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1. Ace Combat Strangereal World Map Download
2. Strangereal World Map

Ace Combat
Genre(s)	Combat flight simulator
Developer(s)
Publisher(s)	Bandai Namco Entertainment
Platform(s)
First release	Air Combat 30 June 1995
Latest release	Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown 18 January 2019

Thus, you DO NOT need any prior knowledge of the Ace Combat serie to play this mod because it is largely independent from the orginal plot. Also, you could always use random world start to get a different experience. The map, country colors, etc are designed to work with the inheaven graphic enhancement mod so I put that into the reqirement list.

Ace Combat (エースコンバット; Ēsu Konbatto) is a hybrid flight arcade action video game franchise featuring 17 games mainly developed by Bandai Namco Studios and published by Bandai Namco Entertainment. The development team within Bandai Namco responsible for Ace Combat games is referred to as Project Aces. The franchise emphasizes fast-paced action and dramatic plots, and has established itself as one of the longest running arcade flight action franchises. As of 2018, the Ace Combat franchise has sold over 14 million copies,^[1] making it Bandai Namco's sixth best-selling franchise, behind Tekken, Pac-Man, Gundam, Tales, and Super Robot Wars.

The main series of games takes place in a fictionalized world populated with fictional countries with details loosely based on real-life locations, events, and wars. One of the main selling points of the series is the ability to pilot a range of aircraft that include accurate or slightly modified representations of present-day military aircraft, prototypes that never saw actual battle, and completely fictional boss-type superweapons. Longtime fans of the series are rewarded with small hints of the continuity between the games, as some characters and events are referenced from one game to another.

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Games[edit]

Timeline of release years

1995	Air Combat
1996
1997	Ace Combat 2
1998
1999	Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere
2000
2001	Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies
2002
2003
2004	Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War
2005	Ace Combat Advance
2006	Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War
	Ace Combat X: Skies of Deception
2007	Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation
2008
2009	Ace Combat Xi: Skies of Incursion
2010	Ace Combat: Joint Assault
	Ace Combat Assault Horizon: Trigger Finger
2011	Ace Combat: Assault Horizon
	Ace Combat: Assault Horizon Legacy
	Ace Combat: Northern Wings
2012
2013
2014	Ace Combat Infinity
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019	Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown

The first three titles in the franchise were released on the Sony PlayStation system: Air Combat, Ace Combat 2, and Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere. Three subsequent titles were released on the PlayStation 2: Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies, Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War and Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War. In 2006, Ace Combat X: Skies of Deception was released on the PlayStation Portable.

In 2007, Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation released on the Xbox 360. Ace Combat Xi: Skies of Incursion released on the AppleiOS in 2009.^[2] In 2010, Ace Combat: Joint Assault released on the PlayStation Portable and featured a story set in the real world for the first time in the franchise.^[3]Ace Combat: Assault Horizon released for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in 2011, and Microsoft Windows in 2013, making it the first multiplatform title in the franchise. Ace Combat: Assault Horizon Legacy released later in 2011 for the Nintendo 3DS, and received a re-release titled Ace Combat: Assault Horizon Legacy + in 2015. Ace Combat: Northern Wings also released in late 2011 for mobile phones on the Java ME platform.^[4]

Ace Combat Infinity, the first free-to-play title in the franchise, released in 2014 exclusive to the PlayStation 3. Infinity was shut down in March 2018 after nearly four years of service.

Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown was announced in 2015 as the first Ace Combat game for the eighth console generation. It was released for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Microsoft Windows in early 2019.

Title	Platform(s)	Year	Sales
Air Combat	PlayStation	1995	2,230,000[5]
Ace Combat 2	PlayStation	1997	1,092,000[5]
Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere	PlayStation	1999	1,164,000[5]
Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies	PlayStation 2	2001	2,640,000[5]
Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War	PlayStation 2	2004	1,802,000[5]
Ace Combat Advance	Game Boy Advance	2005	100,000[5]
Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War	PlayStation 2	2006	792,000[5]
Ace Combat X: Skies of Deception	PlayStation Portable	2006	476,000[5]
Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation	Xbox 360	2007	700,000[6]
Ace Combat Xi: Skies of Incursion	iOS	2009	?
Ace Combat: Joint Assault	PlayStation Portable	2010	?
Ace Combat Assault Horizon: Trigger Finger	iOS	2010	?
Ace Combat: Assault Horizon	PlayStation 3, Xbox 360	2011	1,070,000[6]
	Windows	2013	?
Ace Combat: Assault Horizon Legacy	Nintendo 3DS family	2011 (original) 2015 (Plus)	?
Ace Combat: Northern Wings	Mobile phones (Java ME)	2011	?
Ace Combat Infinity	PlayStation 3	2014	?
Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown	PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Windows	2019	?

• As of 30 January 2008, the worldwide sales distribution was 31.7% in Japan, 43.9% in North America, 23.8% in Europe, and 0.6% in Asia.^[5]
• As of July 2018, the franchise boasted a total of 14,000,000 sales.^[1]
• Namco also developed two arcade games—Air Combat and Air Combat 22—that act as precursors to the Ace Combat franchise.

Setting[edit]

Ace Combat 2, 3, 04, 5, Advance, Zero, X, 6, Xi, Assault Horizon Legacy, Northern Wings, and 7 all take place on an alternate version of Earth in a reality dubbed 'Strangereal', featuring different geography and countries.^[1] The planet is located in the same solar system as the real-life Earth but replacing it entirely. This reality was later included within Bandai Namco's United Galaxy Space Force shared universe.^[7] In this alternate version of Earth, the planet had been affected by the fragments of a large asteroid impact in 1999, which had devastated cities and left impact craters, creating a 'strangereal' gaming landscape.

Ace Combat: Joint Assault, Assault Horizon, and Infinity take place on the real-life Earth. While Joint Assault and Assault Horizon were more realistic, Infinity utilized many elements from the Strangereal series.

Timeline[edit]

In July 2018, Bandai Namco published a consolidated timeline of the major games that take place in the Strangereal universe, and which in-universe years they occur. The consolidated timeline goes as follows:^[1]

• 1995 - Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War
• 1999 - Ulysses 1994XF04 asteroid impact
• 2003~2005 - Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies
• 2010 - Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War
• 2015~2016 - Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation
• 2019 - Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown
• 2040 - Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere

Title differences[edit]

The Japanese Ace Combat was renamed Air Combat in the North American and European releases of the original game.

In NTSC territories, the fourth installment of the series is known as Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies, while in PAL territories the game is known as Ace Combat: Distant Thunder. The Spanish version of the game is known as Ace Combat: Trueno de Acero, which can be translated as Ace Combat: Steel Thunder.

The NTSC version of the fifth installment of the game is known as Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War, while the PAL release was renamed Ace Combat: Squadron Leader.

In PAL territories, the word 'Zero' in Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War was removed, making it the first game since the series introduction to not have a significant name change in PAL territories.

Ace Combat: Assault Horizon Legacy in English-speaking territories was originally titled Ace Combat 3D: Cross Rumble in Japan.

Models[edit]

Although typical aircraft model kits can be customized and detailed according to specific plane designs in each game, the Ace Combat franchise also has its fair share of specially-produced model kits. The earliest-known models were the R-101, R-102, and R-103 Delphinus aircraft from Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere, sold as resin kits in the late 1990s at Wonder Festival; Hasegawa produced the R-101 and R-103, and Tokiwa Aircraft Create produced the R-102 in collaboration with Chawanmushi Ceramics School.^[8] Tokiwa Aircraft Create and Chawanmushi later produced more resin garage aircraft kits from Ace Combat 3 and other Ace Combat titles until at least 2008.^[9]

Hasegawa continued the trend with a 1:72 F-14 Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War limited-edition kit modeled in a cherry blossom paint scheme in April 2011 and a similarly-scaled kit of Assault Horizon's fictional aircraft, the ASF-X Shinden II, in July 2012.^[10] The line has since been followed by the F-22 Mobius 1 and Su-37 Yellow 13 from Ace Combat 04, the Grabacr Su-47 and F-14 Razgriz from Ace Combat 5, the Strigon Team Su-33 and F-15E Garuda 1 from Ace Combat 6, and the Ridgebacks ASF-X from Infinity. Various items in the company's line of model aircraft kits are also available in special color schemes depicting characters from The Idolmaster franchise. These schemes were available as downloadable content for Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation.^[11]

In March 2006, Bandai produced a 1:100 kit of the fictional ADF-01 FALKEN from Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War.^[12]In June 2019, ADF-01 FALKEN Plastic model kit are planned to get a re-release. The pre-order for this re-release version start since 27 March 2019.^[13]

Printed media[edit]

With the release of Assault Horizon in 2011, Project Aces created Aces At War: A History, a special artbook detailing the content from Ace Combat 04, 5, and Zero from an in-universe perspective, as well as production commentary. This was packaged with the special editions of Assault Horizon released in Japan.^[14][15] In March 2012, ASCII Media Works released Ace Combat: Ikaros in the Sky. A tie-in novel for Assault Horizon, Ikaros tells a story of series character Kei Nagase as she participates in the JASDF's ASF-X Shinden II fighter program.^[16]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

1. ^ ^abcdNelva, Giuseppe (18 July 2018). 'Ace Combat 7 Gets New Official Website Ahead of Upcoming Reveal'. DualShockers. Retrieved 28 August 2018.
2. ^Buchanan, Levi. 'Ace Combat Soaring to iPhone'. IGN. Archived from the original on 24 September 2009. Retrieved 24 September 2009.
3. ^Roper, Chris (11 January 2010). 'Ace Combat: Joint Assault Announced'. IGN. Archived from the original on 15 January 2010. Retrieved 15 January 2010.
4. ^'NAMCO Bandai Games Ace Combat®: Northern Wings'. Namco.com. Archived from the original on 10 January 2012.
5. ^ ^abcdefghiIchinoya, Hiroyuki (30 January 2008). '『エースコンバット』シリーズ全世界累計1,000万本突破！' [The cumulative worldwide sales total of the 'Ace Combat' series exceeds 10,000,000 units!] (in Japanese). Bandai Namco Games. Retrieved 28 August 2018.
6. ^ ^abSinclair, Brendan (8 May 2012). 'Dark Souls sells 1.19 million'. GameSpot. Retrieved 28 August 2018.
7. ^BANDAI NAMCO Games Inc. 'UGSFシリーズ 公式サイト'. Archived from the original on 9 April 2015. Retrieved 11 May 2015.
8. ^'幻想連邦機構 国立博物館 ガレージキット館・非キャラものコーナー'. Usi.kir.jp. Archived from the original on 22 June 2013.
9. ^'幻想連邦機構　内閣府　執政官の日記帳'. Usi.kir.jp. Archived from the original on 4 October 2018.
10. ^'1/72 Ace Combat ASF-X Shinden II by Hasegawa HobbyLink Japan'. Hlj.com. 2 January 2012. Archived from the original on 24 July 2012., either as a regular JASDF unit or as Kei Nagase's personal plane.
11. ^'The Idolmaster HobbyLink Japan'. Hlj.com. 2 January 2012. Archived from the original on 24 March 2014.
12. ^'1/100 ADF-01F: Falken (From Ace Combat) by Bandai HobbyLink Japan'. Hlj.com. 2 January 2012. Archived from the original on 29 May 2012.
13. ^'ADF-01F Falken (Plastic model) Hobby Search 1999'. 1999.co.jp. 25 May 2019. Archived from the original on 1 April 2019.
14. ^'エースコンバット　アサルト・ホライゾンの国内限定版！？' [A domestic limited edition of Ace Combat: Assault Horizon?!] (in Japanese). Bandai Namco Games. 3 August 2011. Retrieved 28 August 2018.
15. ^'ララビットマーケットACAH限定版の最新情報を入手！' [Get the latest information on the Lalabit Market limited edition of ACAH!] (in Japanese). Bandai Namco Games. 23 August 2011. Retrieved 28 August 2018.
16. ^'エースコンバット イカロス・イン・ザ・スカイ｜エースコンバット アサルト・ホライゾン'. ah.acecombat.jp. Archived from the original on 3 May 2015. Retrieved 9 May 2018.

