My earliest memory of the joy of flight was formed in Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina. My mom and I, on the top deck of a rented beach house, with balsa wood gliders. Not even a whole dollar for one. They came in all kinds. Ones with wings designed to do loops, ones with plastic and wire propellers that spun up on rubber bands, ones that went farther than you’d believe you could throw. She'd hold on to the strap of my Oshkosh with one hand and her Coors Light in the other, and perched as high as I could get, I'd send my little planes flying. Watching them crest over the other houses between us and the beach, descending somewhere beyond the brief, already eroding dunes of the Outer Banks. We'd send my stepfather off to retrieve them. And then we'd do it again until the sun started to set.
The earliest memory I have of the joy of aerial combat is taking one of those same balsa wood gliders and throwing it as hard as I could into the side of a classmate's stupid head. This is the corruption of the purity of flight.
Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve, excruciatingly details the post-invasion response by the Federation of Central Usea against the Republic of Sotoa, but arguably more than any other Ace Combat before it, this 8th mainline installment in the series is about how war corrupts the spirit of flight. Not in a Hayao Miyazaki's The Wind Also Rises kind of way. We don't quibble over war planes versus nice planes. We live for the roar of jet engines, the high-g turns, and post stall maneuvers that only the military-industrial complex can deliver. No. This is a game about pilots who never should have had to pull a trigger in their beautiful warbirds, and the pilots who couldn't help themselves. And yet, as yet another cutscene queues up, I can't help but think I should have been in a cockpit, pulling a trigger, 25 minutes ago. So much for the purity of flight in my heart.
Instead, Wings of Theve has locked me in what feels like the longest narrative taxiway in the history of games. I know it's not, but these are the kinds of thoughts you have when talking to a guy with mid-00s hipster facial hair in a raft while watching your nation burn. Minutes creep by before we're fished out by a rescue helicopter and plopped onto the last aircraft carrier in the entire FCU fleet. All of this witnessed from the first-person perspective. And that's when it happens. Press X. Press X to be rescued by big men. Press X to get out of the helicopter. Press X to acknowledge the embodiment of the player in the voiceless, nameless, faceless pilot we now inhabit. The game walks you across the flight deck (this is important: you don't get to control this. You will never control this. This isn't your body, just a narrative prison), right into the smug but tired grin of Jan "Rex" Cope. The titular Wings of Theve. Yes, his name is Cope. He explains that he's never shot a single plane down. That's just not his thing. He is the purity of flight manifest. Cope and his scratch-and-dent sale shonen anime wingmen who exist solely to keep Cope (and the “ace” myth) alive are the product of the manic, well-suited Latino with an early '00s Bluetooth earpiece and a smartphone. Purity of flight, meet propaganda, meet corporate nihilism, meet six-figure social media strategists on LinkedIn.
I actually like Cope's wingmen. Tasha, the brash pink-haired anime adolescent former circus pilot. She's never squeezed a trigger. She is the purity of flight waiting for the moment of corruption. Then there's Coster, a bearded Leon Kennedy waiting for his personal "Day the Music Died" moment. Rounding them out, showing them (and eventually the player) the ropes, is Papa Bear himself – Baxter. AKA Professor. He (and Coster) both lost the purity of flight to keep Tasha and Cope pure just a little longer. We'll meet Kate, the leader of Queen Squadron later. She's a ponytail and layered sports bras kind of girl with eyes that’ve only ever known sadness.
Together they are the Wings of Theve the way Voltron is multiple lions. But Cope is the Wings of Theve in the way that Amuro Ray is singularly an asshole. I can't wait for Cope to die. Die, so I can take over. Die, so I can be the pilot, so I can actually shoot planes down. Until then I am looking down at his crotch—I mean his outstretched hand—and pressing X to shake it. Then I'm pressing X to ride piggyback.
Then, once the leader of the ominous rival squadron has blown us out of the sky with the first and last time a post-stall maneuver will be interesting, I get the option to press X to try and save his life. Sometimes interactivity means choosing not to press X. I put the controller in front of me, listening to the micro-motor vibrations dance it across my desk. Cope's wrecked body sinks into the abyss strapped into his $65,000,000 F/A-18 Hornet-shaped coffin. A half-hour into the first Ace Combat in 7 years and this is the second time I've been fished out of the water. I haven't launched even a single missile yet. If this goes on much longer, do I get my pilot purity card back?
