The Let's Play Archive

Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies

by nine-gear crow

Part 7: Mission 7 – Operation Blackout, December 16th, 2004

Deep Strike

Mission 7: Operation Blackout – December 16th, 2004


Overview: Mobius 1 is dispatched to cripple a vital piece of Erusean-occupied infrastructure: the solar power farms in the Faith Park region. Disrupting power to vital Erusean facilities will allow ISAF to operate more freely elsewhere on the mainland while the Eruseans scramble to restore the plant to operational status.

However, this mission puts the ISAF air strike team within Stonehenge’s firing range for the first time.

Meanwhile, in San Salvacion, the Storyteller Boy makes a startling discovery about the Barkeep’s Daughter and her family…



Guest Commentator: The fantastic frozentreasure joins me for this video. FT has generously volunteered to LP the export edition of Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere, specifically the PAL version, which is virtually identical to the NTSC-UC version, as a contrast to Lunethex’s LP of the Project Nemo fan translation of the original Japanese version of Electrosphere. I show up several times across his LP as a guest commentator, so this is him completing the circle, if you will.





FAITH PARK

Briefly glimpsed in both Ace Combat 2 and Assault Horizon Legacy, the Faith Park region in north eastern Usea is a vast arid stretch of land dotted by many canyons, buttes, mesas, and mountains lying between Expo City and Port Edwards.

The region was once home to a Minuteman ballistic missile launch facility located deep in the Faith Park Gorge, however its capture by the Usean Rebel Forces during the Continental War of 98 and its destruction at the hands of Scarface Squadron during Operation Eldorado led to the FCU shuttering the facility following the end of the war. Faith Park also lies close to the Tango Line, the outermost extreme of Stonehenge’s firing range. As such, the area is dotted with impact craters from the Ulysses 1994XF04 asteroid impact due to Stonehenge’s inability to destroy the smaller asteroid fragments effectively at extreme distance.

One of the larger impact craters in the region, Mackenzie Crater, was repurposed by a utilities subsidiary of the rapidly growing Usean General Resource LTD. corporation, to serve as the parabolic base for a brand new solar power facility.



SAN SALVACION RESISTANCE

This chapter introduces us to the San Sanvacion Resistance. Or rather, unveils them, as we’ve already “met” a couple of its members before.

The Skykid Bar owner, his employees, and his daughter, are all active Resistance members. Together, they serve as the covert intelligence front for the SSR, gathering loose intel from the Erusean soldiers and pilots who frequent Skykid. The Barkeep’s previously traitorous seeming friendliness and catering to the Eruseans has been revealed to be a calculated act to get them to loosen their inhibitions and share military secrets out in the open amongst a civilian cohort whom they think are both friends, and could not possibly know anything about what they’re discussing.

All information gathered by the Skykid SSR cell is then disseminated throughout the Resistance cells across San Salvacion as well as forwarded onto ISAF GHQ on North Point via a hijacked Erusean ethernet line.

This revelation throws the Storyteller Boy even further into conflict with himself and his surroundings. With his Uncle vanished by the Erusean Secret Police for making anti-Erusea statements, the boy is now functionally on his own in the world, and the two camps who have taken him in and given him a home among their ranks; Yellow Squadron and the Resistance; are actively at war with one another.

The boy finds himself torn between his burgeoning friendship with Yellow 13 and Yellow 4, and his loyalty to his country and countrymen. He’s thrust into an oddly strategic position suddenly. He could end the Resistance in a sentence by revealing them to Yellow 13, or he could obliterate Yellow Squadron all the same by revealing their secrets to the Resistance. Or he could do neither, and let them fight it out and see who comes out on top.


Also of note, this interlude segment which reveals the Resistance is also one of the story segments that got censored for the European and North American releases of the game. In the image above, the Barkeep’s Daughter is mostly obscured by shadows, but can be clearly seen to be holding something. In the Japanese version, she is holding a shotgun at the ready and acting as the door guard. Again, just like the instance of the Storyteller Boy acquiring a knife and gun earlier in the game, the shotgun is edited out to avoid any depictions of minors wielding deadly weaponry. The shotgun is also edited out of another frame in the vignette as well where the frame is redrawn sans gun.

So there you go, it’s taken us three and a half games to get here, but you can now cross Child Soldiers off your big giant list of “What War Crimes Will Ace Combat Explore Next?”







Kadorhal posted:

Ace Number Seven is De Vico. Named for Father Francesco de Vico, born May 19th, 1805. Italian astronomer and Jesuit priest, in 1835 becoming the assistant superintendent and then in 1839 the director of the Vatican Observatory. His career was cut short by the Italian revolutions of 1848, but in that time he discovered a number of comets; alongside the American Maria Mitchell, who independently discovered the comet C/1847 T1 two days before de Vico, he was awarded a gold medal from the Danish King Frederick VI for being one of the first two people to discover a comet by way of telescope rather than by the unaided eye in 1847. He toured Paris, London, and the United States in his search for a new home after leaving Italy, planning to settle in America and once again touring Europe to recruit colleagues to come with him; he was unfortunately worn out from the constant traveling and died on November 15th, 1848, at 43 years old.

The in-game De Vico flies the other swing-wing craft in the game, the Tornado Interdictor/Strike craft. Possibly owing to that, his paint scheme like Levy's also includes Red Baron on the tail, this time flying a plane of his own.

What's interesting to note, however, is that "Free Erusea" is written on the fuselage and the nose - foreshadowing to the resistance movement from Ace Combat 5's Arcade Mode, perhaps.






Tracks featured in Mission 7:

DISC 1




Concept art of the Mackenzie Crater Solar Power Plant and Faith Park George




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