External links[edit]

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Ace Combat

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Videogame/AceCombat

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Ace Combat is a series of arcade-style combat flight games, involving flight sim levels of graphical detail but without all the fiddly realistic controls; the play style is something between Shoot Em Ups and the Action Game. The games are semi-realistic, featuring real-life aircraft and such things as planes stalling if they slow down too much, but combined with aircraft that carry hundreds of missiles at once and unlimited fuel. Most of the games take place in an alternate reality Earth named Strangereal, one similar to and yet very different from our own.

The series currently spans seven consoles and twelve games:

• Arcade:
  • Air Combat: As an ace pilot codenamed Falcon 1, you are commissioned by the UN to carry out various intercept missions against a rogue state.
  • Air Combat 22: Hostile forces have launched an all-out attack, and as one of three pilots for the 19th Aerial Force (Aeries, Top Gunner, or the returning Falcon 1) it's up to you and your squad to push them back.
• PlayStation:

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  • Air Combat (Ace Combat in Japan) - A country is invaded by a terrorist group and, to minimize losses, an elite mercenary squadron has been hired to end the war.
  • Ace Combat 2 - Rebels across the Usean continent take over multiple cities and bases and Special Tactical Fighter Squadron 'Scarface' must defeat them.
  • Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere - In the 2040s, the world is ruled by corporations who fight over territorial disputes. The rumours of a new Super Prototype threaten to upset the balance of power. Released outside of Japan as a Bad Export for You, lacking Story Branching, the cutscenes or anything that made the game iconic.
• PlayStation 2:
  • Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies (Distant Thunder in the European version) - In 2003, Erusea has invaded its neighbors and by 2004 controls all of Usea. As Mobius One, top ace of the Independent States Allied Forces, it's up to you to drive them back and take the fight to them.

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  • Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War (Squadron Leader in the EU) - In 2010, a series of mysterious recon activities leads to a war between the Union of Yuktobanian Republics and the Osean Federation. However, the real cause of the war is not as straightforward as it first appears.
  • Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War (without the Zero in the EU) - In 1995, the Belkan Federation attempts a land grab. As mercenary pilot Galm One 'Cipher' you fight to thwart their goals; however, the driving of the Belkans to peace talks is not the end of things.
• PSP:
  • Ace Combat X: Skies of Deception - In 2020, the Democratic Republic of Leasath launches an attack on its southern neighbour, the Federal Republic of Aurelia, nearly overrunning the latter within ten days thanks to their airborne fortress Gleipnir. As Gryphus One, you lead Aurelia's survivors in taking back your nation.
  • Ace Combat: Joint Assault - Joint Assault deviates from the Strangereal world that every previous installment of the game has taken place in, instead taking place in real world locations such as Tokyo, London, and San Francisco. As Antares, a newcomer to Martinez Security, you fight the machinations of a powerful terrorist group across the world.
• Game Boy Advance:
  • Ace Combat Advance - In 2032, Corporations begin to dominate the world and corpocracies now control as much of the world as independent democracies. One corporation, General Resource, creates the Air Strike Force to help take over the remaining independent countries and use them to gain more resources. As a pilot of the United Air Defense, you are the last hope for the remaining independent republics as you stop General Resource from taking over the world. The first game in the series not to see a Japanese release.
• Xbox 360:
  • Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation - In 2015, the Federal Republic of Estovakia, after coming out of years of Civil War, invades the neighboring Republic of Emmeria. Due to the use of high-tech weaponry and grizzled veterans, the Estovakians were able to take over the Emmerian Mainland and drive the Emmerian military to Vitoze. As Garuda One, you lead Emmeria's survivors in taking back your country.
• Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC:
  • Ace Combat: Assault Horizon - In a departure from past games, Assault Horizon is set in the real world instead of Strangereal (hence why this game is not titled AC7). You take on the role various pilots in the 108th Task Force, a mixed arms force made up of NATO and Russian personnel. The 108th's mission is to combat a growing rebel movement in Africa, aided by Russian mercenaries who possess a terrifying new superweapon codenamed 'Trinity.'
• Mobile Phone:
  • Ace Combat Xi: Skies of Incursion - In 2020, the Democratic Republic of Leasath launches an attack on its southern neighbour, the Federal Republic of Aurelia, nearly overrunning the latter within ten days thanks to their airborne fortress Gleipnir. You play as Falco One, another Ace Squad who took part in the same war with Gryphus One, in an attempt to liberate your country from Leasath's control.
  • Ace Combat: Northern Wings - The player takes command of Grendel Squadron, a secret squadron created by the Kingdom of Nordennavic, a small, neutral nation on the Anean Continent, to covertly influence wars that may threaten their homeland. It is set across a seventeen year period during wars featured in 04, 5, and 6.
• Nintendo 3DS:
  • Ace Combat: Assault Horizon Legacy - Despite the name, Assault Horizon Legacy (called Ace Combat 3D: Cross Rumble in Japan) returns to Strangereal. It's a remake and retelling of Ace Combat 2 adding elements from earlier games in the series, primarily Zero, with you taking on the role of Phoenix (aka Scarface One). AC2's wingmen Slash and Edge make a return, as does the enigmatic Z.O.E.
• PlayStation 3
  • Ace Combat Infinity - A downloadable title for the PS3, with a higher focus on multiplayer. Set in the real world around the year of 2019, 20 years after an asteroid impact. Aircraft and several superweapons from the older Ace Combat games make appearances.
• PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC:
  • Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown - Taking place in 2019, the Kingdom of Erusea declares war on the Osean Federation over a territory dispute after Osea constructed a Space Elevator called the 'Light House'. You take on the role of Trigger, a convicted criminal, and are thrown into the 444th fighter squadron — the Spare Squadron — for atonement along with other convicts.

Also worth mentioning is The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces for the Nintendo Wii, a Licensed Game of the Sky Crawlers anime. Though it has no direct ties with the Ace Combat universe, it was created by the same team and features the same arcade-sim air combat feel; as a result, many fans see it as a Spiritual Adaptation.

Ace Combat Strangereal World Map Download

In 2011, the Strangereal series, specifically the third installment Electrosphere, seems to have been retconned into the United Galaxy Space Force series, also tentatively known as Namcoverse. Said series seems to unite many of the futuristic games previously released by Namco, where the Strangereal games are the chronologically earliest installments (see also Timeline.UGSF Series).

Release order

1. Air Combat (1995)
2. Ace Combat 2 (1997)
3. Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere (1999)
4. Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies (2001)
5. Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War (2004)
6. Ace Combat Advance (2005)
7. Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War (2006)
8. Ace Combat X: Skies of Deception (2006)
9. Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation (2007)
10. Ace Combat Xi: Skies of Incursion (2009)
11. Ace Combat: Joint Assault (2010)
12. Ace Combat: Assault Horizon (2011)^note
13. Ace Combat: Assault Horizon Legacy (2011) ^note
14. Ace Combat: Northern Wings (2011)
15. Ace Combat Infinity (2014)
16. Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown (2019)

Strangereal chronology

The original/main continuity of the AC series is set on the Constructed World of Strangereal. The first two games were originally not really part of it but have since been retconned to appear that way.

1. Air Combat: Skully Islands insurrection (1995)
2. Ace Combat Zero: Belkan War (1995)
3. Ace Combat 2 and its remake Assault Horizon Legacy: Usean Rebellion/First Usean Continental War (1997/1998)
4. Ace Combat: Northern Wings: Various conflicts (1999 to 2016)
5. Ace Combat 04: (Second) Usean Continental War (2004-05)
6. Ace Combat 5: Operation Katina (2006), Circum-Pacific War (2010)
7. Ace Combat 7 VR Missions: Second Free Erusea Uprising (2014)
8. Ace Combat 6: Anean Continental War (2015-16)
9. Ace Combat 7: Lighthouse War (2019)
10. Ace Combat X and Ace Combat Xi: Leasath-Aurelia War (2020)
11. Ace Combat Advance: General Resource Conflict (2032)
12. Ace Combat 3: Usean Corporate War (2040)

Tropes list at vector 360, on the nose:

