Ace Combat 2 & Assault Horizon Legacy Part #22 - Mission 15B – Operation Dead End, August 13th, 1998

Part 22: Mission 15B – Operation Dead End, August 13th, 1998

Low Altitude Surprise Attack Operation / Destroy the Missile Silos

Mission 15B: Operation Dead End – August 13th, 1998
Mission 19: Operation El Dorado (Legacy Version)

Overview: Operation Belissima continues as Scarface Squadron conducts a hit-and-fade surprise attack on a Rebel airstrip and radar installation in White Valley, northern Usea.

Guest Commentators: ChaosArgate and Lazyfire return for the AC2 and Legacy videos, respectively.

Since his last appearance in this LP, Argate has begun an LP of Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor.

FOX FORCE FOUR

Project Aces’ love affair with grindhouse genre films continues, this time with a reference to a modern grindhouse classic, Quinten Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. In the film, Uma Thurman’s character, Mia Wallace, tells John Travolta’s character, Vincent Vega, an anecdote about a failed TV pilot she’d recently filmed called Fox Force Five, about a squad of five female assassins.

The story Mia tells in Pulp Fiction served as the genesis point for the Kill Bill duology, as Tarantino and Thurman workshopped the idea into a whole film while finishing work on Pulp Fiction. The members of Fox Force Five that Mia describes in her story are a near 1:1 match for the Kill Bill characters of Elle Driver, O-Ren Ishii, Vernita Green, Sophie Fatale, and Beatrix Kiddo (aka The Bride).

Here in Ace Combat 2, however, they are retooled and renamed into Fox Force Four (abbreviated FFF in-game), and molded into a stealth reference to StarFox. Fox Force Four flies a flight of four very Arwing-esque YF-23As, each of which is painted in the colours that have come to represent the four core members of the StarFox team; blue for Falco Lombardi, red for Peppy Hare, green for Slippy Toad, and yellow for Fox McCloud.

It’s also worth noting that StarFox 64 came out in Japan just over a month prior to Ace Combat 2 (April 27, 1997, to AC2’s May 30, 1997), so this is most likely Project Aces slipping in a nod to its cross-platform competition on the Nintendo 64.