✨ We love Ace Combat.
For the uninitiated, Ace Combat is a series of Namco-produced air combat arcade sims.
They're inspired primarily by works like classic manga and OVA Area 88 and they largely concern themselves with anti-war messages presented from the context of being a military pilot: generally, however, the protagonists are well-meaning military officers who are attempting to stop actual warmongers.
Ace Combat generally portrays global conflict as the result of mostly decent people on opposing sides who generally either come together or at least learn respect for one another and put down their arms. The games themselves are fun, exciting romps where you use cool planes to blow up other cool planes and maybe a huge superweapon every now and then with absolutely BANGIN' tunes going on in the background, because it's fucking rad and generally the music heavily contributes to the mood of good-natured 'cool dudes doing cool things' vibe with a light soupcon of liberal humanism. It's VERY goofy and VERY anime and while it occasionally goes to some dark places, it is fairly optimistic overall.
Project Wingman, by independent studio Sector D2, is what happens if you take Ace Combat's tone and vibes, but surgically remove the optimism. And I think it's actually MUCH BRAVER to make that choice.
So I'd like to talk about Project Wingman's PS5-only short campaign, Frontline-59, and the way it utilizes your own expectation of high-minded idealism to twist the knife directly into your heart. This will spoil effectively the entirety of Frontline-59 and most of Project Wingman, so uh... play the game if you're able to? It's really good! I'll wait!
Okay, back? Cool let's do this.
Frontline-59 concerns an engagement during the war that happens over the course of the main game, in an alternate universe Earth where a lot of technology revolves around an unusual naturally-occurring superfuel called Cordium. That war is between a state known as the Federation, an empire in all but name that rules most of the globe that's still inhabitable following a Cordium-fueled natural disaster known as the Calamity, and the newly-liberated nation of Cascadia in the Pacific Northwest, the largest non-European producer of Cordium and an occupied territory of the Federation. By the point Frontline-59 happens, it's about... halfway through the main campaign of the base game, right as the Federation is engaging a massive air battle over the Bering Strait with Cascadia. In the main game, you play a mercenary pilot aiding the Cascadian independence forces. In Frontline-59... you instead play a Federation reservist who is being scrambled as the battle climaxes...
...only to be informed shortly after takeoff that not only did your side lose that battle, enemy mercenaries are now pursuing the stragglers into the Federation state of Magadan, in eastern Siberia, which is right where you are stationed, and you're IMMEDIATELY tasked with protecting the last vestiges of the allied task force you were supposed to be helping turn the tide as they limp home.
What follows is about 3 more missions where you first fight a losing holding action against a coastal invasion, begin to stabilize with a heroic attack mission to support the retaking of a major city, and ultimately reaches a crescendo with a daring raid that involves you flying through an underground highway network to execute a behind the lines strike against a heavily-fortified forward base. All good, dramatic, inspiring stuff, with your allies congratulating you and praising your skill and going 'dang, maybe these reservists have the right stuff!' Unlikely hero saga, yeah!
...and then it gets to Mission 5.
Mission 5 of Frontline-59 is a cruel sucker punch that plays on the EXACT attitude of camaraderie and well-meaning patriotism it's been using to butter you up. The campaign gives you a desperate opening act, a moment to stare the enemy in the face and feel a quiet bitterness at being forced to retreat, a heroic stand to rebuild your confidence, and then a SOARING crescendo of personal exceptionalism and valor that makes you feel like you're dancing on air.
And then it takes all those feelings and makes you realize exactly how fucking poisonous they all were.
Mission 5 sees you return to the scene of Mission 2. Back on that same beachhead, now that the Cascadian land invasion has stalled out due to your efforts. It's time to push them out of the country entirely. So you charge in, all fired-up for this to be your moment of triumph. You're winning. You're winning so hard your plucky gang of reservists, who didn't even wanna BE here at the start of the campaign, are lined up, suddenly heroes over the course of the last month, wing-to-wing with the Federation's elite. You are at the apex of your power and respect.
...and the mood... is rotten. The mission is at the midpoint of dusk, just before night starts to fall, and the world is bathed in a sickly orange from the setting sun, hazed by the smoke of combat. It's bitter cold, the land is scorched and ruined beneath you. And the music is not a triumphant coming home anthem... it's a tense, gnawing piece that draws on ominously trembling strings and twinkling, almost maliciously scornful toy piano, far too eerily light and playful for the mood the rest of the song is setting up. But you do as you're ordered. The battle escalates. You fight for inches at a time. You drop bomb after bomb and let fly missile after missile. The enemy waves and columns keep coming, over and over, as your wingmates get steadily more frustrated... not with the futility of the conflict, as they did at the start of the story, but now bitterly snarling at the people you're trying to force back into the frozen sea. And then, finally... a break in the fighting. The enemy commander calls up your ground commander, and asks for a ceasefire so that they can withdraw. The music halts. He begs for an end to the bloodshed now that his own commander has deserted off on some other mission.
And your commander... seems to listen. He runs the ceasefire request up the chain. You wait. The music begins to trickle back in. Quiet, sad. Resigned. The response is relayed. The music picks up with a preeningly evil military drum snare, and the bottom drops out of the strings as it wheels right back into the combat theme.
"Crystal Kingdom denies the request. Proceed with hostilities."
And then you are ordered to fire on fleeing vessels because this was never about making you feel like a hero. Making you feel like a hero was a pretext to make you compliant when issued an order ANY decent human being OUGHT to disobey. And in that moment, the game does not make you feel like a badass. It makes you feel like a cog. It says, by HOLDING UP your OWN EXAMPLE, "this is where military bravado and the rhetoric of honorable obedience gets you."
And to rub it in, the game has been telling you what you are the entire time. Your squadron's unit tag is K9. You are a dog, and the time when you could bite the hand that feeds has long since passed. The best you can hope for is a pat on the fucking head for being such a good fucking boy. You did such a good war. You did just what you were told, and you earned all the praise, and the fancy new planes they issued you, and aren't you just so proud of yourself now?
You thought this was going to end with some heroic climax? Fuck you. Mission 6 is even more starkly bleak. They immediately send you to protect a Cordium power facility, the setting's analog for an oil field, from an airborne attack. You fight a big flashy battle against a giant aerial battleship, but that's not triumph. The mission fades out on your side firing the cruise missiles that will ruin the world a second time over again and leaves you to hang on that moment as the Earth burns and seethes below you, a landscape of ash and cinder. But you sure felt like a hero for a good 2 hours there, didn't you?
The way this is in dialogue not only with war stories of idealized nationalism but also with the gee-whiz optimism of Ace Combat is fascinating to me. It's ACTIVELY playing on your own hope for this to be better, on your expectation that you could make a difference, that one man in the right place with an improbably well-armed F-15 could make everything right. This was never about your ideals. This was never about making a better choice. You're inside a chain of command which doesn't allow people to make better choices. Power protects power. And you know by the climax of Mission 5 exactly who holds your leash.
Games aren't usually gifted with this much chutzpah when they do an anti-war storyline. It's nothing short of a miracle for one game to pull that same trick off twice. I highly, highly recommend you check it out if you haven't already.