Strangereal World Map

• Ace Pilot: The entire series is based on this trope and Improbable Piloting Skills, wingmen and allied aircraft excepted. Supposedly Mobius One may be considered the trope namer for 04, 5, Zero, 6 (and maybe X), especially if you take Ace Combat 5's Arcade Mode ('Operation Katina') as canon, where Mobius One (with the help of AWACS SkyEye) defeated a de facto resurgent Erusean military and at the final battle six X-02 Wyverns using only a F-22 Raptor a year after the events of Ace Combat 04, where he was the lead element in every major ISAF operation of the Usean Continental War of 2003-2005.
• Adventure-Friendly World: Strangereal was created solely as a setting which permitted repeated full-theater international conflicts for Ace Pilots to participate in, which have been non-existent in Real Life since the development of nuclear weapons - see Broken Aesop.
• Aerial Canyon Chase: Pretty much every Ace Combat game requires the player to do this for some reason, most often because an enemy base is within the canyon and they have an undefeatable network of surface-to-air missiles covering the airspace above. Sometimes there are enemy planes or helicopters skulking in the canyons or other narrow passageways or tunnels, just waiting to achieve missile lock.
• A.K.A.-47:
  • Weapons are referred to with generic descriptors instead of real names; thus in for example Ace Combat Zero the F-14 Tomcat, Su-37 Terminator, JAS Gripen, and Eurofighter EF-2000 Typhoon all use XLAAs while the real planes would probably use different missiles for the long range role. The actual models of the missiles are all different and accurately based on a real missile at least similar to the missile's role, though; for example on the F-14 the XLAA resembles the AIM-54 Phoenix, whereas the Typhoon uses Meteor BVRAAMs.
  • Also, Electrosphere gives the airplanes slightly different names as part of the game's futuristic feel, such as the Eurofighter 2000E Typhoon II and the XFA-36A (McDonnell Douglas X-36).
  • Justified with the minor mistakes the games sometimes make. They sometimes use prototype aircraft, so certain planes have names and functions different from usual (e.g. the F-16E Block 60 was named the F-16C Block 60, and in Ace Combat 2, the Raptor wasn't released yet, so they modeled the YF-22, the prototype version, instead).
• Airborne Mook: Enemy aircraft, naturally. Enemy aces qualify as Elite Mooks or better, especially when they come in squadrons.
• Airstrike Impossible: A recurring mission type. The series loves to force you to fly jets through underground bunkers or down the barrel of giant cannons, with at least one in every game, usually in the penultimate or final level.
• Alternate Universe: Strangereal, a Constructed World similar to ours in many ways, except without nukes and continents closer together.
• All There in the Manual: A number of details, such as the full history of the Ulysses asteroid, aren't covered in-game.
• And Now for Someone Completely Different: The only player characters to definitely return in a later game is Mobius One (player character of 04, the arcade mode of 5 and the VR mode of 7) and Phoenix (protagonist of Air Combat and Ace Combat 2/Assault Horizon Legacy), though the later's paint schemes are entirely different.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: Shoot down enemy aces and you can slap on their paint jobs on your planes.
• Animal Theme Naming: The Yellow Squadron's official designation is 'Aquila' (Latin and Italian for 'Eagle'). Over two dozen Belkan aces are named after various birds (in German), and another dozen, after animals (ditto). Aurelia's air force likewise have bird genera for squadron names, as do the individual pilots of Emmeria's 15th squadron.
• Anti-Villain: The PS2 series hammer in the fact that your enemies are people too, with the wars being waged due to economic strife caused either by the Ulysses meteor or from the country itself.
• Arbitrary Mission Restriction: Each game typically includes at least one mission where the player is required to fly through a trench, staying below the lip of the trench. It usually has one of two justifications: Either the mission is a stealth-recon mission, and flying above the trench will result in detection and immediate failure, or there is heavy anti-aircraft fire that can't reach the player in the trench, but will instantly kill them if they fly too high.
• Armies Are Evil: Subverted in most games after 2. Especially considering when you see cutscenes of pilots and soldiers from the opposing army doing what they were trained to do without any complaints.
• Armored Coffins: All the planes in 3 are piloted via a so-called COFFIN (COnnection For Flight INterface) system, which is a kind of neural interface that allows you to steer them with your brain but has no ejection seats whatsoever.
• Arrow Cam: Holding down the missile button in most of the games will cause this to happen.
• Artificial Brilliance: Ace pilots, when compared to the standard mooks. Yellow Squadron in 04 will use the Pugachev Cobra maneuver to get behind you, for instance.
• Back from the Brink: In 2, 04, Zero, and X, the first mission starts as the last allied base in the area is under attack by enemy bombers with air support from starting fighters, which give a quick 'tutorial' in anti-air combat with easy targets. 5 and 6 subvert it by having this mission a little later on (and 5 has the distinction of being the first base attacked instead of last).
• Battleship Raid: Most games feature boss stages where you face a giant enemy aircraft, battleship or group of such aircraft: the Aigaion, Hresvelgr, Arsenal Birds, Arkbird and SOLG are all examples of this trope. Even the first game ended with a giant flying battleship.
• Bigger Stick: Getting better planes or better upgrade parts for planes you already have.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: In-Universe, most of the fictional superfighters come out of nowhere with little explanation, like the ADF-01 in 2 (and especially its reappearance in 5). Starting from Zero and X these start getting some justification, most often being a sort of last-resort superweapon the enemy hopes to turn the tide with.
• Bloodless Carnage: As a consequence of plane-combat. The one and only time the player sees blood is the attack helicopter segments in Assault Horizon where you're actively shooting at foot soldiers rather than just vehicles and buildings.
• Bland-Name Product:
  • Joint Assault has BNN.
  • 5, Zero and 7 have OBC.
  • 7 also has ENN.
• Bragging Rights Reward: You can't unlock the respective superplanes of each game without completing story mode at least once, depending on the game (and that's not even getting into unlocking the bonus paint schemes for them, which requires beating the game at the highest difficulties). 5 requires taking both story branches and finding specific ground targets to destroy; Zero, without Old Save Bonus, requires beating the game twice with different Ace Styles to unlock the X-02, and beating it three times with all the different Supreme Ace medals to unlock the ADF-01; and the PAK FA can't even be used in the story mode in Assault Horizon.
• Broken Aesop:
  • The games like to talk about how terrible nuclear weapons are.. despite that the Strangereal setting needed to be made in the first place because nuclear arms have prevented the kind of all-out wars between major military powers that the plotlines are built around. So nukes are bad, as we are told by a world that collapses into gigantic, pointless wars every five or so years because nobody has an effective deterrent against them. Historically, nuclear weapons were not developed in Strangereal until the 1980s by Belka (Strangereal's version of Nazi Germany). Superweapons such as airborne fortresses, railguns and laser platforms are supposed to fill the deterrent role that nuclear weapons normally would, but they do a poor job of it, not least for the fact that they aren't actually meant to be one in-universe; while some could act the role due to being well-known, built for a different purpose but also being effective as a weapon (Stonehenge was built and highly-publicized for the purpose of protecting the continent from the Ulysses asteroid, Excalibur was meant for missile defense, Chandelier also for shooting down asteroids, Arkbird was already fitted with lasers for destroying asteroid fragments still in orbit), for the most part they are in fact meant to be used in a shooting war, most of them being purpose-built for killing people and introduced to the world at large by firing the opening shots of a war (most of the airborne fortresses such as the P-1112 Aigaion from 6 or the Gleipnir from X) or quickly finished, repaired, or otherwise repurposed to turn the tide of a war that's gone badly (stuff like Megalith from 04, Arkbird and then the SOLG from 5, Chandelier from 6, etc.)
  • The 'Nukes are bad' message that's often presented in the games is even more undermined by the fact that the massive conventional wars the series portrays are only possible because Strangereal is a world where nuclear proliferation never occurred, and thus no doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction arose to discourage overt conflict between superpowers. Even worse, the still-legitimate part of that message is broken by the fact that Belka, the only country in Strangereal known to have access to nuclear weapons as above, has since gone on to have a hand in, if not be directly responsible for, every single bad thing that's gone on in the series since the events of Zero, even retroactively. This turns what could have been a still-legitimate aesop of 'nukes are bad because they could destroy the world if left unchecked and used with reckless abandon' into an overly-simplistic Hitler Ate Sugar moral, that 'nukes are bad because only the bad guys use them'.
  • Most egregious is that there doesn't appear to be any kind of interventionism in Strangereal. Two countries can go to war with each other for reasons ranging from legitimate 'not wanting to take in any more refugees' as in 04 to simply 'wanting to test out their leader's new toys' as in X, and other countries (not even the superpowers like Osea or Yuktobania) will never involve themselves or attempt to broker a truce so long as the conflict never spills over their border. This is especially evident in the Aurelian War of 2020 (the aforementioned X) and the Anean Continental War of 2015-2016 (6); both wars took place on the borders of a major superpower (Osea in the former and Yuktobania in the latter) and neither country was known to have stepped in. Erusea is able to occupy Usea, a continent roughly the size of Asia for no less than two years, while utilizing a massive railgun network to maintain air dominance, yet no other nation ever intercedes on Usea's behalf.
  • On top of that, no sense of military reduction or oversight is ever implemented for belligerent nations; Belka is able to keep a significant portion of its once mighty air force and military, while Erusea is able to rebuild and revitalize its military 14 years after a devastating two-year occupation of an entire continent.
• Calling Your Attacks: From 04 and beyond, characters use the 'Fox' brevity codes when launching missiles (Fox 2 for standard missiles, Fox 3 for radar-guided/special air to air missiles). Except for the Heroic Mime protagonist, who also gains an AWACS support unit who calls out those codes for him.
• Canon Discontinuity: Although not outright stated, the games that are set in the real-world Earth instead of Strangereal are clearly independent from each other, with no story reference toward each other. Ace Combat Infinity stands out, as it meshed both a plot set in the real world with special encounters of the Strangereal settings. The game was also focused around online multiplayer and was designed to be different in the first place.
• Canon Welding:
  • The above-mentioned 'United Galaxy Space Force' is an attempt to merge a number of their series with futuristic installments into a single continuity, with Electrosphere as its first installment chronologically.
  • Ace Combat 7 has numerous plot threads that connect back to 4, 5, and Zero, and even some very specific minor allusions to 2 and Electrosphere.
• Cataclysm Backstory: The Ulysses meteor defined the Strangereal universe. When it was first discovered, many countries scrambled to create weapons capable of destroying it, leading to the building of the many doomsday weapons faced in the franchise. When it actually crashed, the economic and political consequences led to two of the wars in the games, the Anean and Second Usean Continental Wars. The devastation of Ulysses also ultimately spurred the construction of the Lighthouse Space Elevator in the early 2010s, as a means to assist with the rebuilding of the Usean continent with a strong supply of solar energy.
  • This also applies to the Infinity universe, where the 'Ulysses disaster' led to the setting of the game being what it is.
• Cerebus Syndrome: More dramatic and realistic elements have crept in over time, the biggest examples being Zero and Electrosphere.
• Chasing Your Tail: And how! Expect to spend a lot of time staring at the back of other planes.
• Colourful Theme Naming: Both Belka and Erusea's Air Forces use colors in their squadron names, though Erusea's squadrons are actually named after birds.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard:
  • Enemies usually can maneuver better and lock-on much faster than you can even when using the same plane as you, and some bosses' superfighters have capabilities you'll never get.
  • You know this trope is in full effect in AC5 when enemy planes can fly through the goddamn ground to evade you. When it's the last target on a timed mission with 10 seconds left, controllers will be thrown through television sets.