Ace Combat 8 draws from the same grab bag of mission types that every other Ace Combat has. Wild weasel runs, exhausting escorts, air superiority for ground assaults, timed strafe-em-ups, the Radar maze that everyone hated from Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown is back with a narrative vengeance, and Ace Combat 4's Stonehenge Railgun Dodging returns with a such a frequency "Railgun Warning!" will easily become a sound effect that gets stuck in your brain for a week.
Despite the Republic of Sotoa fielding Land Battleships, orbital kinetic bombardment satellites, and giant flying wings, like every other Ace Combat, you'll mostly be fighting old MiGs, the occasional Mirage 2000-5, some Eurofighter Typhoons—the usual assortment of licensable war machines from the usual war machine companies who (in addition to dealing multi-billion-dollar death and misery around the world) keep you from playing Ace Combat 4, 6 and now Zero if you didn't buy the specific pre-order bundles. When they really want to up the ante they'll send in the Lux Lunae's shadowy fifth-generation Sukhoi Su-57 Felons. Their main contribution to the battlefield is a diegetic theme song borrowed affectionately (in a slightly less "Truck Month" form) from professional wrestler Tommaso Ciampa.
Dogfighting them is annoying. It's not the endless chaff reserves or the maneuverability of their custom Sukhoi fighters—it's their radio chatter. They simply will not shut up. When their leader, Shadow 22 with his villainous train conductor facial hair, chooses to darken your skies, you'll wish that you could take him out before it is narratively allowed.
Unfortunately, for a game that’s so obsessed with the purity of flight, you do comparatively little real dogfighting. Instead, you’ll be strafing shit on the ground. Anti-air turrets, SAM launchers, tanks and APCs. All of it tied to one of the most aggressively and self-consciously scripted set of missions I’ve ever played. Sure, Ace Combat missions have always included event flags, but never like this. Wings of Theve’s entire trick seems to be “we spawned another group of Tupolev bombers on the other side of the map… Again. [smiley emoji].” Missions are heavily centered around paper tiger convoys getting ripped to shit in four places at once, while your wingmen are too busy having meltdowns or gabbing about how central you are. They certainly can't do anything to help you cover one enemy spawn after another. Somehow, squadron commands and reactivity have fallen off since Fires of Liberation and left us with: Cover, Attack My Target, and "Just Do Whatever." It's very unclear that the commands produce any response. I have definitely failed missions after mistakenly trusting them to handle the dregs of one crisis while I raced to engage the next wave of critical threats.
The narrative lives entirely within the Wings of Theve, his wingmen, the XO, that terrible social media man, and the endless turbidity of an Ace Combat war story which abandons the grander operatic melodrama of previous Ace Combats to gesticulate platitudes at the player. And not only that, but the entire thing is received from a singular point of view—the player’s. It feels stifling, suffocating, and the general juvenilia of Ace Combat dialogue goes from charming to an undergraduate playwriting workshop inflicted directly at the camera. Ace Combat pilots were never meant to be embodied like this, to be so directly addressed by everyone about everything, to have the entire (and I mean every moment of) game orbit the player like a shitty smirking Renaissance sun.
This isn't the first time Ace Combat has fallen short for me. A massive series with 31 years on a swarm of platforms, it's going to have ups and downs. It's allowed to do things that are boring (Joint Assault) or embarrassing (Assault Horizon) or truly silly (like a Java-based, top-down shooter for mobile phones). But between 1995 and 2011 there were 15 games. Compared to the last 15 years where there have been four. Before Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown, I didn't think we would get another Ace Combat. The first game since the partially-free-to-play Ace Combat Infinity, a fatiguing "What if Ace Combat 4 kinda happened on Earth?" that largely existed to support an online deathmatch/co-op system with a huge number of planes. After 4 underwhelming years, Bandai Namco dropped an asteroid on the servers freeing us from that zombified nightmare and gave us the Lighthouse War.
Ace Combat 8 feels like a bid to attract new players who avoided “the weird Japanese fighter jet game,” the ones who were scared off by the true faithfuls' dedicated cries of "Go dance with an angel!" or the absurdity of a hot anime mechanic ending up in a penal colony for forced fighter jocks after her passion project with gramps went wrong. This is an Ace Combat for people who haven't flipped through untranslated pages of the Area 88 manga or run up against a Land Carrier before.
