Ace Combat

Not really. I mean, Pixy calls him out on it in-universe.

"While you're up here fighting for peace, tons of blood is being shed on the ground. Some peace, kid. You think you can stop bloodshed by shedding more blood? Flying with all those ideals swimming around in your head is gonna get you killed."

Actually, I don't actually have a problem with the idea of fighting for peace. There are always going to be people who start shit. Sometimes the only way to stop them is to start shit right back. If you want peace, prepare for war, and all that.

Like I said, AC5 heavily reminds me of Gundam SEED.

[earnestly applauds DBL's Rimshot]

Which I find really funny, because I find "defending yourself and those who cannot defend themselves" to be a much nobler and more straightforward ideal than "fighting for peace", which sounds like a borderline Ice-Cream Koan (although, yes, it's not hard to draw the connections that make it reasonable), despite the fact that PJ is a good guy.

Pixy does call him out on it pretty well, which I think makes it clear that the game's not really espousing PJ's ideal. He's portrayed sympathetically, but just because someone is a good guy doesn't mean the work is espousing every ideal that character holds. I think PJ was being portrayed as naive and idealistic, while Pixy was cynical, bitter, and disenfranchised by what he'd experienced on the battlefield, neither of which, on its own, is a bad thing. What made PJ good and Pixy bad was that PJ never lost sight of the fact that it was his responsibility to protect people and preserve human life, while Pixy decided that the world was such a Crapsack World that it needed to be rebooted. Sort of a "The best way to help the species is to pare it back, nevermind what that does to a shitload of individuals in the meantime" mindset.

Whatever else I may say about Zero, I did find Pixy's philosophy interesting, though of course his radicalization and eventual "We should set off a bunch of nukes all over the world and let civilization start over Fallout-style" is batshit.

edited 21st Apr '16 7:29:56 AM by SolipSchism

...I just had a true Ace Combat moment now.

Valley of Kings on Ace with a Falken. Destroyed every opponent on the map, nailed the final target with 5.36 seconds remaining on the countdown and flew out of the halfway-closed hatch without rolling to align the plane with the opening's shape. Fuck yeah.

Nobody messes with Cipher. No-fucking-body.

edited 31st May '16 10:58:38 AM by amitakartok

Of course. This is the guy who is apparently so good of an Ace Pilot that he has what it takes to take down Mobius One single-handedly (albeit in a non-canon segment) when an entire squadron of Ace Pilots failed.

Also, it's my headcanon that Cipher is Mobius One's dad... who is Blaze's own dad. Blame it on this one fanfic where all three of them featured in an alternate take on AC5's plot; apparently the elder two impregnated the moms while they were in their late teens at the latest.

edited 31st May '16 6:18:56 PM by MarqFJA

As long as we all accept that Cipher is, in fact, the actual demon Razgriz.

edited 31st May '16 6:34:52 PM by TheAirman

Or the Anthropomorphic Personification thereof. Or the son of such a being, at least.

Nah, straight up Razgriz in human form. Mobius One and Blaze are his descendants as per your headcanon.

The myth is actually a prophecy, like a reverse-Dead Sea Scrolls.

edited 31st May '16 6:53:22 PM by TheAirman

I still think best pilot, if we're going purely by canon story-mode feats, is Talisman, given that he takes out that fucking Nosferatu. Seriously, that's far and away the single most intense fight in any Ace Combat game I've played, bar none. Flying around like a madman dodging UAVs and directing the entire allied air force against him. Definitely awesome. Though if you want to talk about single ridiculous stunts rather than an entire dogfight, it has to be Bishop from Assault Horizon shooting the canopy off his wingman's plane so he could ditch after he took a hit and his ejection seat malfunctioned. Everyone and their mother does suicidally fancy tunnel flying in Ace Combat, but I can't think of anyone else who pulls off an insane feat of gunnery like that.

In other news, I picked up a PSP recently. I know there's a couple Ace Combat games for PSP, but I don't know anything about them. Are they any good?

ACX is pretty good, though I really wish it was on the AC5/Z engine instead of the AC04 engine. On the other hand, dat Saab Viggen.

X is good, with a fucking phenomenal final mission depending on how you set it up (each arc has branching mission paths), X2 is good enough but the final mission can be a royal pain in the ass.

...and I just witnessed Cipher taking down Pixy in 54 seconds on Ace using a TLS-equipped Morgan. My fastest kill on the guy ever.

Damn.

