Part 18: Mission 18 – Operation Judgement Day, September 26th, 2005

Megalith

Mission 18: Operation Judgement Day – September 26th, 2005
Epilogue & Credits


Overview: A group of young Erusean officers who escaped Farbanti have fled to the Megalith ballistic missile launch facility in the Twinkle Islands, and are preparing its warheads for immediate launch. With Megalith’s vast firing range, San Salvacion, Los Canas, St. Ark, Expo City, and North Point are all in danger. Reports also indicate that the Erusean remnant plans to strike Oured, Osea as well.

As Usea braces itself for another harrowing rain of death from the skies, Mobius Squadron prepares to launch.


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Guest Commentators: As promised at the end of Ace Combat 2, I am joined once more unto the breach by ACES CURE PLANES and Cirvante.




So, standard final mission rules apply. If you would like to go into the final video blind, then this is your jumping off point. Read no further down and you won’t spoil any of the little surprises to crop up in this video.

If not, then please proceed.

































































Alright then, let’s get started.





MOBIUS SQUADRON
Independent States Allied Forces Naval Air Force, 118th Tactical Air Wing, 1st Tactical Fighter Squadron
Members:

• Mobius 1 – [REDACTED] “Ribbon” [REDACTED]
  
• Mobius 2 – [NAME REDACTED]
  
• Mobius 3 – [NAME REDACTED]
  
• Mobius 4 – [NAME REDACTED]
  
• Mobius 5 – [NAME REDACTED]
  
• Mobius 6 – [NAME REDACTED]
  
• Mobius 7 – [NAME REDACTED]
  
• Mobius 8 – [NAME REDACTED]
  
• Mobius 9 – [NAME REDACTED]
  
• Mobius 10 – [NAME REDACTED]
  
• Mobius 11 – [NAME REDACTED]
  
• Mobius 12 – [NAME REDACTED]
  
• Mobius 13 – [NAME REDACTED]
  

AWACS Operator: [REDACTED] “SkyEye” [REDACTED]
Squadron Composition: F-22A Raptor (x4)* [Mobius 1 Player Determined], Rafale M (x3), EF-2000 Typhoon (x3)* [Mobius 10-12 do not appear in game]

Following the official surrender of the main Erusean force at Farbanti, the ISAF Air Strike Team was consolidated into a single squadron: Mobius Squadron. Pilots previously hailing from Omega, Viper, and Halo Squadrons were reassigned to Mobius Squadron, which would now serve as the standard bearer for the ISAF Air Force and the crown jewel of Usean air power.

While the squadron totaled 20 planes in all, only 13 Mobius fighters were deployed for the Megalith assault operation, Operation Judgement Day. (Extracted audio has SkyEye and other pilots identifying Mobiuses 14 through 20, though these planes never appear in game nor is the audio used in the mission).





THE STORYTELLER BOY MAN

The final interlude before the credits reveals the truth to the audience about the Storyteller Boy and casts the frame narrative in a brand new light upon review. We’ve always known that the Storyteller “Boy” isn’t—at the time of his recounting Shattered Skies’s frame narrative, actually a boy, given how he speaks in past tense with the voice a grown man and makes it unambiguously clear several times that he is reflecting on events from days long past.

What we learn from the final interlude is that the Narrator is recounting the events of the frame narrative in a letter to Mobius 1 as a grown man roughly twenty years after the end of the Second Continental War to tell his and Yellow 13 and Yellow 4’s side of the story, in the hope that Mobius 1 will write him back and in turn tell the Narrator his side of the story. Again, as with the thread title, this is the reason why I requested the special DEAR RICHARD (now the DEAR JEFFREY) thread tag for 04. (Which, in hindsight... Uh... was a lot funnier before we all found out that Lowtax beat the shit out of multiple women, willfully spent his entire life savings to ensure none of his ex-wives or children would see a penny of it in alimony or other court-ordered restitution and then blew his brains out with a shotgun out of pure spite, so fuck you Rich ). Unfortunately, given the narrative structure of the game and Mobius 1’s nature as a player cipher, we never get to see what the reply letter entails, though it can be inferred, if we’re being generous, that the gameplay half of Shattered Skies is an element of Mobius 1’s reply to the Narrator.

We’re never given an exact date as to when the Narrator writes his letter to Mobius 1. It’s just assumed that it’s about 20 years later, given that the Narrator seems to be in his 30s or early 40s in that final shot. Though all we see is a hand, so we really can’t say for certain. It could even be 10 years later and the Narrator is only in his 20s, this would put the epilogue to Shattered Skies happening around the same time that Ace Combat 7's VR Mode is occuring, in 2014. We don’t know. If it’s in the 20 year range, then that has some interesting implications for main game Ace Combat 7, which is set in 2019 (14 years after Shattered Skies and 24 years after Zero).

