I'm not saying that just because the series is set on an alternate Earth where the continents and countries are all made-up and unfamiliar. That's nothing terribly new in speculative fiction, after all. No, I'm talking about the tech base. It's mostly realistic? Except when it's not, and the discontinuities are... really something.

Case in point: The playable aircraft all seem to be real-world machines, but in some cases jarringly anachronistic ones. AC8 is set in 2029, but the starting aircraft are the A-model Tomcat and the Legacy Hornet, both of which have been out of service for years (in the F-14A's case, for twenty years, and the A-model was fairly out of date well before then).

On the other hand (spoilers, I guess) [ one of the principal enemy threats is something called a "land battleship", which appears to be literally a battleship running on a couple dozen Jawa sandcrawler tracks. With railguns. And in the mission Biboo played, and replayed, and replayed last night, it was attacking the base of a space elevator. ]

This is all so deliriously weird, I felt my grip on reality starting to slip just watching somebody else play it. I kind of want to get it now, even though I'm not good at that kind of game, which I guess is a sign of successful marketing. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Unless they remake Zeonic Front at some point, Ace Combat is as good as it's going to get.

I do heartily recommend it, tho, even with the pitfalls of using a controller to actually play it.

Also, Ace Combat 7, which takes place in 2019, starts you with an F-16C. According to Wikipedia, while it resumed production in 2019, it had previously ceased being built in 2017. It doesn't say when the C/D variant stopped production, but they started in 1984.

(Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere, which I believe is set furthest in the timeline so far, at 2040, gives you a fictionalized upgraded version of the Eurofighter Typhoon as a starting plane, with MMI controls called the COFFIN system.)

Ace Combat does this in order to basically sell you (in in-game credits for flying good) superior planes (Or in the case of DLC, legacy super-aircraft that were either end game antagonist planes, or completion rewards, or both) because otherwise having something actually modern when it's putting you up against a couple of F-15s with potatoes at the controls and a couple of defenceless bombers in the tutorial missions would just be mean. :)

God I wish I could play AC8...I very nearly S-ranked AC7 on the hardest difficulty, I love arcade-y flight sims.