It's new to me: Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere

The North American version of Ace Combat 3 might seem a little odd and half put together. Once you play the original Japanese edition, you realize that's just what it's issue was.

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.

I’m familiar with the general purposes of an unofficial translation of a video game. Most often, it’s for a game that never received an international release — a Japan-only title, for instance, that English-speakers localize so copies of the game can be patched and played for an audience the game was never intended for. Sometimes, it’s because an official localizer messed with a game in some questionable ways, like when Working Designs would decide they needed to completely unbalance the difficulty level and gameplay of something while they were translating into English. Or maybe there’s some cut content in the regional releases that an unofficial translator has decided to restore years after the fact.

Being unfamiliar with Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere, I was a little confused about why it could have needed a massive re-localization. The game released worldwide, after all, and, presumably, it was once again about flying jets through the air at ridiculous speeds that would melt faces if actually attempted by a pilot. It turns out that the original Japanese edition of Ace Combat 3 is wildly different than the North American release: the latter is actually a step back from Ace Combat 2 in some ways, since the level of presentation is comparatively lower, and it’s because the English-language edition of Ace Combat 3 cut out voice acting, cutscenes, story, branching mission paths, and 16 of Electrosphere’s 52 missions. That’s over 30 percent of the game!

Ace Combat 3, as far as the actual gameplay goes, is built on the ideas of its predecessor. If you loved 2, you’ll most likely also love 3. The context in which that gameplay exists, though, is completely different from 2 to 3, at least with the complete, Japanese version of the game. Here’s what I said about Ace Combat 2 in 2023 after playing that for the first time:

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.

…

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.

In its sequel, though, you’re no longer in the position of letting the bosses do the thinking for you. There are three factions in the game — well, four, but you don’t know about that one until pretty late into the story — and you’re capable of flying in service of any of them. You start with the UPEO, the Universal Peace Enforcement Agency, which is pretty much the United Nations. Like the UN, this UPEO doesn’t have nearly the power it needs to in order to uphold its stated mission across the world: whereas the UN’s problem is that the United States has the veto power to do whatever it wants without consequence even if literally every other UN member says they disagree with the plan, the UPEO’s legs are cut out from under them by the emergence of mega corporations so powerful and influential that they are vying to be the global hegemon rather than any one nation. They have their own armies, and it’s those forces that you, as a UPEO pilot, are attempting to either aid or keep in check, depending on the mission in question. And it’s your relative helplessness in stopping those corporations for more than a mission at a time that has everyone wondering if the UPEO’s power is that of a paper tiger.

Image credit: MobyGames

You are in charge of your own destiny here, which is the complete opposite situation of Ace Combat 2 and its mercenary-based setup. You can leave the UPEO, and very early on in the game, even, just because an invitation to do so sounds intriguing. You can leave because you feel the UPEO is compromised and no longer aligns with your personal beliefs. You can leave because you’ve chosen to aid your companions, or between allies who are forcing you to pick one or the other and their beliefs, or decide to leave it all behind for something new for both yourself and humanity. You can also stick with the UPEO regardless of your personal feelings because that’s where you work, and you have decided to have loyalty to them for some reason. There is no true “happy” ending in Ace Combat 3, because of all of this choice: you will disappoint someone with every decision you make, someone who sees the promise in you, and if they don’t die from it then, they are very likely to later on in the story when you meet as foes instead of as parting friends.

The story is inescapable: it is the foundation holding the rest of the game up. It’s to the point that the game even sounds different than it did in prior entries. Electrosphere has more of the synthy, futuristic vibes of the occasional Ace Combat 2 track now as its central sound: the Top Gun-inspired hard rock soundtrack is gone, the guitars a thing of the past. Its purpose, in prior entries, was to reinforce that feeling of just how great flying at these speeds is, but here, everything has a weight and a dread to it that the events of Ace Combat 2 did not. Every time you go up in your aircraft, it’s to potentially kill someone you know, to be betrayed or betray, to fight off the logical end point of capitalism, where incomprehensibly wealthy corporations with their own advanced and massive military forces are vying to control the world and inflict their vision of the future onto it. There is seemingly no end to it, either, whereas in Ace Combat 2 the enemy and its reach seemed much clearer, and easier to handle. Here, you defeat one mega corp, and what? The other, which you’ve already been at odds with in the past, fills that vacuum, unchallenged? Hard to think about how cool flying is when that’s the situation turning over in your mind.

There’s more of a philosophical bent to it all here: flying is kick ass, yes, but what is its purpose, what is your purpose, and are you in the right place for your needs and those of the world? Is anyone? Rena, an early ally and noted ace pilot, has a condition that basically means that if she goes out into sunlight, she will die. She can see the world through the “eyes” of her aircraft, though, as technology allows her to pilot from a safe venue over an advanced neural network, giving her dominion over the skies and the ability to travel the world and experience it in a way she otherwise could not. It will not surprise you to find out that she is extremely loyal to those who gave her this opportunity, in ways that might not align with your own loyalties or philosophy or her current place of employ. You will end up having to choose between Rena and your other allies, like Erich and Fiona, as well as between your starting organization and the two corporations, General Resource and Neucom, as well as a fourth, shadowy organization whose presence won’t be fully felt until later.

