Nightmare Fuel / Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies

• The opening cutscene begins with the storyteller boy talking about how years before the war began, an asteroid called Ulysses had past by, and dozens of meteors rained down on the planet.
  • Several missions take place in areas that were struck by meteors, showing just how much damage Ulysses had done to the continent of Usea.
  • The final mission, Operation Judgement Day, has fragments from Ulysses being used as kinetic weapons against Mobius Squadron: while making for an awesome backdrop, it also shows how potentially apocalyptic Megalith was.
  • In order to minimize the damage that would have been done by Ulysses, the Useans had banded together, and built the Stonehenge Railgun battery to intercept and destroy the asteroid fragments. Then the war began, and the Eruseans started using Stonehenge to secure aerial supremacy over the majority of the Usean Continent.
• The cutscenes in general manage to paint a horrific picture of life under Erusean occupation without showing any violence. Your own language is silenced, foreign soldiers taking over law enforcement, telecommunications ceasing, gasoline rationing, etc. The still images allow you to have your own imagination of what happens.
• The narrator's uncle resorts to drowning his sorrows with alcohol because the rationing put his taxi service out of business (not to mention the deaths of the narrator's parents, one of whom is likely his sibling). When he finally disappears (whether on his own or detained by the Eruseans), the narrator is all alone.
• You get a taste of how ruthless the Eruseans are in "Escort". Mobius-1 is dispatched to fly escort for a pair of airliners carrying defecting Erusean scientists, and from the dozens of aircraft sent to intercept the airliners, they do not want them getting to ISAF custody alive. You can hear the panic in Flight 701's voice as she pleads with the Erusean fighters:
  Flight 701: This is Air Ixiom Flight 701. We're carrying civilians! Don't shoot! I repeat, there are civilians on board! Hold your fire!