More vibes than story, but what incredible vibes

It's a good game. I remember playing Ace Combat the first time in a PS2 and it was sick as hell, this is the same feeling.

As for the story, it's clear these Japanese writers have a very different cultural mindset; It's pretty obvious there is something unnatural in the unfolding of the events of the war in the story. Although they captured multiple sides of the story very well, it does not feel like a war of nations at all, it is very different from real life conflict, real life politics and power struggle. It's very artificial. And you can argue that modern conflict is also artificial, but that would show your clear lack of understanding in history and modern geopolitics. So go ahead and react with the clown.

But what they did really well in the story, is building a very humane character/villain? Mihaly A. Shilage. Not a lot of people seem to like the character, everyone wants a perfect villain that has either very good motives, or very bad ones. No one wants to see a human behind their screen.
A quote from him in the game is: "I did this for my ego. I unleashed pure chaos upon this world just so I could keep my wings." It's clear from the start that the skies represent some sort of freedom in this world, that Mihaly never wanted to fight for his country, or for Erusea, he wanted to be free.

I remember when I was a kid and I used to spend some nights at the airbase my dad was the medic of for the weekends. He had his whole building for him because there weren't many people on the weekends. I don't really know why he still held that job since he was already a successful surgeon at his clinic. But I digress, I've met a couple of pilots in there, the last thing they wanted to talk about was politics. All my life I always annoyed people because that was the only thing I wanted to talk about with them.
Why would someone that is giving their life to their country not want to talk about politics?
On social media you can see american airbases posting about the moment in which pilots get their planes picked for them. It's usually a crazy smile and huge victory jump when they learn they will fly a B2, F22, AC-130, etc. And it's funny when they have to pretend to be happy when they will get to fly a boring Hercules for transporting troops.
Why does someone want to fly planes? I think it's the same as climbing mountains, it is to achieve a higher goal. Humans want to dominate, it sounds bad, but it is a reality. We have zoos, we have massive farms, we take what we want, we throw our ♥♥♥♥ on the river, we kill elephants as trophies. Maybe it is in our nature, to be able to feed our family, we needed to start wars with animals to survive.
Right now, the majority of us live a very artificial life, we wake up, go to work, pretend to be normal, go home, cry and sleep. It seems natural that, if we are hungry for domination, we start making our own rules, we want to satiate this need and we climb mountains, run marathons, aim for leaderboards, and, of course, reach the sky.
I might be wrong, but I don't think any bellic pilot flies for any other reason, than to dominate the skies, to be free from the chains of the world we made on the ground.

The planes also feel different from each other, even though the controls are the same and the weaponry is not that different from each plane. You can still feel every plane behaving differently, being faster, moving around. It's hard to explain but I don't think there is much science behind it. It just feels good.

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