• Conservation of Ninjutsu: Both used and averted. Your character does become a One-Man Army with many kills to his name, but any time an ace squadron shows up you will face a much tougher fight since they'll attack together.
• Cool Plane:
  • Nearly every single fictional aircraft in any Ace Combat game is either the best plane in the game, one of the best planes in the game, behaves very uniquely or is simply extremely good-looking.
  • Subverted with the BM-335 fictional antiquated bomber from Zero, which resembles a World War II Heinkel (in-universe, it's apparently been around since 1951) and upon killing one may cause an ally to comment that it looks ancient.
  • Also plenty of the nonfictional ones. It's no coincidence that Ace/Air Combat (at least in the US), 04, X and Joint Assault feature the F-22 Raptor on the cover, since it's a top tier air-to-air king and has a distinctive look. This is Mobius One's 'official' plane, as indicated by its being the default plane for Operation Katina, aka AC5's Arcade Mode. Some players, however, prefer the Su-27 Flanker and its variants/descendants, particularly the Su-37 Terminator and the Su-47 Berkut to the Raptor. The Sukhoi planes may be better dogfighters thanks to the Quick-maneuver Air-to-Air Missile (QAAM), while the Raptor has more 'standoff' capability. This slightly evens out in AC6, where they are amongst the multiple planes that can use the QAAM (somewhat toned down from the 04 incarnation), so the cool doesn't always have to be useless.
  • Ace Combat X features a high number of fictional planes; some of which aren't that great compared to the higher-end real planes, though the best planes in the game (the Wyvern, Falken, and Fenrir) are fictional. However, all the made up planes except the Fenrir have the ability to be upgraded with new parts, altering their performance.
• Cosmetic Award: Medals and paint schemes, especially ones acquired by downing enemy aces.
• Crew of One: In all the games, whenever the player flies an aircraft that in the real world would require a crew of 2 or more to operate effectively, the empty seats are automatically filled in the aircraft's third-person models and the plane is able to execute all functions flawlessly.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: Several annoying minor changes in the control settings across titles.
  • There's also severe differences between how to evade all the different superweapons, as well. In particular, Stonehenge in 04 requires you to be below 2000 feet, while burst missiles from 5 require you to be above 5000 feet. Then come the Gleipnir in X, where its shockwave ballistic missiles require you to fly below 2000 feet again, but its shock cannon requires you to climb above the Gleipnir.. and then in its last appearance it turns upside down at one point, forcing you to fly below it again to dodge the same weapon.
  • Try switching between Ace Combat and H.A.W.X.. The controls are virtually identical.. except the buttons for guns and missiles are switched. Thankfully, the PC version of the latter lets you rebind your controls.
  • The SAAM weapon got hit with this hard in the jump from PS2 to PSP and beyond, and with the equivalent weapon in HAWX. In 5 and Zero, among other tricks, you can launch an SAAM early, before an enemy enters the maximum lock-on range, and still get a kill on it because the SAAM will start properly tracking the target once you lock on. In X and later games SAAMs are now dedicated to whatever target you were locked onto when you fired them, meaning you can't do the above trick or redirect them in the case of kill-steals anymore, but you can actually target two enemies at the same time if you can keep them both within the missile's steering circle. Then in HAWX, if you try to do any of the above, or even so much as have the target leave the steering circle for a second, it's counted as a miss.
• Defenseless Transports: Transport planes (and ships, less often) appear from time to time as either NPCs that must be escorted or targets to be destroyed. They can usually survive a few hits but can't fight back in any way.
• The Determinator: The player-character is often this; surviving countless attempts by the combined armed forces of entire nations to kill him with barely a scratch.
• Difficult, but Awesome: SAA Ms usually fall into this. They require you leave yourself vulnerable and keep a target in your sights for the duration of the missile's flight, but they are some of the most accurate missiles in the series, making them extremely useful against enemy aces if conditions permit their use.
• Dodge by Braking: The Pugachev's Cobra and its variants are maneuvers both you and some enemy aces can pull off. Just make sure that they're not flying at the same altitude as you are, or they'll opt for a very humiliating machine-gun-kill. The Yellows are fond of doing this. On the other side, if they try to Cobra and you are going slowly enough to not overshoot, it's a big invitation to light 'em up; one of the signs that the new Yellow Squadron from the final level are not nearly as skilled as the old group is that they use the Cobra to evade your squadmates without considering that maybe you or one of your other squadmates are then given a clear, easy shot at them while they're stuck in place.
• The Dreaded: A staple of the franchise. Due to how impossibly good your characters are, enemies crap their pants in fear at THE VERY POSSIBILITY of your presence. A few enemy squadrons also have the same reputation, until they're shot down by you.
• Dude, Where's My Respect?:
  • Beautifully averted; by the time you're halfway through a given game, your Improbable Piloting Skills will be legend among friend and foe alike. Half the fun is listening to the enemies panic when they find out you're on the field.
  • That said, despite their legendary accomplishments, every playable pilot disappears from history shortly after their final victories. Probably voluntarily. The sole exception seems to be Mobius One, who continues serving ISAF after the end of 04's Usean Continental War, putting down a Free Erusea movement in 2006 (AC5's Arcade Mode) and helping put down another uprising in 2014 (AC7's VR missions).
• Earn Your Title: The player's accomplishments in battle are what eventually lead them to earning their notorious titles among both allies and enemies alike.
• Easy Logistics:
  • You can run out of regular missiles and/or special weapons, and some games and difficulties give you limited cannon ammo, but you never run out of fuel; aerial refueling is just an interactive cutscene. In missions where you can Return To Base, once you successfully land or skip the landing interactive cutscene your plane is immediately repaired (except on harder difficulties) and rearmed. If you switch special weapons for yourself and your wingman (the latter in Zero and 6), the change and reload occurs instantaneously.
  • This in and of itself is an example of Gameplay and Story Segregation, as storywise logistics do matter; just see the 04 missions where you take out a group of Erusean transport planes and then a forward operating base as the prelude to wrecking the 'Invincible' Aegir Fleet, then afterwards destroy solar power generator facilities to both damage the enemy war machine and divert attention from an upcoming invasion. The third and fourth missions in 5 force you to keep flying the F-5, as well, because there's no time for you to switch. Fuel limitations are also shown in a few other missions, such as the squad requiring to stop off at a different air base after 'Rendezvous' because they're low on fuel and can't get a tanker aircraft to them, and missions which start or end with aerial refueling are noted to take place quite a ways away from where you took off from, particularly ones directly over Yuktobania in the first half of the game.
  • The ending to Zero is a zig-zagging instance. The mission to Avalon has such a long travel time that from mission 16 to the end, you cannot switch, buy, or sell planes or special weapons. Then again, the at-most three minutes between the end of 'Avalon' and the beginning of 'Zero' somehow completely restocks and repairs your already flying plane (and rather bafflingly, removes all of your allies from the area).
  • Air Combat and Ace Combat 2 do have a fuel meter, but this is really just a disguised timer, since it empties at a steady rate regardless of how you fly.
• Enemy Chatter:
  • A staple of the series, it seems that everyone and his mother — including allied ground units in the middle of raging battles, enemy air and ground units, police CBs and even civilian radio stations — are all broadcasting on your presumably encrypted and frequency-shifting channel, and (other than your wingman commands) vice versa. Strangely enough, it compels the drama factor of the series. Lampshaded late in Ace Combat 5, when Archer incredulously announces: 'The radio is picking up the enemy communications!' Which it's been doing the whole time.
  • It is likely that the enemy chatter isn't actually broadcasting over the radio all the time; more realistically, only the player can hear it, which is why the game will occasionally have the characters take notice when the enemy really is speaking on the same channel, for the convenience of knowing when the characters can actually hear the enemy.
  • Assault Horizon dropped it altogether save for when some enemies (mostly Markov and Illich) state that they deciphered your radio encryption and knew your frequency and the mission where you save the Russian prime minister.
• Enemy-Detecting Radar: Your fighter's radar will show the location of enemies nearby, though stealth planes will fade in and out. Some games use different colored icons to indicate which targets are mission-critical (Zero), while others use the same colours to show how much health each target has left (5). Most of the games that came out after Ace Combat 6 often have stealth planes only show up on radar when they are in the front half of your plane's radar field.
• Escort Mission: There is at least one per game in the PS2 era. A notable example in Ace Combat: Joint Assault has one of the players control a 747 jet while the others escort them.
• Expansion Pack World: Each new game that came out in the series would reveal more and more about Strangereal's geopolitical setup and history. A world map of Strangereal was revealed early on, but there's still a significant number of countries that haven't even been identified yet, much less a war between two of them to flesh them out. None of the three games that take place on Earth are connected to each other.
• Featureless Protagonist:
  • It's very rare to find out anything about the character's name, appearance, or even gender. To that end, most of the games' stories focus on people affected by the protagonist's actions (4 being the biggest example). A few of the games have played with this, notably Electrosphere, where it turns out the PC is an AI, designed to test if one pilot could turn the tide of a war and whether he can kill a specific person.
  • This trend was finally broken by Assault Horizon, which had multiple playable characters with visible faces and speaking roles.
• Fictional Earth: Strangereal is Earth in every possible way except for landmasses (which for the most part are Earth continents shifted in different directions and visually modified) and nations. You can even tell what real world counterparts the nations are based on. It has an Antarctica no different from the real one. It even has its own Pacific and Arctic Oceans. Almost all the aircraft used in the game exist in reality.
• Fighter-Launching Sequence: A few times, naturally. Sometimes you have to actually play through the takeoff sequence yourself, to boot.
• Fragile Speedster: The X-29 has incredible acceleration and max speed but takes hits poorly. So do its 'cousins' the F-5E and F-20A in their respective games. The Cariburn is fast, but since a single missile hit can take the damage meter up to 51% even on Normal, damages easily. It blends with Glass Cannon as it can equip QAAMs.
• Friendly Fireproof: Go ahead, drop that cluster bomb ten feet from friendly ground forces. They won't feel a thing. Or try to send a couple rounds through your wingman's cockpit if he's being annoying.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: Every last one of the player characters start off as no-names but quickly become One Man Armies who are The Dreaded and Famed In-Story.
• Genre Blindness: At least once a game, a character will say something that will make you have to pause the game and cover your face in shame. For example, Ace Combat 6´s 'final' mission. You've won the war, people are celebrating, and your 'mission' is to do a patrol while fireworks explode in the sky. Then one of your wingmen says 'I'd like to say: Mission Accomplished'. Cue enemy fighters and transcontinental missiles.
• Germanic Efficiency: Being the Fantasy Counterpart Culture of Germany, Belka has the most advanced technologies (many of the original fighters and superweapons in the series are attributed to Belkan engineering), the most efficient air force (they have the most Aces in any Ace Combat game to date; out of 169 named Aces in Zero, 139 of them are of Belkan nationality) and very skilled engineers (in the form of Gault 1/Anton 'Dr.' Kupchenko, who designed the superweapons of Ace Combat Zero as well as the ADFX-01/02 Morgan, and Gault 7/Lorenz 'Feniks' Riedel, who designed the Battle Fleet for the Eastern Faction during the Estovakian Civil War and the subsequent Emmerian-Estovakian War). This dies down in between the Belkan War and the events of 5 due to painful punishments from causing the War.
