Video Game / Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown

Does the color of the sky mean anything special to you? It does to me. A hell of a lot. When I close my eyes, the sky in my dreams... is a deep, dark blue.

"Trigger, your call sign is Spare 15. Consider it your prisoner number for the air."

Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown is the twelfth game in the Ace Combat series that's set in Strangereal, and the eighteenth overall.^note Thirteenth in the Strangereal continuity and nineteenth overall if you count Ace Combat: Assault Horizon Legacy as separate from Ace Combat 2. The first numbered title in more than a decade since 2007's Ace Combat 6, Ace Combat 7 is the first game of the series to feature PlayStation VR, with a noted focus on the use of volumetric clouds and in-game weather conditions as gameplay mechanics.

Three years have passed since the last major continental war, and now the Kingdom of Erusea, formerly the Federal Republic of Erusea, has come into conflict with the Osean Federation. Princess Rosa Cossette D'Elise claims that Osea has violated her kingdom's sovereignty by forcing the construction of their Space Elevator on their territory, and has declared war in retaliation. You take on the role of Mage 2, codename Trigger. After a rescue mission goes wrong, Trigger finds himself being thrown into the 444th Fighter Squadron—aka the Spare Squadron—composed of other prisoners, where he must clear his name while keeping Osea safe. The game is set between May and November 2019 of the Strangereal calendar, taking place a year before the Leasath-Aurelia war in October 2020.

Announced near the end of 2015, the first trailer, found here, shows an Osean F-22 Raptor chasing after an Erusean Su-30M2 as they approach a space elevator called the "Lighthouse". A second trailer, showcased at the PlayStation Experience 2016, provides more exposition, establishing that the two countries are at war. See here for the E3 2017 trailer, and here for the Gamescom 2018 trailer. The game was released on January 18, 2019 on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, and February 1st for PC; the first multi-platform release since Ace Combat: Assault Horizon. Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown: Deluxe Edition is set to release on the Nintendo Switch on July 11, 2024.

Season Pass and Downloadable Content

• The Season Pass offers 3 DLC planes (The ADF-01 FALKEN, ADFX-01 Morgan, and ADF-11F Raven), 3 additional missions, and an in-game music player that is exclusive to the pass. Players who bought the game as part of the Strangereal Edition version have immediate access to the player. DLC 1: "Unexpected Visitor" was released on September 25th, 2019. It takes place 2 days after Mission 13 - "Bunker Buster" in the story. DLC 2: "Anchorhead Raid" released on October 23rd, and DLC 3: "Ten Million Relief Plan" on November 27th. The official DLC debut trailer is here in Japanese and here in English. The Season Pass trailer is seen here.
  • DLC Mission 01, "Unexpected Visitor," introduces OIA agent David North, who has discovered the location of the Alicorn, a massive Erusean submarine aircraft carrier with the strike power of an entire fleet and, most alarmingly, WMD capabilities. Anxious to capture the Alicorn to use as a bargaining chip against the Eruseans in peace negotiations, Osean high command tasks Trigger's squadron to assist the operation. But the captain of the Alicorn is much more than he seems... and may have an agenda of his own.

  • DLC Mission 02, "Anchorhead Raid", is, as the name suggests, a raid on the Erusean port city of Anchorhead, with the goal of crippling Erusea's consolidated naval forces. Not only that, but they receive reports that Captain Matias Torres himself is bringing the Alicorn to Anchorhead (ostensibly to join the Erusean naval forces), providing another opportunity to stop the super-submarine before it causes even more damage. The LRSSG sets out once again, aiming to hobble the Erusean Navy and sink the Alicorn in one fell swoop, but treachery follows their every step, and enemies lurk in places they least expect.

  • DLC Mission 03, "Ten Million Relief Plan", serves as the conclusion to the three-mission DLC story arc. Torres plans on using the Alicorn's weaponry to devastate the Osean capital city of Oured. Trigger's squadron conducts a desperate hunt in the waters off southwestern Usea to find and destroy the Alicorn before Torres and his crew can kill a million people with it, and Torres does not intend to go down without a fight. With time running out, our heroes desperately chase after the mad captain, but there's nothing more dangerous than a cornered lunatic...