This final vignette actually ends up confirming more details about Mobius 1 as an entity in the world of Ace Combat than it does about the Narrator. Others in the thread have mentioned this, but it bears repeating. Cipher disappears. Phoenix disappears. Nemo gets deleted. Mobius 1 sticks around. Operation Katina, which we will be looking at next week, proves that well enough, as does Skies Unknown's VR Mode. Cipher and Phoenix are mercenaries, they’re kind of expected to fly off into the sunset and disappear once the job’s done. Mobius 1 is a soldier, the guy has a great deal to loyalty to ISAF and the FCU and later the IUN.

It’s also implied that Mobius 1’s name and contact information are public record, or at least publicly searchable information. The Narrator tracking him down to write his letter proves this. Contrast that with Brett Thompson, who spent the better part of a year looking for Cipher and found nothing, not even a real name.

So what are we to make of these implications the final cutscene leaves us with? Did Mobius 1 retire to a peaceful life after the war while the rest of Usea never forgot what he did for them? Did he assume a position of prominence in Usean public life in his post-war career, like a politician or military leader? Or something else entirely? We get something approaching an answer to that in Ace Combat 7's VR Mode, which sees the return of Mobius 1 to the battlefield ala Ace Combat 5's Operation Katina this time as an "old timer" pilot. But we'll get to that in due time.

Either way, of all the aces across the franchise, Mobius 1 truly is the one that endured.





MEGALITH

Ancient Greek, broadly, for “large stone”. A megalith is generally considered to be any large prehistorical manmade object carved or assembled from stone. Stonehenge, for example, is a megalith, as are the Maoi figures of Easter Island. This is not to be confused with the term monolith, which is, as its name implies, a single carved or constructed stone monument or artifact. The majority of megaliths which have survived into the Modern Era are burial mounds or tombs of other sorts, which used massive carved rock slabs to form the support walls and roof of the tomb before being encased in earth to form the actual mound of the burial mound.

Megalith the structure follows a similar naming delineation as Stonehenge. While Stonehenge was a more refined weapons platform, Megalith is a much broader use facility and in many ways less refined than Stonehenge was. Megalith in game also looks like a singular mass of rock and concrete, like one giant stone structure in and of itself, while Stonehenge was something much more complex in its construction.

As we point out in the video, Megaltih is also a slightly remodeled retread of Fortress Intolerance from Ace Combat 2. Both facilities share a similar design; a point that Assault Horizon Legacy highlights as it actually reuses several texture elements from Megalith to create its rendition of Fortress Intolerance.



AGNUS DEI

It’s not often that the Ace Combat franchise dips into overt Christian references. And that’s quite odd for a game coming out of a culture that loves its inaptly appropriated Christian references and imagery as much as Japan does.

Also known specifically as the “Lamb of God”, Agnus Dei is one of the many titles given to Jesus Christ in the Christian religion, specifically in Catholicism. The term appears in the Gospel of John, and is given to Jesus by John the Baptist, who exclaims, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29). It is related to the idea that Jesus offered himself up as a willing sacrificial lamb of sorts to fulfill God’s will to redeem all of humanity with his suffering and death on the cross. The Lamb ultimately became a visual shorthand for representations of Jesus in Medieval and Renaissance artwork and literature, similar to the dove representing the Holy Spirit visually in depictions of the Trinity.

The liturgical text from the Roman Catholic mass was later composed into a song also titled “Agnus Dei”. The version of Agnus Dei that appears on Ace Combat’s soundtrack and plays over this mission quotes from the song/text:


The specific iteration of the song that is being referenced, however, is Mozart’s Requiem Mass in D minor, in which a rendition of Agnus Dei is featured as the symphony’s thirteenth movement. The version of Agnus Dei that most modern audiences are familiar with was composed by Samuel Barber in 1967 when he recomposed his original instrumental piece, Adagio for Strings, to feature a choral rendition of the Agnus Dei liturgy.

Both Adagio for Strings and Barber’s Agnus Dei can be heard in many modern movies, TV shows, and video games, particularly in the PC game Homeworld, which uses Agnus Dei as its main theme.



REX TREMENDAE

Remaining on the subject of Mozart for a moment, the “prelude” song that opens the final mission, Rex Tremendae, takes its name and lyrics from another movement from Mozart’s Requiem. Rex Tremendae is the fifth of Requiem’s fourteen movements and a part of the Sequentia section of the symphony. It is a choral movement sung in keys between G minor and D minor.

The full title is Rex Tremendae Majestatis (King of Tremendous Majesty) and is yet another reference to Jesus Christ. The section of Requiem which Rex Tremendae is positioned draws heavily from Dies Irae (Days of Wrath), a Latin hymn describing the Last Judgement outlined in the Book of Revelation. Or, in short: Judgement Day.