And I just did it again, then one-upped it with 52 seconds. Looks like you can't get any faster because the mission dialogue won't let you.

Oh well, time to face the Gauntlet. Gelb, Rot, Schwarze, Espada, Wiza- HOLYSHITMOBIUSONE. I mean, I knew he was in the game as a Bonus Boss but this is the first time I've actually seen him! Granted, he got my wing with his second missile salvo just as I was lining up my MPBM, but damn.

*25 minutes later* HOLYSHITFUCKYES, I actually took him down!

Cipher is fucking unstoppable. Jesus Christ, man.

Now I've seen everything the game has to offer. As of today, I finished maxing out the kill gauges of every single plane except the superplanes, with over 106 hours logged in the savestate.

edited 3rd Jun '16 2:54:46 PM by amitakartok

It's probably nostalgia talking, but I'll probably always vote for Mobius One as most awesome Ace Combat protagonist. (Tiny in-universe justification: he does everything solo. Even if wingmen are pretty useless in the vast majority of games.)

Well, not everything solo. The last mission technically has a whole Mobius Squadron accompanying him, which can survive without a single loss if you don't screw around with the Yellows. AC04 just happens to suffer from a lack of wingman control, plus all of the wingmen in subsequent games have Gameplay Ally Immortality and you could complete the entire campaign without their assistance anyway, so they don't really count.

It's been a while, but don't the surviving Yellows in the Megalith mission start mentioning that the rest of Mobius Squadron are, to be blunt, kind of crap? I mean, maybe they're actually decent pilots and they're only bad in comparison to Mobius One, but I definitely had the impression that they were more of a psychological thing ("oh shit, and entire squadron of ribbon fighters?!") than anything else.

Of course, it's been ages since I've heard that dialogue, because it's way more fun to listen to the Yellows progressively freaking out more and more if you shoot down their commanding officer (and his replacement, and his replacement, and HIS replacement...) in the right order.

My impression of that was that the entire squadron used the Mobius insignia in order to make it impossible for the Yellows to tell which one is the real. I mean, you might be able to identify the real one if you happen to be looking in the right direction at the right time, but the instant you lose sight of him because of someone else getting on your tail and forcing you to maneuver, it's needle-in-the-haystack time because they all look the same.

My impression (which appears to be shared by some AC fanfic writers) is that the other Mobius Squadron members are all Ace Pilots in their own right (even if nowhere near Mobius One's legendary level) who distinguished themselves by performing great accomplishments in other battlefields throughout the war ^note come on, you can't tell me that Mobius One's missions are the only major operations that ISAF performed in the war; chances are that some of them were concurrent with other operations elsewhere and/or merely proving themselves skilled enough to merely survive since the first operation they had fought in alongside Mobius One.

I remember this one AC 5 fic that pretty much outright stated that Mobius Squadron is composed of the best aces the ISAF had, it's just that Mobius One was just that good. Heck, I'm pretty sure one of the requirements to join was that you had to last something like a minute in a 1v1 mock dogfight with him!

Of course, after a bit, the fame got to be a bit too much for him, and he "retired" to a quiet life in Osea, where he joined the Air Force as a fighter pilot trainee, callsign Blaze...

Oh yeah, I know that one. It's The Ultimate Ace. Bonus points for an easy justification as to why nobody recognized his face: He never took off his flight helmet in the presence of the media.

edited 4th Jun '16 2:14:06 PM by MarqFJA

Why do so many people want all the player characters to actually be the same guy? It raises lots of questions and answers none.

I don't know about the "raising more questions and solving none" thing, but it does provide an actual connection between the games' stories involved in the fic, and occasionally even justifies why there are seemingly so many godly Ace Pilots who end up being the hero of the game's subject war: They're really the same person.

One fic even has its very premise revolve around the fact that the protagonist keeps moving from one identity to another, and (in the first chapter) implies that he's a lot older than he looks like and may not even remember his original name (if he had one). The plot is kicked into overdrive when Pixy from AC0 comes back as a villain once again into Blaze's life, having somehow discovered the guy's multiplicity of identity.

Subtle hints throughout the series suggest that several fighters, specifically Pixy/Yellow 13 and one of the Belkan War pilots you shoot down/Scarface are one and the same. It...can get a little confusing when you throw in the Strangereal vs real world context and a couple of Legacy Characters, sure we can buy that Bartlett fought at the Round Table and later trained Wardog squadron. But what about, say, Mobius One, or Edge? Same person? Or are they, like, James Bond and the same name and callsign are used?