Love/Hate: Ace Combat Zero – The Belkan War (2006)

Welcome back to the Ace Combat Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’ll be going over the final entry in the series’ PS2 “holy trinity”, Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War. Again, I never played this game growing up, but it has gained a sterling reputation amongst Ace Combat fans, often being cited as the best game in the franchise, if not at least a top three entry. Then again, Ace Combat 5 was highly-lauded, and I found it particularly disappointing because of the hype around it. Would Ace Combat Zero actually live up to the hype this time? Read on to find out…

While Ace Combat Zero has had zero re-releases, it’s a much easier game to emulate today than Ace Combat 04 and 5. I was actually able to run it well on my Retroid Pocket 4 Pro, with only occasional stuttering to speak of (which is a damn-sight better than 04 and 5‘s performance even on the Steam Deck). Even if you don’t want to mess with dedicated emulation devices, if you have a higher-end smartphone released in the last few years, there’s a good chance you can download NetherSX2 and run this game yourself!

Love

• Reputation System, Roleplay, and Emergent Gameplay – Ace Combat Zero‘s biggest new addition is a new “reputation system”, which operates kind of like early morality/faction systems in the sixth and seventh console generations. Basically, it’s an additional ranking system where your actions in battle can push you into one of three alignments: mercenary (the “ruthless” alignment), soldier (the neutral/balanced alignment), or knight (the “virtuous” alignment). Each mission has optional, non-essential targets denoted with a yellow indicator on your mini-map and HUD, which are typically things like enemy barracks and supplies. You will also occasionally “neutralize” an enemy plane, damaging it badly enough that it’s no longer able to stay in the battle, leaving you with the option of whether you want to finish them off or not. Destroying these optional targets pushes your alignment towards “mercenary” and causes the enemy forces to really despise you in their radio chatter. The game also starts throwing harder enemies at you as the best pilots all try to take you down. Conversely, playing as a knight will cause allies and enemies to really respect you, and ignoring all the non-essential targets saves you time and resources. While this does play into some of the other systems, the main reason this is cool is just for roleplaying purposes: you write the story of your character, Cipher, and get to determine the kind of pilot you want to be. Personally, I decided to eschew my usual goody-goody alignment and instead decided to play the ruthless, dispassionate mercenary raining death from the skies. The joy of this system is that this is ultimately up to you to decide how you want to play.
  • In addition, you also occasionally get calls from allies in urgent need of support, which become timed sub-objectives. It’s entirely up to you on whether you want to heed their calls, but if you do then you really have to book it to rescue them in time. If you don’t prioritize your time well, then your embattled allies will be neutralized in short order. In one case, it led to a really cool bit of emergent gameplay: an ally plane had an enemy on his tail he couldn’t shake and asked for support. I was in a dogfight at the time, so I dealt with that and then, when I was finished, saw that this ally was still calling for support. I knew it had been a while at this point, so I rushed towards his location, blasting past other nearly enemy planes I normally would have engaged. Unfortunately, I was too late: I saw my ally’s radar symbol blink out just as I was arriving. I felt bad enough about this, but then the guys who shot him down turned their attention to me… as did the squadrons of enemy fighters that I had passed on the way here. Suddenly, I had a least eight planes swarming my wingman and I, and it turned into this frantic furball where I was having to line up missile lock-ons for a split second before firing and immediately taking evasive action from the three enemies who were on my tail at any given moment. We came out in the end after a couple frantic minutes of combat, but it was such an intense bit of unscripted gameplay and was amongst the most memorable encounters in the entire franchise for me!
  • All that said, it’s extremely tempting to go for the mercenary route for one simple reason: money is tight in Ace Combat Zero. In previous Ace Combat games, you could get pretty much any plane you wanted after one or two missions, but in Zero it can easily take like five or more missions to unlock a good plane (not to mention that buying additional weapons for those planes can easily take another two or more missions per weapon to afford). Non-essential targets provide a substantial cash bonus, so it’s extremely tempting to go for it. That said, half of the fun of a knight playthrough is in depriving yourself of the “easy” path, so I actually like that you’re legitimately sacrificing for a virtuous playthrough… that said, you face harder enemies in a mercenary playthrough, so you aren’t unduly punished if you take one route over the other either.
• Mission Structure and Variety – Ace Combat Zero has pared back 5‘s overly-scripted missions, instead opting for a more free-form approach akin to Ace Combat 04, but with more inherent variety to the missions. In particular, Zero occasionally will give you a mission where you can choose from one of three different engagement types: either a ground-based, air-based, or mixed engagement mission. These all will take place on the same map, but the enemy types and placements are all remixed for each engagement type, which dramatically changes your experience depending on what you pick and helps offer the game a bit more replayability. Honestly, Ace Combat Zero may just have the best lineup of missions in the entire franchise.
• Learned All the Best Lessons – Ace Combat Zero isn’t really doing a whole lot original, but it takes everything that was good about 04 and 5 and refines their formula to a near-perfect sheen. For example, while the game is clearly built using Ace Combat 5‘s game engine and flight mechanics, there are several instances where the more frustrating aspects of that game have been removed in favour of going back to the more successful approach of 04. The aforementioned mission structure is one example, but they’ve also cut down the radio chatter to feel far more authentic and natural, the story is more serious and mature, and they brought back the ability to purchase aircraft and weaponry again. You can really tell that they took a good, hard look at the previous Ace Combat games (including 3 for the ability to make choices to define your playthrough) and tried to implement their constituent parts to make the best game possible.
• Assault Records – Ace Combat Zero has this neat little system where, whenever you shoot down a named enemy pilot, you unlock some info about them, including a photograph and their ultimate fate, which can be viewed in a menu between missions. It’s nothing more than flavour, but it’s a really neat way to implement a collectibles/unlockables system in this kind of game!