Ace Combat 3 forces you to focus on which mega corp is the “good” one, if either of them can be good, if the UPEO itself is helpful or harmful, the importance of control over not just the air but space, too, and oh, it turns out a lot of people are tired of the constrictions of the flesh and are going to do something violent about it. Ace Combat 2 kicked ass, yes, but at its core it was… not this. The most difficult question you had to answer was which plane you wanted to climb into, but in Ace Combat 3, you have to wonder about the very nature of humanity and if there is a better way to live, and if so, what’s the best way to achieve that. At the very least, you need to decide on some organizational or person-to-person loyalties, to figure your place in the world, and these decisions will cause the storyline to branch, closing off one mission path but opening up another in the process. And there are multiple branches in the game, that even allow you to hop out of the new situation you’ve chosen if you decide to instead of being stuck there until your next playthrough.

Ace Combat 3, in Japan, opens with a scene-setting video, presumably of your character — which you name — watching a news broadcast that lays out the precarious state of the world and the mega corporations that control it. Before you even begin playing a mission, you can check out a helpful glossary of terms full of the places, people, and organizations mentioned in that broadcast, to give you further context on the world you, the player, has entered. Everything is designed to look as if it’s through a HUD your actual character is interacting with, with screens and menus and video calls and access to the near-future’s version of television and the internet. And you will have those video calls, both before missions and after them: they aren’t just from your superiors, either, but from your allies, your wingmen, and sometimes, even secret messages meant just for you.

Compare this to the North American version, which (1) has no opening cutscene to set the scene and instead uses a short wall of text to intro you, (2) does not have you name a character, (3) removes the glossary of terms because the ultra-simplified story doesn’t require it, (4) cut out all of the named wingmen and allies and such, leaving you with a very basic story and a rogue AI to contend with, and (5) removes all of the branching pathways. Instead of 52 total missions that can all be experienced by playing the game repeatedly with different decisions being made to open up new pathways, you get 36 total in a more linear fashion. It’s not a terrible design choice, in the sense it was the choice that brought us Ace Combat 2, but Electrosphere, at least in Japan, wasn’t trying to be Ace Combat 2. It was trying to be Ace Combat 3, which was vastly different. The North American Ace Combat 3 doesn’t work as well as its predecessor, as Ace Combat 2 avoiding narrative for vibes worked due to intentional design, from levels to soundtrack choices, that reflected that choice. The same care wasn't put into narrative-less vibes for Electrosphere, but why would it have been? Namco built the game around a narrative and its themes, made it central, made it vital. Which is great… unless you cut it. The English language Ace Combat 3 is still fun to play even in this form, don’t get me wrong, but it’s a much emptier experience than originally intended.

Apparently, the plan was to localize the game as is, but funding was cut, leading to Namco in America scrubbing the story and its many elements out to release a simplified and less expensive to produce version of Electrosphere. Ace Combat 3 wasn’t as well-received as it should have been because of these changes, especially since the pre-release buzz had been about all the extra focus Namco had put into story and presentation, so, the game didn’t end up making as much money as it should have, either. The reason for the budget cuts is unclear, though, the timing of the release might have something to do with it: it was already March of 2000 by the time the North American version released, seven months before the launch of the Playstaion 2 in the same region. Was Namco just trying to squeeze one more major release out while there was still even half-a-year of cushion between it hitting the shelves and the PS2? It’s a plan that didn’t work like they wanted it to, that much is clear.

In May, 2023, a group of unofficial translators — Load Word Team — released a patch that effectively “restored” all of the cut content from the North American release by patching the Japanese edition into English. If you’ve played the North American Ace Combat 3, but not the Japanese edition, change that: patch the game, and play it the way it was meant to be played, if Namco hadn’t cut the budget for localization. It switches Electrosphere from a somewhat odd “Ace Combat 2, but futuristic” game to the thoughtful, choice-first experience it was supposed to be. Going back to the North American version after experiencing all the Japanese one has to offer will prove difficult.

Which is not to say it’s a perfect game even in its intended form. There is, weirdly, a little less freedom for you in terms of what craft you can choose for many missions, especially those in the back half of the game on disc two. You get used to it, but it does force you to master specific planes instead of whichever kind you want, and the sheer speed of the one capable of near-space flight will take some getting used to after you were utilizing more standard, realistic craft in the many missions prior. These are small things, though, and certainly a worthy trade-off. It’s just noticeable when so much else has been opened up, and considerably.

Play Ace Combat 3 with the translation patch. You get not just access to the full original 52 missions, which are hidden through the branching pathways as well as, in some cases, depending on your performance in previous flights, but you get the full story and thoughtful narrative that, kind of inconceivably, helps explain where Namco’s heads were at at the time, and why they were interested in working with the newly formed Monolith Soft on the heady Xenosaga games prior to their merger with Bandai. That’s not what I expected out of an Ace Combat game, especially following the no thoughts, vibes-only excellence of Ace Combat 2, but it turns out Namco knew what they were doing here with the shift. At least, until it came time to localize the game, anyway.

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