• 25th Anniversary Original Aircraft Series — Released on October 28th, 2020. Adds the CFA-44 Nosferatu, ASF-X Shinden, and XFA-27 to the roster, as well as more plane skins and emblems.
• 25th Anniversary Experimental Planes Series — Released on April 28th, 2021. Adds the F-15 S/MDT, F-16XL, and FB-22 Strike Raptor, as well as more skins and emblems.
• 25th Anniversary Cutting-edge Aircraft Series — Released on November 22nd, 2021. Adds the F/A-18F Super Hornet Block III, F-2A Super Kai, and MiG-35D Super Fulcrum as playable aircraft, as well as more skins and emblems.
• Top Gun: Maverick Aircraft Set — Released on May 26th, 2022 as a Crossover with the release of the film. Adds the DarkStar, two F/A-18E Super Hornets, two F-14A Tomcats, and the "5th Generation Fighter"^note The movie's official designation for an advanced Su-57 from the film as playable aircraft, as well as Top Gun-themed skins and emblems.

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Can you hear me, troper with the three strikes?

Tropes A to M

• Acceptable Breaks from Reality: Most airplanes actually cannot fly straight up; their "thrust-to-weight ratio" is too low. But implementing this would run the risk of making the final mission Unintentionally Unwinnable. So the game fudges the physics in the name of fun.
• Accidental Murder:
  • Trigger is accused of shooting down Harling's plane while going after some drones which were harassing him, which gets him sent to a penal squadron. However, it's later revealed that Trigger didn't fire the missile which killed Harling. Unbeknownst to everyone at the time, Erusea had gained the ability to hack into the Osean satellite-based IFF systems, allowing them to make their drones appear on radar as Osean allied fighters. One of said disguised drones was deployed into the battle around the ISEV and managed to shoot down Harling before making its retreat, leaving Trigger—the allied unit in closest proximity to Harling at the time—to take the fall.
  • After Erusean drones spoof Osean IFF signals and Bandog hastily redesignates everyone not formed up around Trigger as hostile, Count shoots down Full Band due to his IFF designating him as an enemy. It's implied that Bandog did this on purpose (Count certainly believes so), given Full Band spent much of the mission talking about some highly-sensitive data he'd gleaned and some later revelations regarding Osea's war plan.
• Ace Custom:
  • An inevitable result of the plane customization system is that your plane can significantly outperform its baseline specs. Insofar as aesthetics, Trigger himself has two: The first is his custom emblem of a wolf clutching a revolver in its jaws, and the second, gained during his stay with the 444th, is three white "strikes" across his tailfin(s), which are later appropriated into a set of three jagged claw marks when Trigger joins the LRSSG, and earn him the enemy nickname "Three Strikes."
  • Mihaly's Su-30SM is heavily modified, eliminating the second seat in favor of a system that automates most of the Guy in Back's tasks and records Mihaly's flight data in great detail. It also displays extreme maneuverability. His two-seat X-02S Strike Wyvern boasts similar automation and flight recording enhancements.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The drones utilized by the Erusean military begin to go rogue following the collapse of Usea's satellite network, as the strategic AI that controls them does not know when to cease its function. Schroeder first notices this when the F/A-18 drone escorts of Cossette's transport stop obeying his orders over Anchorhead Bay.
  • ALEX, David North's AI assistant in the three DLC missions, appears to be completely benign though, capable of sassing North when his train of thought strays into "trash" territory and even coining her own variant of the game's oft-repeated refrain of "Stick with Trigger and you'll make it".
• Airborne Aircraft Carrier: The two Arsenal Birds built in concert with the Lighthouse are a more thought-through example than most. They are entirely uncrewed and only carry shorter-range Attack Drones instead of conventional fighter jets. They stay aloft perpetually, given thrust by electric propeller engines that are remotely beamed power from the Lighthouse itself. As the top of the Lighthouse terminates in geosynchronous orbit, this effectively gives the Arsenal Birds a range covering approximately half the planet if they ever interpreted their programming to send them elsewhere beyond Erusea.
• Airstrike Impossible:
  • As usual for the series, though it's exaggerated here. The 444th Fighter Squadron is composed of expendable convicts that the Osean Air Force does not hesitate to send into suicidal battles with impossible odds and almost zero hope to survive, including an intense air-to-ground operation in a series of cloudy valleys while under the watch of a powerful satellite-based anti-air defense system.