Mixed

• The Narrative – Ace Combat Zero is going for a very serious storyline, telling the rather brutal and mature story of the Belkan War that was alluded to in 5. Our exploits in the war are filtered through a narrative device where a journalist learns of our actions ten years after the conflict has ended. It’s fairly well-executed all things considered, but I’ve got a few issues which keep me from loving it.
  • First of all, the game does a poor job of conveying the progression of the Belkan War (which, like I’ve said, was a really underrated strength of 04‘s macro-level narrative). You’re just out doing a bunch of missions as directed, it doesn’t really feel like you’re making actual progress in the war from mission-to-mission.
  • Secondly, the narrative is bizarrely-paced: a third of the way in, Belka are losing the war. Two thirds of the way in, they’re nuking themselves (which, according to 5, is the defining moment that ended the conflict). Then the final third of the game just kind of spins its wheels and goes on an unhinged tangent that comes completely out of nowhere. Oh, and then there’s the multiple sci-fi superweapons, which are introduced and then destroyed before they can even make an impact.
  • The weird pacing ends up exacerbating another issue with the game’s narrative: you’re never on the backfoot at any point in this game, you’re just constantly curb-stomping everyone you come across. Even if a threat does seem to emerge, it’s dealt with immediately.
  • As for the journalist side of the narrative, it’s bringing the seriousness and gravitas that the developers were going for, but it’s ultimately just… kind of dry stuff. I don’t particularly care about the story of this journalist or the legends about my character, I just wanna go be a mercenary. It’s not like 04, where its side-story was engaging on its own merits, and where its developments leant your missions extra emotional weight. I never found myself actively enjoying this framing device, just merely tolerating it.
• Excalibur – As is seemingly requisite for Ace Combat games at this point, Zero has it’s own superweapon for you to face-off against and to shake-up the typical gameplay formula when it’s activated. This time it’s Excalibur, a giant facility that shoots out lasers which can be beamed off of orbiting satellites to fry enemy missiles and planes approaching Belkan territory. In-game, it creates zones of area denial, forcing you to fly around its “blast radius” to avoid getting cooked. It’s got all the hallmarks of a classic Ace Combat superweapon, which makes it really disappointing that it feels like something of an afterthought within the narrative. Seriously, one mission ends with reports of something unknown that destroyed some planes, then in the next mission ends with the laser beam attacking you directly… and then in the very next mission you’re off to destroy it. It’s not like Stonehenge or the Arkbird where you have lots of build-up before you face-off with it, it just kind of shows up and gets blown up immediately. Granted, the moments where it does show up are really cool, but it would have been even cooler if we got another mission or two where it was hanging over our heads, or got a bit more information about it earlier on so you could get that creeping dread about facing it at some point.

