Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies (2001)

Ace Combat has always been one of my all-time favorite series. I even bought a PS2 just to play Ace Combat 4, because emulators, for all their perks, still can’t handle the game’s analog controls properly. And it was worth it—at least mostly.

Let’s be honest: Ace Combat 4, 5, and Zero are essentially the same game under the hood. You fly similar jets, you're given a limited loadout, and most of the time you’re spamming missiles at everything in the sky. The biggest difference lies in how each game delivers its story.

In Ace Combat 4, the narrative is presented through still-frame anime-style cutscenes. Uniquely, the story isn’t even about you—Mobius 1, the silent protagonist—but rather your adversary, Yellow 13. His tale is told through the eyes of a boy whose parents he accidentally killed. The boy, now working at a pub frequented by occupying pilots, watches as his hometown quietly resists. The bartender and his daughter—secretly in love with Yellow 13—are part of that resistance. It's a poetic, subtle approach, a far cry from the over-the-top, “in-your-face” storytelling of later titles like Assault Horizon.

Gameplay, however, is where Ace Combat 4 stumbles a bit. Too many missions follow a “score X points in Y time” formula, which often turns into a drawn-out missile spam-fest with minimal tactical variation. Instead of tackling mission-specific objectives, you're stuck in a repetitive loop of dogfighting, sometimes needing to return to base once—or even twice—for rearming. It wears thin.

That said, a few missions truly stand out. Mission 7, for example, presents a narrow ravine early on, and you immediately know what’s coming: an orbital cannon starts firing, and your only option is to thread the canyon to survive. It’s classic Ace Combat drama and spectacle. Other standout missions include Mission 10, where you strike an enemy submarine facility, and Mission 11, an escort operation that actually changes up the pacing.

The game is short—just 18 missions, with about two hours of pure gameplay if you're efficient. Progression is tied to a credit system where new aircraft become available as you complete missions. But once you unlock the EF-2000 Typhoon around the halfway point, there’s little incentive to switch planes. Later unlocks like the F-22, F-15 ACTIVE, and Su-47 are flashy, but by then, the campaign is almost over.

Another immersion-breaking issue is your seemingly useless allied forces. Possibly due to the points system, friendly units rarely (if ever) shoot anything down. It makes the battlefield feel more like a one-man show than a full-scale air war.

The penultimate mission pits you against Yellow 13, but it’s hard to call him a true nemesis. Mobius 1 never speaks, and you only encounter 13 twice: once to escape, and finally to shoot him down. There's no personal connection, just a silent, symbolic clash.

The final set-piece mission has all the expected tropes—tight corridor flying, missile barrages, and sweeping lasers. Despite the spectacle, it was surprisingly manageable on the first try, likely thanks to the analog controller, preparation, or just the fact that later games are more punishing. The trickiest part? Realizing that the third corridor runs perpendicular to the others, requiring a lap around the island to find the entrance.

In the end, Ace Combat 4 is still a fantastic game—tight, focused, and visually striking for its time. But its repetitive mission design and shallow progression keep it from being perfect. Still, for fans of the series, it remains a great game and a defining moment in aerial combat storytelling.

At its core, Ace Combat’s PS2 debut feels like the promise of the first two PSX games realized. It looks great, feels really good to control, and when it’s firing on all cylinders, it’s a really impressive and fun time. It’s basically just the style of those original games but mostly better and more fleshed out, without going as far off the beaten path as the third game did.

As strong as that core is here, I do still think they struggle to make a consistently compelling campaign around it. The main issue is mission design, particularly the many score attack missions that focus on eliminating simple ground targets. These missions do at least often have somewhat interesting bits of level design through difficult terrain and visual limitations. The problem is that once you finish the objective, you still often have a lot of time left on the clock. This gives you an opportunity to improve your score, but if you end up dying in the second half of these missions, it’s pretty tedious to do the relatively basic objective and survival again.

I felt that this design discouraged me from actually continuing to have fun once I hit the minimum required score. The overall result of this is that the campaign slightly drags at points, only slightly, but its peaks are quite good, such as the tense final mission and a few great ones toward the end of the first half.

The story is pretty good too, focusing on the war from the perspective of a child in an occupied territory that you’re working to liberate. His interactions with some of your adversaries definitely add interest to those battles. The only real problem with the story is that it often felt disconnected what I was actually doing as my character. By the end, it does come together, but I found it somewhat limited in impact due to that disconnect. It almost feels like they wanted to go all the way and let you play both sides of the conflict, which could have maybe been more interesting.

I would not consider the sometimes flawed mission design as something that ruins the game, more just something that makes me think how it could have been much snappier and better as an overall game. It’s still a very enjoyable game to play and one of the Ace Combat games that I can more strongly recommend.