  • It's also implied that General Resource, Ltd. from Electrosphere traces its origins to a state-run South Belkan munitions firm, and carries on that tradition in its own corporate power schemes.
• Glass Cannon: The F-5E and MiG-21 in the PS2 games, and the A-4 in 2 are this, though since you usually get these in the beginning of the game, the player doesn't need to worry about biting the bullet. The Mobius F-22 and Yellow Su-33 in AC6 (as downloadable content) are also this, but it pays off when you have wicked manuverability. On Ace mode all your planes are a One-Hit-Point Wonder against missiles, so the question is how much Cannon and Speedster/Lightning you're packing.
• Good Colors, Evil Colors: Radar signatures. The colors used change depending on the game, but typically retain green for allies and red for required targets. This carries over into countries as well, with the flags of 'good' countries typically being blue, whereas the flags of 'bad' countries are usually in red.
• Good Weapon, Evil Weapon:
  • It has been noted that in almost every game, the protagonist squadron and sometimes his allies usually fly Western fighter aircraft (usually American, and more often than not the F-22 Raptor) while the antagonist ace squadron(s) usually use high-tier Russian fighters (often a variant of the Su-27 Flanker). This is however subverted multiple times.
  • Phoenix aka Scarface One from 2 prefers to fly the Su-35 Super Flanker (which is statistically the best normal plane in the game, matching or surpassing even the F-22 in six of seven attributes) while four of the five Z.O.E. aces use American jets (the fifth uses one of the series' first two fictional superfighters). This is played straight however in the remake when he uses the F-22 as his aircraft of choice.
    • Of course this gets subverted somewhat for the enemy in the remake, as only one of the five major ace squadrons (including the aformentioned Z.O.E.) flies Russian aircraft. Justified in all cases however, as both the original, and more poignantly in the remake, shows that this is the closest the series has gotten to depicting a Civil War, and would use Western fighters in its inventory. The squad flying the Russian aircraft are from Erusea, the antagonist country in 04 whose premier ace squadron also flies the Russian-built Su-37 Terminator.
  • In 04, ISAF would deploy a mix of Western- and Russian-made fighters during missions that are considered pivotal story-wise: a flight of MiG-29s fly top cover for you and a few other F/A-18s during the assault on Stonehenge, whereas the Siege of Farbanti has you accompanied by a mix of F-15s and Su-35s at its beginning as you shoot down enemy F-15 S/MTDs and Su-47s. Mobius One is often portrayed with the Raptor here as well.
  • In 5, the 8492nd Squadron flies the F-15 S/MTD up until the final mission, where they fly Su-47s instead. Your squadron's official plane is the F-14A Tomcat.
  • In Zero, out of the 12 major ace squads you face in the game, only three (Gelb [Su-37], Schwarze [MiG-31] and Gault [Su-47]) play this trope straight, the rest primarily flying American jets with a few multinational-European (Rot [Eurofighter]), French (Espada Two [Rafale]) and Swedish (Indigo [Gripen], Espada One [Draken]) ones thrown in as well. Meanwhile, your team is shown flying the F-15C.
  • In X some of the Redshirts fly Flankers.
  • The Rigel Squadron in Joint Assault mostly avert this at the start, with three of the four flying Russian jets, but then switch over to playing it mostly straight when they defect to Valahia in the fourth mission. Interestingly, the one guy among them flying an American jet is also the only one who is actually nice to the player character before the defection.
  • Averted in Infinity. Enemies would fly Fulcrums and Flankers alongside Harrier IIs and Raptors; allies could fly whatever they had available, whether they're Japanese F-2s, the Russian MiG-29, the American F-15, or otherwise. Story-wise it's zig-zagged with the Bone Arrow flight, with Omega flying a Eurofighter and Bronco flying an F-16F, while Viper flew a MiG-21 and Zebu a MiG-29; the player obviously had their own choice of craft, though the rental sets alzo zig-zagged this, such as mission 2 suggesting an F-16C then mission 3 suggesting a Su-25.
  • The very well known American AH-64 Apache helicopter was, in Strangereal, used mostly by the enemy forces.
  • 7 has a strong mix of eastern and western fighters present as enemies throughout the entire game. Almost every mission features a Russian Mig or Sukhoi, with star enemy ace Mihaly using a Su-30 in most of his appearances, but European Gripens, Rafales, and Typhoons are added into the mix in the midgame, and American F-117s, A-10s and A/V-88s appear now and then. The penultimate mission features numerous enemies using F-22s, Su-47s, Su-57s, YF-23s, F-15Js, Typhoons, and others.
• Harder Than Hard: Ace Combat 04 and subsequent games have Expert and Ace difficulties. They also have an Easier Than Easy difficulty (Very Easy). Note though that some goodies (mainly ace appearances) only occur on certain difficulties. Just to clarify for anyone not clear on the concept: on Expert difficulty, one missile instantly kills you, and that's not the hardest difficulty.Ace Combat 6 had 'Ace of Aces' difficulty available to purchase as DLC. It only took about 3 bullets to down your craft.
• He Who Must Not Be Seen: You never get to see the main character either which is especially obvious in Ace Combat 5, where the between-mission cutscenes show the rest of your squadron frequently, as well as some other allies and enemies. Even when you try zooming in on the cockpit of your plane during a mission the pilot's face is hidden by a tinted visor and an oxygen mask.
• Heroic Mime: The main character almost never speaks — bizarrely enough, this is true even in later games, where you have dedicated wingmen to whom you can give orders with an almost too simple 'Yes/No' command, or call for Attack or Cover. Fanfic retellings have been known to fill these in.
• High-Altitude Battle: While every battle in the series takes place in the air (even if it's a helicopter flying only a few feet off the ground), a few stand out for pushing the limits of your airframe:
  • 'Rising High' from Ace Combat 2 and Assault Horizon Legacy takes place so high (above 40,000 feet) that most aircraft will constantly stall if you try to climb at too steep an angle or if you lose too much thrust.
  • Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere has high altitude missions for the RF-12A2 (a futuristic relative of the SR-71 Blackbird), as well as a mission in orbit involving a weaponized space shuttle. You have to survive re-entry too.
• High-Speed Missile Dodge: Without countermeasures it's the only defense against enemy missiles. Yes, despite what some people claim, this is a basic tactic taught and used in Real Life. It just doesn't look the same as it does in (most) fiction because fictional missiles usually lack proximity fuses.
• Homing Projectile: Missiles, both friendly and not.
• Hyperspace Arsenal: The least number of missiles any plane in the series carries is around 50, frequently you'll have many more, and then you have special weapons on top of that - don't be surprised when you see ordnance 'magically' rematerialize on your plane's wings in third-person view! Oh, and ditto for the gun both due to a lot of — or on some difficulty levels infinite — ammunition and a slower rate of fire than in real life where you have cannons with hundred-round bursts at around six-thousand rounds per minute.
• Iconic Logo: In a series where nearly every protagonist is a Featureless Protagonist, the only things identifying each game's hero is their squadrons' unique logo.
  • Iconic Outfit: When appearing in other games as cameos, the protagonists (and when applicable, their famous rivals) always appear with their signature plane and their Nose Art. Lacking either one, and it definitely isn't them.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: The highest difficulty level is Ace.
• In the Style of..:
  • Directly comparing the 'Megalith ~Agnus Dei~' with the standard rendition, or 'Zero' with 'Unsung War', the differences in rendering make it difficult to tell that they are meant to have the same lyrics.
  • 'First Flight' from 5 is listed in the OST as an arranged version of 'Blockade' from 04, but there's really not much similarity between the two unless you can slow the latter down massively. Operation Katina also has a remix of 'Elemental Particle' from 2.
• Infinity +1 Sword: Almost all the superfighters have hard-to-achieve requirements, but the effort's well worth it.
  • Infinity -1 Sword: Of course, if it's too much effort for you, you can get high-tech planes like F-22, Su-37, Su-47, Su-57, and YF-23 much more easily.
• Instant Expert: The player characters can switch between plane types with ease.
• Instant-Win Condition: Some missions only need you to make a point limit and then it will be completed when time runs down regardless of enemy survivors. In others focusing on only the needed targets is enough to win. Subverted, however, as it's still possible to crash in the time between 'Mission Accomplished' and getting to the results screen, causing a failure (from AC04 onward,) or in AC2's case, still finishing the mission but losing money due to having your downed plane replaced.
• Interface Spoiler:
  • In most games there will be unselectable or empty boxes in the plane buying and selecting screens, giving away the total number of available planes.
  • in Zero, the named aces list has 169 entries, in rows of 5. Normally this would leave one blank space after the 169th ace (Pixy), suggesting there is a secret 170th ace. There technically is one: Mobius freaking One with his signature F-22 Raptor. Subverted, however, as there isn't a profile to unlock, since he appears in a bonus mission out of the storyline.
• It's Personal with the Dragon: A staple of the series. In many games, there is an Arch-Enemy or personal rival for you that isn't the Big Bad, and who is your greatest enemy.
  • The straightest examples are with 4, 6 and Zero. 4 takes the cake in that all of the cutscenes in the game are about your rival, developing and building up to your final clash with him.
• It's Up to You: In real life, squadrons generally specialize, with different units being assigned close air support, getting air superiority or doing bombing runs. Your characters do all of them over the course of the game, sometimes at the same time.
  • The main character (and sometimes his squadron) can always and sometimes is singlehandedly turning the tide of the war. It also becomes a driving factor in the game where radio chatter reflects the infamy and fear of your allies and enemies when you appear on the battlefield, especially in Ace Combat 5.
  • Lampshaded in the arcade mode of Ace Combat 5, where it's revealed that the hero of Ace Combat 04, Mobius One, was proven to be more effective than an entire squadron, hence why ISAF sent him to deal with the issue alone.
  • And generally even when you do have a squadron, their AI is so passive that most players will end up with ten or more kills for every one they make between them.
• Jack-of-All-Stats:
  • The MiG-29 Fulcrum usually is this.
  • So are F-16s, though it often has multiple role-specific variants.
  • Multirole aircraft in general are built around this, being able handle both fighter and attacker duties equally, though in return, they are less effective than their specialized counterparts in their respective roles.
• Just Plane Wrong:
  • Averted for the most part, although it does indulge in Rare Vehicles quite a bit. Also subverted as some implausibly cool-looking superfighters have been successfully modelled as airworthy under the limitations of early 21st century flight technology.
  • Except of course, the Neucom's R-series (at least the more advanced ones). The R-211 Orcinus and R-102/3 shouldn't be able to fly with what we currently know about aerodynamics.
  • Questionable with the ADF-01 FALKEN; It flies well enough in X-Plane, which is one of the most realistic flight sims, but some things have been done IRL that simulators could not replicate and vice versa. Short of an extremely rich and well-connected fan building his own, we may never know. It's also one of the most over the top Superplanes, oddly (see Serial Escalation below).
  • This trope can also go the other way with very old aircraft that have been long out of production or retired. The most notable would be the F-14, of which most were retired and subsequently destroyed, while a remaining handful are sitting in museums. Unless you count the ones Iran has, of course.
  • The F-22 Raptor (which is only in service with the United States Air Force) is in service with just about every nation in Strangereal.
  • Also, the Su-37, of which only two were built, is a mainstay advanced fighter in Strangereal. In reality, it was designed as a technology demonstrator and was declared technologically obsolete with the advent of the Su-35S in 2010.
  • For balance reasons, every plane in the game is armed with a gun, even those that don't have them in real life (such as the F-117A, the F-35C or the EA-18G), as well as dozens of missiles (such as, again, the F-117 and unarmed tech demos) that, unlike in reality, are viable and equally effective against both fast air targets and unmoving bunkers. 6 also allows every plane to perform tight High-G turns, which would normally tear some of said aircraft apart.
  • Sometimes justified when the game uses production or prototype concepts of planes and weapons before the final testing is finished (e.g. the production model of the Raptor was used in AC4, after the first two games used the prototype YF-22, and in trailers for AC7 Raptors were shown using external weapon pods, which were in testing for the FA-18C.)
