Trivia / Ace Combat

• Backed by the Pentagon: The games are made with the backing, or at least the blessing, of the Japanese Air Self Defense Force, and as such, Japanese jets, such as the Mitsubishi F-1, F-2 Viper Zero, and F-15J, and JASDF paintjobs for the F-4E and F-35C (standing in for the F-35A that Japan is acquiring) make frequent appearances as playable aircraft, and the E-767, used only by the JASDF, is ubiquitous as an AWACS aircraft.
• Creator Backlash: Downplayed by series director Kazutoni Kono, who admits that the mixed reviews of Ace Combat: Assault Horizon showed him that the series' direction was starting to stray away from what the highly critical fanbase actually desired. This fueled him to make sure that the next main instalment in the series went back to how 04, 5, Zero, and 6 were designed.
• Dueling Games: With Konami's Air Force Delta series and Ubisoft's H.A.W.X. series.
• No Port For You: Of the three major console makers, Nintendo gets the short end of the stick when it comes to this series. The Game Boy Advance got the 2D spinoff Ace Combat Advance and the Nintendo 3DS got the Ace Combat 2 remake Ace Combat: Assault Horizon Legacy, but there are no Ace Combat titles for Nintendo home-console platforms. While the series has been generally PlayStation-centric, Microsoft's consoles at least got 6 (and in fact, 6 did not get released on Sony platforms), Assault Horizon, and 7. ^note In January 2024, it was announced that 7 would be receiving a physical and digital release for the Nintendo Switch, making it the first numbered entry to see a release on a Nintendo home console, albeit five years after the fact.
• Referenced by...: Vector Thrust, at any point possible.
  • The LWSM and SWBM missile files are hidden in the game's files. Most other weapons, while actually including their real names, are also referred to by the same names as in the PS2 Ace Combat games.
  • Nearly all of the characters from the series pop up as random AI opponents you may face in Skirmish or Arcade battles.
  • Several Namco titles also make references to the series. Ridge Racer in particular returns the favor for Nagase being a recurring character by having the logos of several Ace Combat 3 corporations show up in the levels of Ridge Racer V and 64; one stage in Tekken 6's story mode also takes the player through a hangar housing several CFA-44 Nosferatu's, which is also the plane the player flies in Mach Storm, a Spiritual Successor to the original arcade games. Possibly the strangest one, however, is the Nintendo 3DS game Pro Baseball Famista 2011, where the XFA-27 from AC2 is among the various Namco characters showing up to play baseball. Yes, a baseball-playing fighter jet.
  • Lyrical Nanoha, of all things, features an ancient, fallen civilization named after the Principality of Belka. Bonus points for Belka being a proud kingdom of the past, its only representatives being honorable knights, and the heavy amounts of Air Jousting. Add to that the great disaster falling upon the kingdom.
• Schedule Slip: The COVID-19 Pandemic prevented Project Aces from properly celebrating Ace Combat's 25th anniversary in 2020, also delaying the rollout of 7's DLC in the process. Things only picked up again in 2021 as the "Anniversary Extension Operation", with an in-person concert in Tokyo planned for August 7.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Namco announced that they would be porting three of their arcade games, including Air Combat 22, to PC in May 1996. EDGE had a preview of the Rave Racer port in their July issue, but beyond that nothing came of the announcement.
  • Before work proper started on Ace Combat 5, the team planned to use the Ace Combat 04 engine for an entirely unrelated game - a remake of Xevious to celebrate that series' 20th anniversary. Some footage of the game remains, showing what is essentially Ace Combat 04 with the player flying the Solvalou instead of a real-world plane, but that one-minute teaser is basically all that came out of the project before the team shifted all its time and resources to The Unsung War.
  • Around 2007, Famitsu had an article centered on a trio of cancelled games that would have been set in the Strangereal world - the first of the three in particular, Brave Arms, would have been a 3D beat'em up set in the Kingdom of Sapin in 2025.

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