Awesome / Ace Combat X: Skies of Deception

• Gryphus One establishes his badass cred early on by dodging the shockwave from a SWBM that wipes out almost everyone else in his squadron. He proceeds to lead the retaking of Aurelia, takes down the Gleipnir airborne fortress that helped Leasath almost completely conquer Aurelia in ten days, helps to retake Griswall despite the Leasathian Frickin' Laser Beams, defeats Leasath's elite Alect Squadron and the Fenrir superfighters. If you make the right choices, he does the last two at the same time!
  • It gets better. If you're REALLY good and know the general placement of the fighters early on, you can shoot down the Alect planes WHILE CLOAKED. The mission briefing states quite clearly that doing that is too dangerous to approach head on which is why you need to destroy the mechanism that's providing the cloak with energy. If you can down all four of them, the game sometimes has trouble accepting that you could actually do that and skip to the last phase of the mission.
  • Speaking of the last phase, there's the obligatory AC tunnel mission. If the Alect squadron was fought, there's still one last man who escaped your wrath. Your job is to find him and destroy the fighter he's piloting AND escape at from a collapsing tunnel at the same time.
• Let's not forget Albert Genette. 10 years after joining the Wardogs in uncovering the truth behind the Cirrum-Pacific War, Albert shows he hasn't lost his reporting chops by taking down Diego Navarro by revealing to the entirety of Leasath his true plans for the war, leading to righteously enraged citizens tearing apart his beloved weapon on the very day of its ultimate triumph, just as Gryphus 1 destroys the rest of the weapons.
• Operation X. Just like Mobius 1 in Zero, this game's version of The Gauntlet has a nasty surprise in higher difficulties: Scarface One piloting his signature XFA-27. Although defeating him is entirely optional, getting to that point is easier said than done; He's the hardest opponent in the entire game, even more so than the XFA-33 Fenrir.