• Kaizo Trap:
  • In almost all the titles you can still crash or even get shot down after the 'Mission Accomplished' but before you go to the mission results screen. This is particularly possible in 5, where sometimes the enemy AI glitches out and continues attacking you after the mission is over (realistic as it may be, they're not supposed to do that).
  • Averted in 2: control of your plane is completely taken away after you complete the mission. To avoid this issue, your plane just de-spawns entirely in missions where that would inevitably lead to a crash, and in every other one it will automatically pull up a couple hundred meters as soon as control is taken away from you; if it manages to crash at this point anyway, you lose credits to replace the plane but the mission is still completed. Assault Horizon Legacy, a remake of 2, is more in line with the rest of the series.
• Kill Sat: Featured in Ace Combat 3 and Ace Combat 5. The one in Ace Combat 3 was available as a special weapon.
• La Résistance: Mentioned a few times in various titles, particularly in 04, where the viewpoint character for the story outside of gameplay fell in with them.
• Lampshade Hanging: In one mission a pilot starts talking about his personal life, as pilots in the game are want to do. He is promptly told to shut up and concentrate on fighting.
• Laser Cutter: The Tactical Laser System's shot.
• Last Stand: Always happens in the last mission, the exception goes to Zero where it happened 4 missions before the last one.
• Legacy Character: Kei 'Edge' Nagase is likely to appear in some form throughout each game: as a mercenary, defector, airline pilot, The Lancer, The Cameo in a real NATO squadron, a pilot for Strangereal's version of NATO, writing a Character Blog on development of one of the games..
• Lethal Joke Character: F-117A in Zero and 6, EA-6B in Zero, pretty much any non-afterburning jet with QAA Ms.
• Leitmotif: A portion of The Unsung War has found its way in every game since 5. Yes, even Assault Horizon.
• Lightning Bruiser: Most of the late-/end-game planes can tank more hits than earlier ones while still being faster, more agile, and carrying more ammo. Especially the superfighters.
• Like Reality Unless Noted: Although Strangereal is a rather different alternate Earth from ours, it uses the same planes with an occasional twist or two, and many countries and events have clear parallels to those on our Earth. And then of course the physics breaking arcade elements the game adds for fun.
• Macross Missile Massacre: There are various types of multi-target missiles in the series. The XMAA can target four different air targets at once, and the XAGM serves the same purpose but against air targets. Later games have variants allowing targeting of six air targets. And the ADMM in Ace Combat 6 allows you to target up to twelve enemies.
• The Main Characters Do Everything: In real life, air superiority and ground attack missions are generally given to units dedicated to those roles. In these games, not only do you get multiple types of missions, but you can easily swap out your planes to match whatever role is needed.
• Manual Leader, A.I. Party: In the Ace Combat installments that give you permanent wingmen, you can usually select their planes and give them orders but you only steer your own plane on missions. Ace Combat 5 is the only one, however, where you can speak of a 'party' (it had three wingmen as opposed to one in other games).
• Mass 'Oh, Crap!': Usually signalled by the arrival of your squadron.
  • Zero has a spectacular one when Excalibur makes its debut. One second, all the pilots in the operation relax after having cleared the airspace from enemy fighters, Cipher and Pixy form up with a flight of five cargo planes for what looks like an Escort Mission.. then suddenly a laser beam sweeps down from the sky and instakills three cargo planes with zero warning. Cue everyone still alive screaming over each other in confusion and panic as this kicks in - including resident wisecracker Pixy, who for the first time in the game sounds more than a little nervous.
  Allied pilot: AWACS, requesting orders!
  Allied pilot: What was that? Where did that attack just come from?!
  Pixy: What the hell happened?! AWACS, what's going on?!
  AWACS: Hold on! Incoming emergency message from Operations HQ: enemy launching long-range attacks, current airspace is within range.
  (Excalibur fires again, destroying the last two transports)
  Allied pilot: Plane 4 just vanished! Allied planes are disappearing from radar!
• Mega-Corp: By Electrosphere in the Strangereal continuity, even powerful corporations have their own militaries, including air forces.
• Midair Collision: This is one of the most embarrassing ways to fail a mission in the games, especially crashing into a bomber you are chasing or a plane you already shot down.
• Mighty Glacier: The A-10 Thunderbolt II, usually having the worst speed, but having the most powerful machine gun and toughest defense by a landslide.
• Minimalist Run: Using only the starting plane. Probably most easily done on 6, since while the F-16 isn't spectacular, it's still far better than the F-4 or F-5 you usually start with in the earlier games.
• Missile Lock-On: Missiles generally take a second or two to lock on to a target, if it stays near the center of the screen. Each plane has its own 'Anti-Air' and 'Anti-Ground' stat which shows how fast that lock on is. Enemy aces generally maneuver violently enough to make locking on to them quite difficult.
• Mission Briefing: Every mission starts with a summary of objectives and a map displaying enemy forces and any allied ground forces, zooming in on certain areas by pushing left or right on the directional pad, as well as hinting by the number of each enemy type which plane type would be best-suited. 6 would dub these Operations, since in these areas you're to provide close air support against surface targets, achieve air superiority over aerial targets or both, and letting you benefit from a captured airfield, electronic (increased missile guidance) or fire support courtesy of the assisted allies. The briefings are more useful for some missions than others. If a briefing suggests that the flight will be quiet, such as a ceremonial flight above a rally or a patrol during ceasefire, assume the worst. The only truly non-eventful flight is a Free Flight, which can only be done after you clear the campaign at least once.
• Mission Control: An Airborne Warning And Control System (AWACS) aircraft constantly supervises you, providing mission and story updates as well as things like reminding you that you've locked on to an enemy or vice versa, that you or the enemy has launched a missile at the other, or you're in gun range, as well as whether a missile hit or missed. Amazingly, it's not actually as irritating as it sounds. To the developers' credit, his information is usually useful and the guy comes off as friendly and genuinely concerned about the pilots. It also helps that there is enough dialogue played infrequently enough to keep it from getting stale.
• Mook Chivalry: Generally averted; enemy squadrons have no qualms against taking your lonely self on all at once. It gets justified later in each game, where you're infamous enough among them that they can't possibly expect to take you out one-on-one.
• Mooks: Although wide and varied, and still capable of damaging you significantly, it's present in all games where you take on whole squadrons of fighters. Especially early on in the American version of Electrosphere, all of Neucom's fighters are the same plane. Averted of course by the ace squadrons; even when your plane is superior (in their first appearances on non-SP playthroughs it's not) they tend to be better pilots. Gets iffy though when for gameplay reasons the difference becomes really marked (Espada 1 in Zero flies a starting plane and is still one of the most difficult aces in the entire game).
• Musical Spoiler: You can tell that something is about to happen if the music suddenly goes quiet or changes.
• My Nayme Is: The usual Japanese L/R translation issues are found throughout the series.
• Named After Somebody Famous: All Erusean aces are named after famous astronomers.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: In an unusual twist, it's the player, who, depending on the game, may be the Grim Reaper, the Demons/Ghosts of Razgriz, or the Demon Lord of the Round Table, among others. The enemy forces usually start to cower at the mention of your name.
• Necessary Drawback: QAAMs have the same short range as regular missiles to balance their high accuracy/maneuverability, long-range missiles tend to be inaccurate unless launched at the right angle, and SAAMs could have been overpowered in combining XLAA range with QAAM maneuverability.. were it not for you having to keep your aircraft's nose pointed at the target (and the target within a SAAM-exclusive circular reticle) for the duration of the SAAM's flight^note , which can make you a sitting duck while the missile is flying. The air-to-ground weapons and parts have similar issues.
• Nerf: Certain SP weapons have been subjected to significant nerfs after they prove particularly dominant.
  • QAAMs were nerfed heavily from Shattered Skies to Unsung War, going from nearly perfect seekers to barely better than regular missiles.
  • Zero gave SAAMs a de facto nerf without actually changing their parameters by making the AI much more aggressive, which makes it much harder to keep them on target, both because the plane your shooting at will try much harder to escape the circle, and because other enemies will be much more likely to force you to take evasive maneuvers of your own and break your lock.
  • Assault Horizon Legacy nerfed the tactical laser system from a near instant-kill beam of death to a wiffle bat that needs several seconds on target to score a kill.
• New Game+: You can start a SP New Game to restart the campaign with your attained money, unlocked planes and paint jobs (and in Zero with your Ace Style Gauge where you left it in the previous campaign), or do Free Mission(s) to bump up your ranking and/or time, shoot down named aces, and in 5, Zero and X gain money. Note that in Zero your Ace Style Gauge is only affected by the campaign, so feel free to be merciless in Free Mission. Free Mission also has a Free Flight option (except in X) where you can fly around all by yourself with no time limit or objectives and explore the maps. In addition, all three PS2-era games require using New Game+ to unlock their super-planes, in addition to other requirements.
• No Name Given: In addition to the player characters, several enemy aces like Yellow 13 and most of the AWACS spokesmen go only by callsign.
• Nom de Guerre: All pilots have at least one callsign. These are either squadron identifiers (Galm 1, Wardog 2, Yellow 13, etc.) or unique nicknames (Cipher, Edge, Heartbreak One) and many pilots have both.
• Nose Art: A staple of the series, from about Ace Combat 3 onwards. Shooting down certain enemy Ace Pilots allows you to slap their paint jobs onto your planes of the same model. Other special paint jobs were unlocked by completing certain plot missions. Ace Combat 6 also introduced downloadable custom paint jobs.
• Nuclear Weapons Taboo:
  • Subverted with the implicitly stated and sometimes detonated nuclear arsenal from various games. What's interesting about this is that while nukes exist, nuclear proliferation doesn't seem to. As such, nuclear weapons are seen as more frightening In-Universe than they are in Real Life, which is the reason The 'Verseexists in the first place.
• Occupiers out of Our Country: In most games, once you start to liberate enemy territories, you're likely to hear someone invoke this trope. The liberation of Directus in Ace Combat Zero is the most notable example. After you begin your fight against Belkan forces, the citizens of Directus decide to join in and fight back with whatever they can get their hands on. With you and Pixy covering the air, they take back the city by themselves.
  Civilian: Get out! Get the HELL out of our city!
• Oh, Crap!: Enemies have this reaction when your characters show up in later parts of the games. Your allies have this reaction when they get targetted by the local superweapon. The two words are explicitly dropped in X: Skies of Deception when your allies see that there's another Fenrir in Archelon Fortress trying to escape to Leasath and they can't do anything about it themselves.
  • Zero has a rather good example in the first Round Table mission if the player is up against the Rot Squadron.
    Final Rot pilot: Impossible! Am I the only one left?! Requesting backup!!
    • And in the penultimate mission:
    Enemy: He's coming.. the Demon Lord is coming here!
• Once a Season:
  • Ever since Ace Combat 5, it has apparently become a tradition to kill or almost kill off one of the player's wingmen. Since Zero, 6 and Assault Horizon always has the player flying with only one wingman, well..
  • Every main-series game since the fourth has included Mobius One's paint scheme for the F-22A and Yellow 13's paint scheme for the Su-37 or its nearest equivalent. Later games have added more character references, such as the Wardog/Razgriz and Zipang from 5 and Scarface One from 2.
  • And of course, tunnel flights, canyon flights and fights against humongous superweapons.
• One-Hit-Point Wonder: The player's plane on Ace difficulty, at least against missiles.
• One-Man Army: In the original Air Combat, Phoenix is literally the only one driving back the rebellion. In 2, Phoenix can invoke this by choosing to not hire a wingman. Deliberately invoked in 'Operation Katina' in 5, as Mobius 1 and Sky Eye are sent to fend off Erusean rebel forces. Galm 1 from Zero is eventually acknowledged as 'an indispensable component in (the) war'.