But even then, I can't understand how they wouldn’t be underwhelmed. The set pieces here just don't hit the way the earlier games do. Even when they beg you to press X to look at a building fall, or vaporize an AEGIS cruiser. It wants to tell a Battlestar Galactica story, but it refuses to limit the player with Battlestar Galactica-like constraints. It spends so much time gassing up the player, it can’t make room for menace. Even when the Sotoan military leader, Moon 11, enters the narrative, we're given so little time with this enigmatic war-princess and her clipped wings that her campaign never becomes something we can try to understand and be properly sympathetic or disgusted by. She exists to point at a threat, a misunderstanding, a corruption, and then to be put down. She’s never given the necessary fullness that Pixy has in Ace Combat Zero that makes the final telegraphed showdown so meaningful.
Rather than instilling an unwavering belief in me, this Wings of Theve has left me deeply conflicted about what I want, what makes Ace Combat Ace Combat. I love when the game gets me in the clouds, has me strafe a wing that makes minuscule even my beefiest interceptor. It's those moments where Ace Combat 8 makes me wish I had a bigger monitor. Or that I was the kind of person who set their life up in a way where a desktop connected to my television made sense and wasn't the acceptance of personal aesthetic death. Even sitting inches away from a 32" display doesn't appropriately capture the bombast enough. There are 100 bonus gigabytes (of God knows what, HD textures I'm assuming?). An entire professionally detailed Version Katoki of every plane, vehicle, and available surface featured in the game. There are decals and oil stains around every rivet. I don't want to give myself over to spectacle, and I am morally, ecologically, and spiritually opposed to the advance of gaming visual fidelity... But I am also human, I have eaten of the apple and known sin.
I want to see the fear in the frantic head and hand movements as my rival's cockpit fills with hydraulic fluid, blood, and fire. I could do the Top Gun thing and fly upside down canopy to canopy to watch him die. Even as I know it would terrify my fish, I want the aftermath of Sidewinder vs F-35 to light up my living room. I'm not proud of it, but part of me wants to know what Ace Combat 8 looks like through a Steam Frame. And I'm disgusted by the contradictions this swells within me. But you have to understand, these explosions look really fucking stellar. Almost as beautiful as these fucking clouds.
While Ace Combat 7 introduced functional clouds to the franchise, 8 has transformed them into a full experience. It's not just pretty white fluff that ruins missile lock. Sure, it still does that. But once Wings of Theve lets you care more about the things that fly rather than people that crawl, there's a whole world of water vapor to learn, explore, and dogfight in. Some clouds stack, creating pockets of visibility within their marshmallow density, like those pillows stuffed with shredded foam chunks. Others are a vast expanse, changing with the sunlight and time of day. Haze giving way to kilometers of disorienting haze. I could have sworn I was pitched up only to be mere meters above the ocean. Sometimes the clouds will let your prey get the drop on you. Creeping up when you least expect it, unseen except by radar. You work yourself into a stall trying to get a visual. A machine gun lock. Anything. You plummet from the sky like a wounded bird, and that's when your reticle goes red—not because you found them, but because they found you. But nothing beats going from a low supercruise skim over the surface of a river cutting between mountains only to pull up hard. Turning yourself into a javelin. Ripping through mounds of white floss towards a slow-moving bomber. You catch it unaware, right in its soft, explosive belly and fly straight through the wreckage left by your missiles. Clouds that are dynamic, dangerous, and the reason I've let this 150-gigabyte monster with its shitty kernel-level anti-cheat, and its toxic casino-mentality Online Mode. But it's not enough.
31 years is a long time to love something. To carry a torch. It's lasted longer than both of my mother's marriages and the rental that was eventually claimed by the Atlantic. It's nearly 3/4 of my entire life. And even though we've had our ups and downs over the years, we historically have made it through. I loved Skies Unknown. Even the radar mission. The endless UAV swarms. The return to Stonehenge, this time not to destroy, but to defend. When Kiyoka Wada hits those gymnastic aerial runs in "Daredevil" I was locked in—I was the fucking purity of flight manifest.
But even the occasional satisfying dogfight in impressive clouds with very expensive toy models can't save how tedious, stifling, and flat-out miserable Wings of Theve is. I hate what this game imagines as the future of the franchise. Loot crates, extractive sycophancy, and imaginary celebrities singing “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” into their iPhones. A squawking, player-fixated, mollycoddling vision of immersion, where scripted events run regardless of input, where risk and expressivity are sanded down into an onanistic blob that gestures at things I used to care about.
