — Assault Horizon Legacy+ — with updated controls for the later 3DS variants, as well as amiibo support. If you’ve ever wanted to play an Ace Combat game where you could also choose to enable Mushroom Kingdom item boxes in the sky, well, have I got wonderful news for you.

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