I’ve never been an air show guy. Despite having a pretty established and well-attended one every summer here in Toronto, on top of my personal politics not aligning with parading around machines that are explicitly built to destroy people and things, I just think they’re noisy for no reason and still have memories of my late dog Shelly (RIP) freaking out whenever they’d go by. But somehow, one of my favourite video game series of all time – at times my all-time favourite (sorry Yakuza) – is a game centred around these exact machines. Maybe there’s something to the notion of the games I love making something that I don’t particularly enjoy in real life – fishing, cats, mahjong – into something that I become low-key obsessed with in the virtual space, but that’s another article.

A few years ago, I described Namco’s Ace Combat as a series about a war where you’re an active participant but it has a generally antiwar message. In the newest edition, Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve, the series that I’ve been in love with since the PlayStation 2 takes everything to another level completely with its biggest-budget entry to date while doubling down on that message. On the heels of its wildly-successful Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown, Project Aces has seemingly used every dollar that comes with that success to build out Wings of Theve in every conceivable way, including in its story that retains both its complex geopolitical landscape and its emotional core.

Ace Combat is still a series that has, ahem, flown under the radar for many years. It’s not really thought of as a AAA title despite being so long-running and with such deep lore, world-building, and attention to detail. Doing the work of building an entire alternate world, appropriately called Strangereal, that mirrors ours but is just slightly off, the Project Aces team behind the franchise has gone way above and beyond what you’d expect from a game of this sort. Blending the realism of actual fighter jets and other military equipment with the manga-esque high drama and science fiction-esque flourishes of the story is one of the unique joys that this series has always brought me, and it is very much intact (and refined) in Ace Combat 8. If you ever wondered what a military flight-sim would be like if it were lovingly crafted by an obvious fan of both the Mobile Suit Gundam and Metal Gear franchises, have I got a series for you!

There’s no way I could explain the entire backstory of this series here and it’s confusing enough even for someone that’s played a lot of the games, so I can’t imagine how tough it is for someone that hasn’t. Let’s just leave it at “it’s complicated” and move on, but I can assure you that a whole world of complex political machinations that also contends with “what if a massive asteroid was hurtling toward Earth and how would various countries respond to that threat” awaits if you’re willing to dive in. In Ace Combat 8, the main thing that you really need to know is that you’ve taken on the moniker of the “Wings of Theve” who is a mythological ace pilot that was created via government propaganda to scare off its enemies. It’s based on a real guy named Jan Cope who seems to be a decent pilot, but is nowhere close to the prodigy he’s ‘marketed’ as and certainly does not have close to the legendary kill count with which he’s credited. When Cope is shot down at the beginning of the game and you, a much more skilled pilot, take over the mantle (including his callsign “Rex”) it’s very clearly more about messaging than anything else. Adopting that responsibility, you lead a team of pilots into various campaigns in an attempt to turn the tide of a war, both real and perceived, that your side is clearly losing. This plays out really interestingly in the game as you are constantly haunted by the voice of the original Wings of Theve who gives you cryptic clues and tips and questionable fortune-cookie-esque philosophical guidance through the comms in your cockpit which only you can hear.

Even though there is a lot of emphasis on real planes and the technical side of outfitting yourself and your team in Ace Combat 8, the machines are only part of it and are extensions of the people that pilot them into battle. Each of your wingmen have their own distinct personalities that you have to manage, taking into account their skills and equipment as well as your own weapon payloads and the constraints that your particular battlefield puts on you, to problem-solve your way through the scenarios you’ll encounter as you work your way through the story. You need to remember that one of your wingmen is very averse to killing other pilots but is extremely skilled at flashy maneuvers so they’re better suited to distraction while you put another teammate on death duty. You’ll have to be patient with the one guy that wants to play early-00’s buttrock anthems of the Nickelback variety through the comms because he keeps up team morale. You’ll need to keep in mind collateral damage, so maybe you don’t want to drop that unguided bomb in the middle of a mixed group of enemy and friendly combatants and use something targeted instead. In this way, missions have way more variety and have tons of nuance and unexpected moments beyond “just blow up these targets.You used up your whole payload of air-to-air missiles and now a deadly squadron has jump-scared their way onto the radar and need to be dealt with? Sucks to be you.

Speaking of that deadly squadron, while you’re pitted against the nation of Sotoa as a whole, it gets a whole lot more personal as it throws a rival team of fighters known as Lux Linae or The Shadows at you. This team has a way of taking over your comms channel with an ominous, oddly-catchy chant that resembles a Gregorian choir as they appear. It’s theatrical in a way that would – and sometimes does – play as funny at first, but the association between that chant and immediately having to contend with a barrage of missiles from pesky, agile aggressors is strong, and I grew to fear that song so much that I finally understand what the kids mean when they talk about ‘aura-farming.’ But without getting into major spoilers for Ace Combat 8’s campaign, as I progressed through the story it became increasingly easy to think of the Sotoan army and the nation itself as the logical extension of techbro culture and thinking. Should Elon Musk (and please forgive me for putting this evil into the world) ever actually find himself in control of a government, I think it’d resemble something like Sotoa. The very idea of “what if a huge, revoltingly ugly battleship could run on land and was literally called a Land Battleship” seems like something that’d spring from the mind of one of Elon’s late night tweets and somehow, through the sheer inertia of unimaginable wealth, become reality in spite of what a bad idea it is. And thankfully for me, as a player put in charge of destroying said battleship, it’s got a Cybertruck-level set of blind spots due to the particularly tech-bro-ey grandiosity of that design.

When I last wrote and thought about Ace Combat here at the Gutter, it reminded me of an actual incident in the Russia-Ukraine war where a mythological fighter pilot named “The Ghost of Kyiv” was single-handedly bringing the fight to Russian forces, or so the story goes. Nearly five years later (as that conflict sadly still continues), and you’d think the Project Aces team behind Ace Combat 8 had internalized that idea and spun it into Wings of Theve. It expands the anti-war ideas laid down in the previous entries and makes you an active participant in that mythology. Even if you disagree with the idea of creating that propagand…I mean, mythology as an avenue for hope, the game forces you into making that your motivation to, with every completed mission, feed the machine. A game that forces you to play the bad guy, even if it’s for a short while as allegiances and circumstances shift around you, has always been one of my great video game loves. From Shadow of the Colossus to The Last of Us Part 2, games that corner you into rooting against yourself as you play the heel just feel like home to me, and Wings of Theve (and the other late entries in the Ace Combat canon) tap into that in a major way. I might not be a fan of air shows, jet fighters, or what they represent in real life* but maybe if enough people see and experience the overdramatic horror of the war in Strangereal, there’s an opportunity to change how we think about how those machines in our version of reality.

Maybe.

Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve is available for PC, Playstation 5, and Xbox. I played the PS5 version.

*yes, I recognize the irony of my writing this both right after Remembrance Day (Canada) and Veterans Day (USA), and after the announcement of an increase in Canadian defence spending. Sometimes the world just laughs at you, am I right?

Sachin Hingoo was shot down off the Sotoan Coast and has been played by an alternate version for the past nine months.