I’ve been binging Ace Combat basically on a whim while I slowly go insane in quarantine, and the second stop on my journey was Ace Combat 4. Coming after Electrosphere’s grand-scale cyberpunk narrative with four factions, five endings, animated cutscenes done by Production I.G. (best known for Ghost in the Shell,) and a whopping 52 missions, I went in expecting something shorter and leaner – Electrosphere was a critical and commercial disappointment to Namco, and Ace Combat 4 being a soft reboot of the series would inevitably bring a host of changes with it.

Ace Combat 4, in contrast to the scope of Electrosphere, is remarkably focused narratively – Mobius One’s meteoric rise to fame is done entirely through radio chatter, with the cutscenes instead being dedicated to fleshing out the rival Yellow Squadron, with a particular focus on its leader Yellow Thirteen and his wingman, through the PoV of a citizen living under enemy occupation.

I didn’t expect this simple narrative to bring genuine moral ambiguity into the game through dramatic irony – nobody on the battlefield knew anything about the people they were fighting, and Mobius One casually slaughtered Yellow Four without knowing the efforts of the barkeep’s daughter that got Yellow Four in that state, Yellow Four’s character, or any of the things the player knew. He simply saw a target and blew it up, and then headed back to base.

Unfortunately, they scaled back the scope of the gameplay as well – nineteen missions in comparison to JP Electrosphere’s 52, and still much less than the English version’s 35. Additionally, the design changed: Electrosphere’s missions were generally about destroying specific targets within a strict time limit, while Shattered Skies’ missions tend to be raw score attack, destroying as many targets as you can within the time limit. The problem arises in the time limits, where Namco seemed to realize that the game was shorter than the last to a worrying degree, so they simply cranked up the amount of time you spend in each mission. Electrosphere’s missions were about three to eight minutes long, while the shortest missions in Shattered Skies are about seven minutes long. The longest? Twenty minutes.

There are no checkpoints, and crashing can send you back an infuriating amount of time. Occasionally they throw a wrench into things and add an updated objective or force you to temporarily change your flight path, but these are relatively uncommon and the distractions generally cease quickly before you go back to blowing up the five hundredth ground target.

There are obvious exceptions, but several of these interesting missions are then given absurd lengths and a nice concept is turned threadbare when you do it for twenty straight minutes.

Even the least interesting mission is still rendered at least compelling, however, due to the excellent audio design and soundtrack. Firefights are incredibly lively, with nonstop chatter, lots of which is unique to each mission, well-done sound cues mean that even when your HUD is impossible to read in the glare of sunlight, you can still down a plane and dodge a missile, and the soundtrack is simply to die for. Holy fuck it’s so good.

These elements and the narrative come to a head in the last two missions. The penultimate mission starts out as another overlong ground targets mission but rendered climactic and entertaining by continually adding in mini-objectives like “blow up that bridge,” “take out that AA gun,” and a second half that is white-knuckle tension that makes you feel like the biggest badass on the planet, a feeling that is maintained until the start of the final mission, which makes you feel like the biggest badass in the history of existence across all of time and space.

The final mission, narratively, feels like an excuse – every major plot thread and character arc was resolved in the prior mission, and it feels like one last victory lap. Until, of course, you actually start the mission, where it’s a barrage of the hypest possible things that you could think of within about a minute of each other before you blow up the fucking Death Star in a final test of your skills as a pilot. Completely narratively superfluous, but they finally let the gameplay speak and had the already-excellent audio transcend to another plane of incredible, making the game’s final hours unforgettable.

Before I started the final mission, I felt this game was a 3/5, and the strengths of that final mission alone bumped it up an entire star. Already, I’m forgetting the sludge of the boring, bland, overlong missions, and I recall only the simple-but-effective character arcs, the all-too-rare moments of dancing through the sky and around buildings, shaking off missiles and countering with a salvo of my own, and, of course, <<You're not gonna believe this, Jean-Louis!>>

That final mission made this game about ten times better overall. Objective design was a lot worse than 3, with multiple 15-20 minute missions of nothing but mindless score attack and no real difficulty. The most pressing threat the majority of my playtime was my own boredom making me play risky and possibly crashing, costing me ten to fifteen minutes of progress.

The narrative was really well-done and I found Mobeus One's rise to fame hype as hell, while the unnamed character's interludes gave the game genuine moral ambiguity and a different pace than Electrosphere's grand scope. I still really enjoyed this game overall, I just think that about half the missions could stand to be half the length and it'd be better for it.

Not gonna lie, i didn't expect ace combat 4's mission design to be as big a step back from 3 as it is. AC4 missions seem to be defined by going for as many points as you can in these big open areas, which would be fine if they weren't 10-20 minutes long with shitloads of downtime. The mechanics of ace combat 4 are a nice refinement and it feels a lot better to play, but this kind of feels like a step back in the narrative and mission department so far and this had a lot more hype than Electrosphere (granted, one was only really playable after a fan translation came out four years ago and one was the best-selling game in the series).

I'm only on mission seven and I hear a lot of hype about mission eight, but I'm a lot more mixed on this one than I thought I'd be so far.