  Enemy: It's that Ustio mercenary, damn him! He's turning the tide of battle in their favor!
  Enemy: He can't be human!
  Enemy: He's like a demon..
  Ally: That kind of pilot.. they call a Demon Lord..
• One Nation Under Copyright: Electrosphere, where corporations have long superceded governments in economic and political control.
• Operation: [Blank]: Most missions have titles of this form displayed during the briefing; this is usually completely independent of the actual stage name. Exceptions include:
  • Operation Free Gracemeria in Ace Combat 6.
  • Ace Combat 5 has the Operation Desert Arrow mission, though the stage name omits the word 'Operation.' There is also Operation Desert Blitz, with the stage name being Desert Lightning, a lesser extent of this.
  • Operation Bunker Shot in Ace Combat 04.
• Orchestral Bombing: Later games in the series have orchestra for a lot of their music. Come the or certain boss battles, and Ominous Latin Chanting sets in as well.
• Orphaned Etymology: The aircraft names and designations are an example for the entire series, since they are real-world aircraft being used on a planet where the countries that manufactured and designated them do not exist. For example, the F-14 Tomcat is called such even though there was never an America to give it that specific name (the closest equivalent being Osea), but it could also have been the F-112 if the Tri-Service Aircraft Designation System of 1962 had not passed, and by extension every other non-fictional aircraft in the game, which received its name from either America, a European power, or NATO still hold their real-world designations despite being in a parallel world. It gets even more ridiculous when you consider that the game uses fictional manufacturers (such as North Osea Grunder Industries) that manufacture all sorts of planes, even those made by different countries, while still keeping their original designations. A special mention to the Mig-29A in Ace Combat 7, whose hangar description specifically mentions how it earned its real life nickname.
  Its nickname is 'Lastochka,' the Russian word for the swift-flying swallow.
• Outside-Context Problem: Z.O.E, or 'Zone of Endless' for the player's sake, first appeared in Ace Combat 2, and is given literally no explanation or acknowledgement. Its remake, Assault Horizon Legacy, acknowledges this mysterious enemy plane that sometimes shows up to challenge Phoenix, but still leaves Commander Olsen and everyone else confused as to just what the heck it is. There are vague hints about a secret Belkan program being developed in Zero and 5, but it isn't until 7 that the players learn that the Z.O.E are all advanced AI drones. In all of this, there's no in-game acknowledgement, mention, or discussion about 'Zone Of Endless' anywhere. It still remains something that only the players know about.
• Overshadowed by Awesome: The real-life planes are almost always outdone statistically by the game-original superfighters. Of course, unlocking them is also easier, making them more frequently used anyway. Besides, the fifth gen fighters certainly aren't lacking at all.
• Playable Epilogue: The games typically include the so-called 'Free Mission mode', where you can fly individual campaign missions out of order as often as you want on any difficulty. This mode (along with New Game+) is usually unlocked after completing the campaign on any difficulty and lets you use all hitherto unlocked planes and upgrades, in order to e.g. hunt down the remaining aces or improve your completion ranks. Ace Combat 7 averts this, by making Free Mission available right away.. which makes grinding, unlocking, and playing through the Campaign on the first playthrough with any plane on the aircraft tree possible to those who have the patience to do so.
• Point Defenseless:
  • AA guns usually aren't much threat on lower difficulties, much less able to take down your missiles and bombs, such that when 'high-performance' triple-A that can show up in X: Skies of Deception, the briefing and AWACS guy feel a need to emphasise it. Also, Sulejmani's Varcolac from Joint Assault mounts a rear-facing anti-missile gatling.
  • Assault Horizon averts this in a mission tasking you with destroying an enemy naval fleet, where their CIWS defenses actually are capable of shooting down your missiles, thus requiring you to coordinate with several pilots and launch enough ordnance to overwhelm those defenses. On the player's side, they can also destroy shoulder-fired SAMs with their guns in helicopter missions.
  • Infinity includes lasers mounted on UAVs (in the campaign) and a special gold-painted variant of the P-1112 Aigaion from 6 (in co-op), which could shoot down missiles launched within their attack range. Aegis vessels zig-zag this; in co-op they're as useless as ever, but in Naval Fleet Assault, they can shoot down missile-type weapons.. but not bombs, or even other air-to-ground weapons that work exactly like missiles.
• Pre Ass Kicking One Liner: '<player character>, engage.'
• Product Placement: Assault Horizon is brought to you by the US Air Force. 'It's not science fiction.'
• Radio Silence: A few mission across the series impose this for storyline reasons, sometimes combined with altitude restrictions or avoiding enemy radar. At most, this is just a break from your wingmen's chatter until you arrive where you need to be or are inevitably discovered early.
• Rare Vehicles: Many (real-world) flyable aircraft are either prototypes, technology demonstrators, or canceled projects that never made it into mass production.
  • Most egregious is the Aurora and every boss plane. Not to mention 'normally' (on any difficulty regardless of performance) flyable top-tier/endgame planes such as the 'S-37A' (04)/'S-32' (5)/Su-47 Berkut (Zero and 6).
    • The Su-47 and F-15 ACTIVE have it the worst in 04 - Erusea has enough of them that they're letting the Redshirt Army fly them in the penultimate mission, when only one of each currently exists in the real world.
    • Subverted in a sort of weird way in Zero: Gelb Squadron is the only encounter in the game where you're guaranteed to fight Su-37s. There are two of them in the squad, the same number built in real life. There are, however, two more named Su-37 pilots later in the game, but they only appear on Ace difficulty, and one of them (who may or may not be the future leader of the Yellow Squadron), only in the Knight Style.
  • Another offender is the F-14 Tomcat, which was retired in 2006, with a few planes going to museums and the rest getting scrapped. While most of the AC games were made before the retirement, Assault Horizon is particularly egregious offender since the game was made in 2011, is set in the near future, and one of the trailers shows an entire squadron of operational F-14s. Another possible offender the same game is the PAK FA, which at the time of the game's release is still in the testing phase, and only a few prototypes exist. Even after its supposed introduction to service in 2015, the year before Assault Horizon takes place, problems meant that the PAK FA was still relegated to testing until now.
  • Assault Horizon gets a similar subversion to the example from Zero with the Su-47 - while you can use it to your heart's content once you have access to it, there is not a single enemy anywhere in the campaign that is flying it.
• Real Life: Joint Assault for the PSP, Assault Horizon for the 360, PS3 and PC, and Infinity for PS3 all take place in real-world locations, though Infinity takes elements from the entire series.
• Reality Ensues: The overpowered-ness of the QAAMs can be interpreted as what happens when you put a nigh-undefeatable real-world heater from the modern day in a world where the standard missiles are overfed tabbies that can be shaken off without countermeasures simply by making a gentle turn.
• Recurring Boss: Most often a named enemy ace squadron plays this role, such as the Yellow Squadron in 04. A more minor example would be the Scinfaxi-class submarines in The Unsung War, as you end up fighting both in short order.
  • In 2 and its remake Assault Horizon Legacy, this happens with ZOE, who you encounter at certain intervals. Beast Squadron from AHL comes in twice, but only on a certain route.
• Red Baron:
  • Typically, as your skills become more and more recognized, you or your squadron get a nickname, referring to a plot point or squadron logo. For instance, Gryphus One from Ace Combat X becomes known as 'Nemesis' by the obviously uncreative enemies, and 'the Southern Cross' by allies, since the constellation is painted on your aircraft, there's the 'Ribbon' in 04, and the Razgriz squadron (alternately the Demons or Ghosts thereof) in 5. Possibly the hardest to top would be the 'Demon Lord of the Round Table' in Zero.
  • Possibly rivalling that, one enemy in the sixteenth mission refers to Mobius One as 'the Grim Reaper.'
  • And one of the minor allied pilots from Ace Combat 6 (e.g. one of the ones you can't unlock a profile about, but is still identified by name in subtitles) is literally the Red Baron, albeit named for the character from Namco's earlier arcade game Sky Kid (his two wingmen are Sky Kid, named after the game, and Blue Max, the other playable character from it).
  • It first applies to your wingman in Zero; Pixy already has the nickname 'Solo Wing' (he completed a mission and crash-landed his F-15C Eagle despite losing its right wing), he has a custom paint scheme (his new Eagle's right wing is painted red), and your opposition has already heard of him.
• Redshirt Army: The majority of allied pilots are considerably less capable than the PC.
• Religious and Mythological Theme Naming: Lots of it in ACZ. Also, Scinfaxi, Hrimfaxi, Arkbird, Grabacr, and Ofnir in AC5.
• The Remnant: Erusea does this not once but twice. Leasath also does this.
• Roboteching: The key ability of QAAMs; some cruise missiles also give you quite the spinny chase.
• Self-Plagiarism: The arcade game Mach Storm basically consists of the scripted DFM sequences in Assault Horizon stitched together in a full game. Infinity in turn is essentially taking iconic levels from previous games and turning them into four- to eight-player co-op missions, though for the latter it does have an original (if still Mythology Gag-filled) story and has many a Remixed Level.
• Sequel Escalation: Subverted by the superfighters, with the Falken being one of the first introduced and easily being the most over-the-top, though it wasn't playable until the fifth game (although it got a bit crazier by then). Later planes have at least looked more down to earth, with the CFA-44 looking more like a modern, fifth generation fighter.
• Sequential Boss: Every flying fortress mission is the series counts for this.
• Short-Range Long-Range Weapon: The missile ranges are below their real-world equivalents' (the standard missiles are consistently given a range of about 900 feet). The XLAA ones, in particular, are ridiculously short.
• Shrouded in Myth: Some of the player characters get this treatment.
• So Last Season: Zig Zagged with starting planes. See the article for the rundown. To summarize, your starting plane varies in effectiveness and reliability over the course of the game You mostly start out with either cheap F-4s or F-5s, in 6 you have a reliable F-16C that can reasonably carry you through the game, in 3 you have a Typhoon, a high-end plane.. for the other games that don't take place 20 Minutes into the Future, but for this one is woefully inadequate.
• Sorting Algorithm of Weapon Effectiveness: With few exceptions, the later a plane is available, the statistically superior it is. On the other hand, missiles and other special weapons don't get better on later planes.
• Space-Filling Empire: Osea, the largest country in Strangereal, occupies most of the continent of the same name; essentially everything west of Belka and Sapin, while Yuktobania is of similar scale on the Verusean continent. Assuming that Strangereal is the same size as Earth and that the map given in Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War is an equal-area projection (which seems likely, given that the unchanged continent of Antarctica is more in line with a Gall-Peters projection), Osea is about the size of Russia, India, and Mexico combined and Yuktobania is slightly smaller, at about the size of Russia, India, and South Africa combined. Both of these nations, fittingly, are the setting's superpowers, though Osea is the larger of the two. Compare to the Usean Continent, which is stated to have at least 18 different nations but is far smaller in size (albeit most of them are part of various alliances like the Federation of Central Usea and/or ISAF).
• Speed Run: Taking the fastest plane available through the enclosed-area Scrappy Levels at maximum power. Like taking 'Greased Lightning' from 2in the X-29 or 'Aces' from 5in the MiG-31.
• Spinventory: In almost every game, when selecting the plane, the camera will start rotating around the plane to give a full view. Some of them let you manually rotate the camera and look at the planes at your own leisure.
• The Squad: Mostly averted in 04 (you almost always have four wingmen flying with you, but none are explicitly named, and in the final mission it's subverted in that Mobius Squadron is really just Mobius One plus a squadron's worth of pilots in Raptors with his insignia), used in 5 ('Heartbreak One' Bartlett, Blaze, Edge, Chopper, and Archer), and it's pairs in 2 (Scarface 1/'Edge' or 'Slash', though only in certain missions.. and there're supposed to be other pilots in Scarface), Zero (Galm 1 'Cipher'/Galm 2 'Pixy' then PJ) and 6 (Garuda 1 'Talisman'/Garuda 2 'Shamrock').
