Love/Hate: Ace Combat Advance (2005)

Welcome back to the Ace Combat Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’ll be going on a little detour to the first handheld entry in the franchise, and the first entry to not be made by Namco, Ace Combat Advance. To put it lightly, this game has… a reputation. As someone who grew up with a Game Boy, I was subjected to several shovelware console adaptations which were ill-suited to the system’s limited hardware. Everything I’ve seen of this game leads me to believe I’m in for a trash fire. Then again, people said the same about Resident Evil Gaiden and I found that game to be surprisingly compelling… so who knows, maybe Ace Combat Advance is a diamond in the rough? Read on to find out…

Love

Yeah… once again we’ve got a situation where I can’t really think of anything about a game that I can say that I “love”. Strap in, Ace, we’re wading into the sewers again!

Mixed

• Leads into Ace Combat 3 – Look, this is me absolutely grasping at straws to find anything positive to say and this is about the best I can muster: General Resource, one of the main factions from Ace Combat 3, factor pretty heavily into this game’s missions. As I understand it, this is intended to be a prequel showing what they are up to prior to the events of Ace Combat 3 and the full-on corporate takeover of Strangereal. That’s kind of neat, I guess… doesn’t make this game’s basically non-existent story any better though.
• It’s Playable – Say what you will about Ace Combat Advance‘s design (and, believe me, we’ll be saying plenty in a moment), but the game does mostly work as intended. In theory, you could play this game from start to finish, and it’s very short so the time and attention investment is quite reasonable. Unlike some of the games I’ve covered here, I didn’t have much trouble reaching the end credits. Is such faint praise about reasonable, bare-minimum expectations for a game absolutely damning? Yes, it is!

