Love/Hate: Ace Combat – Assault Horizon Legacy (2011)

Welcome back to the Ace Combat Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’re headed back to a Nintendo handheld with Ace Combat: Assault Horizon Legacy! Released just one month after Assault Horizon, Legacy was once again helmed by Access Games, developer of prior handheld spin-offs, Ace Combat X and Joint Assault. However, while those were both fully original entries, Legacy bears the distinction of being the only remake in the franchise, adapting Ace Combat 2 to the 3DS hardware. Ace Combat 2 was a pretty solid game in its own right, so would Access Games manage to match its quality, or would this be another ill-conceived video game remake? Read on to find out…

Love

• It’s a Faithful Remake – Like I said up top, Ace Combat 2 is a rock-solid, 7/10 game, so I’m pleased to say that Legacy manages to live up to its predecessor’s quality. Some “remakes” are pretty loose with what they choose to adapt, but Legacy captures the missions and feel from the original game well.* It’s more of a REmake than a REmake 2, adding onto the original game, rather than reimagining the entire experience. You’ve got all the same content, but with improved graphics, new boss encounters, a slightly more fleshed out narrative, and modernized gameplay. Honestly, the fact that they fixed my biggest issue with Ace Combat 2, the inconsistent lock-on range which made air-to-ground combat really frustrating, alone makes me consider Legacy a marginal improvement over the original.
• Ace Squadrons – Perhaps the coolest new feature of Legacy is that some missions now end in showdowns with “ace squadrons”, a la Ace Combat Zero. While they just kind of “show up” and don’t provide us with any more story context, these guys all have shockingly memorable, over-the-top, anime-esque character personalities. The most memorable of these pilots is Camilla Almeida of the Cocoon Squadron, who’s a goddamn sky dominatrix with a harem of fuckboys who refer to her as “queen”. It’s wild, hilarious and kind of amazing, especially in such a po-faced franchise like this.
• Customization, Perfected – Since introducing the customization system in Ace Combat X, I’ve always found the idea interesting, but the execution was always lacking. Upgrades were too expensive, had too many restrictions, and just didn’t feel worthwhile. However, Legacy finally nails this system, making it feel fun, exciting, and impactful.
  • First of all, the entire upgrade system has been made much more fun. You can really feel the improvements upgrades give you in-game, and the drawbacks don’t feel nearly as harsh anymore. Expensive upgrades feel really powerful and it’s cool that purchased parts are available for all other planes able to equip it.
  • Then there’s the paint system, which now lets you pick the colour of your plane! This only becomes available if you use the same plane a few times and is nothing more than cosmetic, but that’s half the appeal. I love embracing this childhood fantasy where you shoot down the bad guys in your special fighter jet!

*The main exception to this is the soundtrack, which is pretty much universally considered superior in the original by series’ fans.

Hate

• Maneuvers – The biggest new gameplay addition in Legacy is the new “maneuvers” system. This is, essentially, a take on Assault Horizon‘s dogfight mode: you get close to an enemy plane, wait for a bar to fill up, and then you can press Y to perform an “attack maneuver”. This puts you behind the enemy plane and locks you into pursuit with them. If you wait for the bar to fill completely before initiating the maneuver, then you get a couple seconds to fire missiles and get a near-guaranteed kill. When missiles are being fired at you, you can also press the Y button and a direction to get a guaranteed “dodge” on the incoming attack. I much prefer this version of the system compared to Assault Horizon, as it feels like there’s more skill to it than the on-rails, QTE-fest that DFM ended up being. That said, even though it is improved, maneuvers drain so much of the skill and fun out of this series’ air-to-air combat. They’re way too easy to pull off and start feeling repetitive and overly-prescriptive. It’s a perfectly-functional system, I guess, but like I said with Assault Horizon, these systems are solving something that was never a problem to begin with.
  • These are particularly annoying with “boss” fights, where the strategy to defeat them always ends up being “fly close and then hit them with a maneuver a couple times”. It dumbs down the gameplay of these kinds of encounters.
• Optimization – Legacy isn’t a particularly great-looking game, but even then it really chugs at times. You get a lot of slowdown when you blow an enemy plane up, but there are some levels where the game just can’t maintain a consistent framerate throughout. I would have assumed that this was an emulation thing… but I played the game on my 3DS XL, so this is apparently just how it played on release! I imagine that it would have run better on the more-powerful New 3DS* if I had one… hell, it probably would have run better if I had just emulated the game to begin with! It’s just kind of crazy to me that playing the game on original hardware “as intended” would end up being the worst way to experience the game.

*Which, by the way, has to be the absolute worst console name of all-time, right?

I honestly don’t have a whole lot to say about Ace Combat: Assault Horizon Legacy: much of my commentary of Ace Combat 2 applies here as well, which leaves me to comment only on the things Legacy does differently… which isn’t a whole lot, honestly. I appreciate the updated controls, but maneuvers really dampen my enthusiasm about air-to-air combat. The updated story is appreciated, but it also doesn’t really make the story any “better” than it was in the original. Like I said, I’d consider the game to be a marginal improvement over the original, but given fourteen years of progress, you might have hoped for something a bit more substantial.

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