Hate

• The Last Three Missions – So as I kind of implied in the story section, Ace Combat Zero goes completely off the rails in the final third of the game…
  • Not content to just have Belka nuking themselves be the climax of the game, Namco needed to live up to this series’ increasingly common trope of having a “twist faction” be the final enemy. So, after Belka is defeated, the final six levels have you fighting against splinter Belkan forces who refuse to accept the terms of surrender… and then suddenly the game becomes Metal Gear. In the final three levels, you start fighting against this revolutionary anarchist mercenary force called A World Without Borders, who believe that the Belkan War has showed that nations need to be dissolved to achieve peace. Suffice to say, they hammer you over the head with hamfisted philosophizing… we’ve seen from Metal Gear that this can be a really cool setup, but it’s so rushed and unearned that it just feels incredibly dumb, and really undermines the serious tone the game had been going for up to this point.
  • Okay, so the story goes off the rails at the end. I probably wouldn’t have put this into “Hate” on that alone, but the real killer is that the last couple missions really suck. At mission sixteen you are warned that you have to commit to one plane for the next three missions, which will comprise of air and ground combat scenarios. Cool, I picked my stalwart Su-37 multirole fighter that carried me through half the game. The first of these missions is a straight-up dogfight against a challenging squadron of enemy fighters, which wasn’t too bad with the plane/weapon setup I went with. Unfortunately, the next mission is a one-two punch of suck. First of all, you’re forced into doing one of Ace Combat‘s signature canyon runs, but they’ve designed this sequence to be as much of a pain in the ass as possible. The canyon is very narrow and there are SAMs placed in such a manner that you could never take them all out unless you equipped your plane with an anti-ground special weapon. With the altitude restrictions and little room to maneuver, it’s quite difficult to avoid all the missiles coming at you in here. That said, even if you do manage it, you exit the canyon and then have to fly inside the enemy fortress and blow up several targets inside the complex. Previous “tunnel” missions in Ace Combat games were mostly for show, meant to be primarily claustrophobic spectacles rather than actual skill-testing challenges, but Zero‘s tunnel run is by far the most demanding and punishing sequence of its like in the franchise. You are required to fly into and out of the tunnel at least two or three times before you can accomplish your objective, flying as carefully as possible to avoid crashing into the walls or ceiling of the complex (again, if you took an anti-ground special weapon, this can be made easier). Making matters worse, several of your entry-points to the tunnels close during the course of the mission, so you can end up dying because the game changes the level layout without warning. I must have died a dozen times here in this section and I’ll just say thank God for save states because I can’t imagine how frustrating it would be to have to replay the entirety of this level over and over again.
  • Then there’s the final mission, which is definitely better than the penultimate one, but still a black mark nonetheless. In this mission, you face off against your old wingman in a one-on-one. He’s apparently been equipped with a magic plane with a laser beam generator bolted to it. After pumping him with twelve direct missile hits, he suddenly becomes invincible to all attacks unless he is hit head-on by a missile. This sounds easy enough (after all, this is more or less what you needed to do to beat the final boss in Ace Combat 3), but the problem is that he then spends the entire fight running away from you. The only way to face him head-on that I found was to fly so fast that you overshoot him, bait him into pursuing and shooting at you, and then turning around as fast as possible to hope you can line up a missile before he passes you again. OH, and this is all done while a timer counts down, meaning you have no time to waste to figure all this out. I did manage this one my second attempt (after running out of time on my first attempt), but man was it an incredibly frustrating way to end the game.
  • All-in-all, these last three levels straight-up caused me to reassess my overall feelings on the game. They feel fundamentally at-odds with the rest of the game, and they represent a very unfair and unfun difficulty spike which I can only imagine was implemented to try to pad out the game’s runtime. For a good chunk of this playthrough, I considered Zero to be about on-par with 04, but the ending was such a disappointing pain in my ass that I think 04 still clears it by a safe margin (especially when you take into account its much better-executed narrative). Zero is still a great game, but when you’re competing with perfection, any glaring black mark is gonna stand out.
• FMVs – It fucking kills me that Namco really wanted Ace Combat Zero to have a really serious narrative, and then they chose to film several scenes using FMV sequences. What was it during the sixth console generation that was making people think that FMVs were ever going to look good? Need For Speed: Most Wanted, The Guy Game, now Ace Combat Zero… am I just the most unlucky sonofabitch, or were these somehow a trend in the mid-2000s? All that’s to say that the acting in these sequences is not great, and they ultimately kind of cheapen the narrative. I don’t think that 04‘s gorgeous and evocative, hand-painted still images would work with this kind of documentary-style, interview-heavy storytelling, but just about anything would be less-jarring than an FMV.
• Score Attack Missions – Okay, this is a nitpicky complaint, but I hate when I’m having fun in a mission and then suddenly it just ends without warning. Score attack missions in Zero have a hard score threshold which, once met, instantly completes the mission. Doesn’t matter if you were in the middle of a hot zone and happily blasting away targets (in fact, you’re statistically likely to be doing exactly this when it happens): it’s mission over. I much preferred 04‘s approach, where the score threshold was just the base threshold you needed in order to accomplish the mission, and every point thereafter was being scored to maximize your mission ranking. It’s just really annoying when you’re having a great time and then the game just says “yeah, no more of that!” I guess some people complained that missions went on for too long, but I never found that to be the case, and it’s significantly less deflating than what we got here.

Ace Combat Zero is easily the second-best game I’ve played in this franchise to this point. It just refines the Ace Combat formula to perfection, making for the most enjoyable missions and gameplay that we’ve seen thus far. That said, I still give 04 the edge overall, and that’s due to the awful finale and its considerably more effective narrative… your mileage will definitely vary on that though, so if you think Ace Combat Zero is the best game in the franchise, then I’d very much respect that opinion.

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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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