Hate

• Terrible Design Decisions – Ace Combat Advance doesn’t even bother to try to force the 3D gameplay of the Ace Combat series to run on the Game Boy Advance, and instead opts for a top-down shooter approach. Honestly, this is a very wise decision: it makes sense for the hardware limitations, and top-down shooters were well-trodden territory by 2005, so they should know how to make it turn out well. Unfortunately, Ace Combat Advance is fundamentally kneecapped by several idiotic design decisions:
  • First of all, a lot of Ace Combat Advance‘s issues stem from the developers’ decision to not follow the traditional top-down shooter formula. Instead of auto-scrolling as you shoot at curated waves of enemies, they instead opt for free movement through large levels. While this is kind of cool conceptually, the game would have been better if it was trying to be more generic. The large mission areas mean that you spend a significant amount of time just staring at the dull backgrounds, waiting for an enemy to appear on-screen. Since the levels are so small and the field of view is so zoomed in, you spend like 90% of your playtime just staring at the mini-map, shooting bullets and missiles at off-screen enemies, and following the arrows to the next objective. Let me reiterate that: the optimal and intended way to play the game is to spend the entire playthrough shooting enemies off-screen. I’m not kidding in the slightest here: you could legitimately do a playthrough of this game where you complete every objective and never see an enemy the entire time. While I give the developers some credit for at least trying something different, Ace Combat Advance would legitimately be more fun if it was just doing the “normal” top-down auto-scroller thing.
  • Secondly, In order to shoot at ground targets, you have to hold up on the d-pad to dive towards the ground. In theory, this makes sense, but having to actively swap between air and ground targets is frustrating when enemies can just shoot you whenever they damn well please. You can easily get into a situation where you’re too close to the enemy to hit them, but they can unload ordinance into you unimpeded, which just reinforces the idea that you’re supposed to kill enemies while they’re off-screen… which is just the stupidest way to design a game that I can imagine. Where is the fun in that?
  • Thirdly, your plane moves at a glacial pace by default. You can hold down R to engage your afterburners, but these only can be activated for a limited period of time before requiring a few second cooldown period, so you will often find yourself completely defenseless while your plane crawls forward. Suffice to say, if you’re being attacked by enemies when this happens, you’re probably fucked. Hell, it makes the simple act of pursuing enemy planes a real pain in the ass, because they can and will fly away from you and you will never catch up to them. As a result, you basically only get into dogfights on the enemy’s terms.
  • Fourthly, your weapons do piddly amounts of damage. Your machine gun is nigh-useless against ground targets: you can line up a shot on them as soon as the appear on-screen and still not kill them by the time you pass over their position (again: you need to shoot them while they’re still off-screen). As a result, you end up relying on missiles to do anything. Unfortunately, these aren’t great either, often taking three or more shots to destroy a target. Hell, in the second mission you need to blow up some crates… they take five fucking missiles to destroy. FUCKING FIVE!!! In every other Ace Combat game I’m blowing up entire buildings and ships with one missile, are these crates made of fucking adamantium???
  • Fifthly (yes, fifthly), I think that the game has an automatic lock-on system, but it is fucking terrible. I would often find myself shooting at a target right in front of me and the missiles would inexplicably veer off to the left and miss. I have no fucking clue why this happens. As far as I can tell, you cannot change the target you’re locked onto, even if there’s a more important target closer to you. I swear to God, prayer is a more effective strategy than anything this game provides you with.
• Terrible Controls – So this is closely related to the aforementioned awful design decisions, but it’s worth having its own section to really sink in. Ace Combat Advance feels miserable to play. There’s the aforementioned glacial pace that your plane moves at, which just feels awful. There’s also very little you can do to avoid damage, other than staying away from enemies and pressing up to dive towards the ground. I’ve read that you can deploy counter-measures to deal with missiles, but I can’t even tell if that’s a real thing or some internet urban legend, because I sure as shit couldn’t make it work.
  • That last point is particularly relevant: Ace Combat Advance has no in-game control screen to show you what the buttons do. There’s no tutorial to learn how to play. You literally cannot find a copy of the game’s manual anywhere online. While that alone has speaks volumes to this game’s truly dire popularity, it’s a Game Boy Advance game: it’s got like ten buttons total, how hard can it be to figure out how to play it? I’ll tell ya, I think that this game has a missile lock-on system, but I don’t think that there’s anything you can do to change targets. Sometimes it looks like you should be locked onto a target, but then you missiles veer off inexplicably. I’ve read that L lets you fire off chaff to avoid missiles, but it seems to me like it just allows you to yaw left/right if you hold the button down? It feels like I’m missing some hidden commands, but there’s literally no way for me to tell in-game (or, for that matter, out of game). Seriously, if you have a copy of this game’s manual and post it online, you’ll be a fucking hero to idiots like me who choose to play Ace Combat Advance. You can argue that this shouldn’t be held against the game if you want to, but like I said in my impressions of Umbrella Corps, ideal conditions don’t matter: this is the reality that most people playing Ace Combat Advance will face, so it needs to be taken into account.
• Bad Graphics – I’ve said plenty of times in the past that I love the GBA/SNES graphical aesthetic, so there’s definitely a world where Ace Combat Advance could have looked very cool. Unfortunately, the graphical style they’ve gone for here looks really unappealing. Sprites are very muddy, looking like they took a lot of 3D assets, took PNG screenshots of them, and then shrank them down in MS-Paint and called it a day. I can’t even tell what I’m looking at at times. Here’s a fun demonstration of this for you: that screenshot above? There’s an enemy tank in it, but you’d never know it by looking at it. The backgrounds are also very dull, just a bunch of repetitive, low-res textures. Meanwhile, the planes are all really flat and undetailed: for these, I think that they took the 3D assets but thought that they looked terrible, so they had to hand-craft these to make them look better. As a result, they definitely stand out from the rest of the graphics, but in an incongruent manner. This game would have significantly benefitted from a more stylized art direction (I’m thinking something along the lines of Advance Wars).
• Mother – Okay, so your plane controls like shit, you need to dump an assload of missiles to take out targets, and you are inevitably gonna get to shot to shit trying to destroy most things you encounter. Luckily, the developers have accounted for this… by allowing you to call in a resupply plane to heal you and give you all your weapons back on-demand. Just hit SELECT and the resupply plane will appear on your mini-map (indicated by a blue arrow) within ten seconds. You will have to fly over to it, and you only have a short window to get there before it will leave, but you can just call it back in immediately if you miss it… which is why this system is kind of stupid. Rather than actually making an effort to balance the game or make it fun to play, the developers said “fuck it” and just let you call in unlimited health and ammunition as a band-aid fix. I guess it’s better than having to replay these shitty missions, but that’s a pretty cold consolation to not making your game fun to begin with.
• Passcode System – Despite being released in 2005, approximately twenty years after in-cartridge save systems were standardized, Ace Combat Advance has no way to save your game and instead opts for the old passcode system to access any particular level. Granted, modern conveniences make this a mostly null-issue, and the game is only like an hour long, so you can probably beat it in a single sitting if you really want to, but this is still egregious enough that it bears a mention.

Yeah… Ace Combat Advance was fucking rough. It was absolutely miserable to try to come to grips with it, but when I did finally get the hang of its controls and idiotic design designs (seriously: why the fuck did you make a game where I am playing wrong if I can see what I’m shooting at?!??!!), it was just not fun. So, congrats: the game isn’t broken, it just feels awful to play. Good job, Human Soft.

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Barloq

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Writer, blogger, father. Blogging since 2012, writing my whole life. Was blessed by the chupacabra and the guardian shepherd.

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