Just like Agnus Dei, Ace Combat’s Rex Tremendae also quotes from the song it is based upon:




JUDGEMENT DAY

The concept of Judgement Day or the Final Judgement appears in many major religions including Judaism and Islam, but is most prominent in Christianity. As its name implies, Judgement Day or the Final Judgement is in essence, the final day of the mortal world as we would know it. It is the day when God gathers the souls of all those who ever lived to determine if they are worthy to enter the Kingdom of Heaven or if they will be punished in hellfire for their sins. The Final Judgement is said to be heralded by the blowing of a trumpet heard all across the world.

In terms of applicable references for the game itself, this mission will either be judgement day for Erusea and its many sins during the war and the enacting of the final punishment for the rebels who have refused the surrender treaty. Or it will be Usea’s judgement day as the Erusean remnant attempts to destroy any one of a number of Usean cities with both conventional cruise missiles and a massive ICMB topped with a nuclear warhead.



HOW TO SCREW UP MEGALITH

So Megalith is unique among the missions of Ace Combat 04 in that it has its own unique failure state, and “bad end” cutscene. There are two (known) ways to trigger this special failure. The first requires either a staggering display of incompetence or a lot of patience. If you let the mission timer run down to zero, a cutscene of the main ICBM launching and your allied troops declaring the mission a failure will play. There are two 30 minute blocks to this mission (before the final shutter opens and after), but the second block is only triggered by the player destroying the three generators at the end of each tunnel.

The other way to get this final cutscene to play is to fly into the central tunnel after the generators are destroyed and then fly out through the final shutter without destroying the ICBM. The failure cutscene will then play and you’ll be forced to redo the mission from the beginning. Unlike Ace Combat 2, the game doesn’t rub your nose in it like if you fail to destroy the SLBM in Last Resort, however.





MEGALITH

Constructed by the Eruseans in relative secrecy in the Twinkle Islands, Megalith was intended to be Erusea’s own propriety spaceguard facility to supplement the Stonehenge Turret Network, and then be repurposed into a military ballistic missile launch fortress following Ulysses Day.

The facility was designed to mimic the old Fortress Intolerance facility on North Point, serving as a modernized version of the old Cold War-era nuclear bunker. Built to withstand both asteroid impact and nuclear attacks, Megalith was meant to be a last resort fortress for the Eruseans in the event of invasion or nuclear war. The Eruseans corrected the design flaws in the original Fortress Intolerance by moving the generator facilities needed to power the fortress inside the complex itself, as Fortress Intolerance itself was felled in part due to its reliance on external nuclear power facilities.

Loaded for bear with a massive stock pile of conventional cruise missiles and nuclear warheads, Megalith’s largely automatic launch and reload systems meant the facility could potentially launch dozens of missiles per hour with minimal human action required. A laser targeting system was capable of “painting” fast moving targets such as asteroids or fighter planes for missile interception.

Megalith saw action on July 3rd, 1999, as it launched multiple missiles to shoot down incoming fragments of Ulysses 1994XF04 as it fractured and crashed to Earth. Both the FCU and Osean Federation radar command facilities detected the launches from Megalith, revealing its presence to both governments, but in the chaos of Ulysses Day itself, the missile launches from Megalith were quickly overlooked once it was confirmed that the Eruseans were not firing on any land-based targets in some misguided act of desperate aggression.

Following Ulysses Day and the subsequent economic, refugee, and governmental crisis that befall Erusea, Megalith was shuttered by the Erusean military government and placed on active standby should the need for its reactivation arise.

At the outset of the Shattered Skies War, plans for Megalith’s reactivation were drawn up, but ultimately placed on the backburner after the Federal Erusean Air Force secured Stonehenge in the Delarus desert. However, after Stonehenge’s destruction by the ISAF, Megalith’s reactivation resumed with desperate haste.

Located at the very center of the facility is a special ICMB launch platform capable of striking targets halfway across the planet. The objective of ISAF’s Operation Judgement day is to prevent the launch of this missile by the Eruseans.

Smirnova

• Plane: Su-47 Berkut (S-37A in game)
  
• Mission 18
  
• Spawn conditions: Appears in the far north of the map, well beyond Megalith.

Yellow 13

• Plane: Su-37 Terminator
  
• Not In Game*
  
• Spawn conditions: Shoot down all 18 Named Aces to unlock.

Tracks featured in Mission 18:

DISC 2

• 10. Silent
  
• 11. Mobius
  
• 12. Rex Tremendae
  
• 13. Megalith -Agnus Dei-
  
• 14. Heaven’s Gate
  
• 15. Victory
  
• 16. Blue Skies
  

And here’s some background sketches or renders from the Megalith mission.











Covers of Strangereal newspapers or magazines from the Ace Combat 04 website:




Blue Skies (lyrics)




Stay tuned because we’re not exactly done with Ace Combat 04 yet. Coming up next, we are going to skip ahead to Ace Combat 5 very briefly for a look at the Operation Katina Arcade Mode included along with that game, which serves as an extended (and completely canon!) epilogue to Shattered Skies.

So check back for “Mission 19” coming up next week!