• Squad Controls: Ace Combat 5, Ace Combat Zero, and Ace Combat 6 gave you control over your wingmen. Seeing how the game is about aerial combat, your options are usually 'Concentrate Fire', 'Disperse and Engage', and 'Cover Me'. You can also toggle permission to use special weapons. Unfortunately, in AC6, the controls were already simplified compared to ACZ and this feature seems to have been abandoned completely in later Ace Combat games (where the wingmen are completely AI-controlled).
• Stealth-Based Mission: 2, 3, 5 and X have missions that force you to fly below a certain altitude, avoid circles representing radar coverage, or both. 5 gets one odd version in an Escort Mission where you can fly through circles representing radar coverage just fine, but then the cargo plane you're escorting will follow you through it and promptly get blasted by friendly SAMs.
• Stone Wall: Bombers in the later games, which are absolute crap at air-combat and getting anywhere fast, but have unbeatable defense and anti-ground capabilities.
• Storming the Beaches: Many games have the player providing air support for an amphibious landing at some point. Examples include Operation Bunker Shot in 04, Lit Fuse in 5, and the Aenea Landing in 6.5 also has the player repel a landing in Front Line.
• Story Branching:
  • Two Ace Combat games included major story branching: Electrosphere and Skies of Deception. However, only the former had Multiple Endings, while in the latter, all branches converged for the final mission. Minor branching was present in other games, as well, but it usually availed to one or two mission-long branches, which converged back again into the linear storyline.
  • Ace Combat 2 has your allies launching two simultaneous operations against the enemy, 'Alphaville' and 'Bellissima', and lets the player decide which operation they wanted to support. It also had hidden missions that could be unlocked by destroying certain targets in specific missions, but which overall had no effect on the progression and could be skipped. Like Electrosphere there are also multiple endings, though they're all basically different versions of the same ending depending on whether you shoot down a recurring enemy every time he shows up and, if you do, whether you succeed in shooting down a cruise missile before it can impact with a city.
  • Ace Combat 5 branches off at two different times before converging back into the main story. Your wingman Chopper asks you a question in the middle of a mission and your Yes/No answer determines the choice. The questions he asks has nothing to do with anything relevant to the missions. Arcade Mode also has mission path that branches at two separate points, though it still sends you through the same number of missions per playthrough and the last level is the same for all four paths, other than the placement of enemies and whether the final encounter is four (top path) or six (every other path) X-02s; the paths are basically more of a difficulty select than actual branching.
  • Ace Combat Zero features three branching missions with three different paths, each being split between anti-air, anti-ground, and anti-air/ground missions, but this has little to no impact on the progression of the story. In a subtler way, the story also branches based on your Ace Style.
• Strictly Formula: To the point that two of the three PS2-era games even have the exact same number of missions. Ace Combat 5 initially follows much of 04's formula, but begins to diverge a little over halfway through.
• Superweapon: The series tries to include at least one per game. Many of them were built as a response to the Ulysses meteor that threatened Strangereal in 1994.
  • In Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies features two:
    • the Stonehenge was built as a series of rotating cannons capable of shooting down the Ulysses meteor and any other fragments from it. For the first half of the game, it serves as a long-range anti-air weapon against the ISAF forces that forms a perimeter that prevents them from advancing. It can shoot down any bombers attempting to get too close. One mission tasks you with destroying the solar farms that provide power to it, but then you have to avoid getting shot down by it by staying below a certain altitude and flying through a series of canyons just to escape its range.
    • Once Stongehenge was destroyed, the Eruseans fall back to the Megalith, which was capable of firing ballistic missiles anywhere across the Usean continent. Failure to blow it up before it activates is an instant game over.
  • Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War has the SOLG. It's a Kill Sat that can launch nukes. Should it lose contact from whoever is controlling it on the surface, it is programmed to fall from orbit and destroy a pre-determined city.
  • Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War has the Excalibur, a Wave Motion Gun that catches the allied forces off-guard when giant lasers start blasting at them from long distance. The assault to destroy it proved daunting, as it can still fire at anything approaching it only until they actually get within half a mile.
  • Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown features the Arsenal Birds, two gigantic AI-controlled airborne carriers that are able to dispense dozens of Attack Drones to do its fighting. They also have Deflector Shields that prevents damage from conventional weapons. All throughout the story, their arrival on the battlefield forces the Osean forces into retreating, because the two of them form a perimeter around the Space Elevator that is key to winning the war. It takes the final cannon from Stonehenge that wasn't destroyed in Ace Combat 4 to pierce through the shields and destroy one of them.
• Super Prototype: Most of the superfighters, though some of them are subversions.
• Theme Naming: The series loves doing this. Colors, animals, famous people, they've all been done.
  • Osean fighter squadrons are mainly named after fantasy elements, with Wardog being the exception.^* Between Ace Combat 5, Zero, and 7, there's the Razgriz, Golem, Skeleton, Basilisk, Cyclops, Salamander, Gargoyle, Wizard, Sorcerer, and Mage squadrons.
• With one special exception, all Osean naval vessels are named after birds. Examples include: Albatross, Kestrel, Kestrel II, Vulture, Egret, Crane, Pheasant, Ptarmigan, Hornbill, Shoehorn, Stork, Bunting, and Sunbird.
  • Erusean squadrons are named after birds. While they're known as the Yellow Squadron in Ace Combat 4, their official name is 'Aquila' (Eagle). This follows the precedent set after the death of Edgar Grint (Albireo One) in Ace Combat: Assault Horizon Legacy .
  • Belkan fighter squadrons are named after colors in German.
  • Chess Motifs. The callsigns of all named aces in the penultimate mission of Ace Combat Zero are the names of chess pieces in German and Russian.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill:
  • Getting hit by the Chandelier missiles in 6. There's a launcher with a barrel so big you can (and need to) fly a plane down it, and it fires a missile in timed intervals. It's worth mentioning that getting shot down by the Chandelier literally maxes out the Xbox 360's processing power! The amount of power needed to render the cannon's special effects when it fires combined with your plane disintegrating in the air drops the framerate down to about 3 frames per second. Overkill indeed.
  • On your side it's easy to single a target out for a full 'burst' of special missiles, heaters and gun rounds. Or drop a FAEB/LSWM/MPBM on a single ground target. It's wasteful to the max, but overkill man!
• Timed Mission: Every one. In the first two games this was represented by a fuel meter, making it slightly more plausible, though oddly enough RTB was almost never an issue and the meter depleted at the same rate regardless of what you did.
• Title Drop: The EU non-numeric titles Distant Thunder, Squadron Leader and The Belkan War all show up in their respective games. There's also Shattered Skies — both a dialogue phrase and the name of AC04's eighth mission and as a dialogue while selecting a plane for the last mission. The Unsung War and Zero also serve as the names for their respective games' final missions and their Ominous Latin Chanting final themes, the latter also showing up in a dialogue phrase during it.
• Truth in Television: Most of the planes and how they perform too.
• Try Not to Die: On occasion. 5 and Zero in particular punctuate the briefing for their respective final missions by saying that any outcome other than you returning safely is unacceptable. Zero also has a humorous variant, where Pixy tells PJ in their first meeting that, if he gets shot down, he should crash somewhere where Pixy can't see it.
• Unlockable Difficulty Levels: In the older titles, unlocking the ultimate Ace difficulty mode requires you to finish the campaign at least once on Normal or Hard.
• Unusable Enemy Equipment: There are some fighter-ish planes you can't acquire for your collection, and non-fighter types i.e. bombers^note , recon, and AEW&C are wholly unusable. The Harrier, SR-71, Tu-95 Bear, and B-52 are common examples. The enemy controlled variations of the FALKEN in 2, Morgan in Zero, and Nosferatu in 6 all have special features that the player versions never had, although in the FALKEN's case this is turned on its head by giving the playable version something else entirely that the NPC version didn't have.
• Videogame Caring Potential: There's satisfaction to be gained from helping the Redshirt Air Force out rather than just gunning for the targets and leaving them to die. 6 rewards this by giving you extra points, and allowing you to request fire support from said allies.
• The War Sequence: Several missions in the games really drive home the point that you are fighting a war. A case of Real Life Writes the Plot with 6, as a better graphics engine allows for nearly every mission to have this scale.
• Wave Motion Gun: The series has several superweapons that qualify, including the XR-900's Heavy Laser from Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere, the Arkbird's laser cannon, Excalibur from Ace Combat Zero, and the ADF-01 FALKEN's Tactical Laser System. The TLS returns in both Zero onboard the FALKEN and the ADFX-01 'Morgan' (which has only half the number of shots), and has a spiritual successor in Ace Combat 6 with the Electromagnetic Launcher (EML) onboard the CFA-44 'Nosferatu.'
• Weapon of Choice: Though you can choose any plane available in the game and are encouraged to choose different planes for different missions, each game generally has the main pilot have a 'canon' plane they preferred, which is featured on the boxart.
  • Mobius One and his Raptor, even though it's only available from the penultimate mission of Shattered Skies. It later returns in Ace Combat 5 as his plane for Operation Katina. The F-22 is also the 'canon' plane of Gryphus One in X, William Bishop/Warwolf One in Assault Horizon, and Reaper in Infinity.
  • Almost all of the promotional material for Zero shows Cipher and Pixy in F-15Cs. This gets to the point that you can't even tell Pixy to fly anything else, unlike the squadmates in 5 or 6.
  • The official planes of the Wardog/Razgriz squadron are F-14A Tomcats. Unlike other examples, this is actually justified in the game's story. After a certain mission you're immediately given four F-14As for free and are required to play that specific plane for the next mission because you're limited to carrier based aircraft due to being labeled as traitors by your country. This later gets a Mid-Season Upgrade into the F-14D Super Tomcat, which then becomes Blaze's official plane in all future appearances.
  • Phoenix from the first two games has had three canonical planes. In the original release he used the Su-35E Flanker. In the remake, it was changed to the F-22 Raptor. In either game, it's 'canon' that Scarface Squadron gets a Mid-Season Upgrade to the fictional XFA-27 towards the last missions of the game.
  • Talisman from 6 is shown with the F-15E Strike Eagle, while his wingmate Shamrock (plus most of the Emmerian Air Force) is shown with the F-16C Fighting Falcon, both excellent multirole aircraft. This matches with the game's mission operations, as every mission in the game has you going around the map and supporting all your allies with many different objectives.
• We Do the Impossible: The player's reputation.
• When All You Have Is a Hammer..: Your offensive options in the first two games consisted entirely of short-ranged missiles and an even-shorter-ranged Vulcan cannon. Electrosphere allowed you to swap those out for weapons with differing powers and ranges, and every game after that added special weapons such as bombs.
• Wingman: Right from the beginning, with the exception of Ace Combat 04. They were a complete waste of money in the first couple games. Quiet wastes of money.
• With This Herring:
  • Usually (but not always) you start off with a dinky outdated plane. May be justified considering you generally start out as an unproven rookie and your army needs to come Back from the Brink.
  • Double Subverted in Electrosphere, where you start with a sleek, snazzy 2003 Eurofighter Typhoon.. in 2040, when fusion-powered super planes equipped with superpowerful lasers are under development.
• Wolfpack Boss: All the time against enemy ace squadrons.
• Worthy Opponent: Due to the reputation of the various player characters, the enemy's top aces all wish to fight you.
• You Can't Thwart Stage One: The final missions of Ace Combat 04 and 5, twice in Zero (the Belkans deploying nuclear weapons and V2) and the start of 6. Not helped by how difficult it is to even try thwarting stage one.