  • In Mission 6, Trigger can fly into a tunnel that cuts through a hill, resulting in a Lampshade Hanging conversation where Bandog assumes that Trigger crashed until a Spare pilot points out that he invoked this trope.
  • As part of Strider Squadron, Trigger has to perform a high-speed canyon run while dodging searchlights. How they don't just hear you coming is anyone's guess.
  • Finally taking out the second Arsenal Bird by hitting its rectenna is a minor example; the craft is flying at a relatively low altitude and the only way to reliably hit the rectenna is from directly below as it's shielded by the craft's hull on all other sides. You'll need to skim the water whilst watching your distance to the Bird, then pull up and snap off missiles as you pull away to avoid both stalling and crashing into the Arsenal Bird itself.
  • The final mission features the most intense tunnel run in the series' history: a supersonic chase through a tunnel that makes the tunnel under Sudentor from Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War look positively spacious. The tunnels are barely wider than some of the larger planes, even small bends become hard to correct for, and gates abruptly close in front of you. You then have to pull a tight bank in an enclosed circular underground chamber, avoid crashing into one of the pillars in the middle, and fly through the hollow space elevator tower to escape. Here, it's basically a vertical tunnel mission, where your plane will be affected by the wind and gravity as you avoid elevator pods and walls until you finally reach the exit, ascending over 12 kilometers completely vertically.
  • There are a number of short tunnels and underpasses in the game. Flying through them nearly always spawns a named ace.
• A.K.A.-47:
  • Erusea's ubiquitous MQ-99 UCAV is an exact copy of the EADS Barracuda.
  • The MQ-101 drone carried by the Arsenal Birds is a barely-modified recreation of the X-47B. The only difference is that the wingtips of the MQ-101 are slightly canted upwards.
• A Lighter Shade of Grey:
  • Osea is heavily implied to have the same real-world political problems of modern-day (as of 2019) America: harsh laws targeting the poor in what's heavily implied to be a scheme for cheap penal labour, an over-budgeted trigger-happy military that inflicts collateral damage wherever it goes in the name of "freedom", neo-colonialist imperialist tendencies dressed up as international aid that wind up screwing over other countries' economies, and an overcrowded prison system. It still isn't the aggressor in the Lighthouse War, and it turns out Harling genuinely wanted the ISEV as an international effort for all countries, and not for Osea to gain the upper hand in the space race. On top of this, it's stated the Royal Family was goaded (and in the younger family members' case, groomed) into imperialist aggression and warhawking for Erusea's own imperialist tendencies by military officers who wanted world domination at best, and at worst, total genocide like Torres.
  • When the Erusean Civil War breaks out, both sides commit massive war crimes: the Conservatives begin shooting Belkans on sight, even plain-ol' civilians and fully naturalized soldiers, which accidentally tips the war in Osea's favour by causing a key officer in Erusea's frame-up of Trigger to defect to Osea... and then you have the Radicals, who want to dominate the world and outright massacre civilians leaving their war zones (including children) regardless of nationality for being "cowards" who aren't reveling in the glory of war, up to trying to kill the Princess herself for daring to lead a refugee convoy.
• All There in the Manual: Several instances in the 2019 edition of the Aces at War: A History book included with the Aces at War physical edition of Ace Combat 7 for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
  • AWACS Argus was fed false information about Osean Captain Karl being an impostor, which he believed, causing him to order the destruction of the helicopter containing Karl and Erusean general Edouard Labarthe. An Osean F-16 complies with said orders and shoots down the chopper, killing both men.
  • It's implied in-game that Spare Squadron's missions have an additional motive, as several convicts notice the 444th keeps encountering Erusean drones. In addition, Mission 11's briefing officer mentions the loss of many pilots in order to find an opening in Erusea's auto-intercept drone network. A section of the book on the Lighthouse War confirms this was part of the Osean strategy, which established both the LRSSG for long-range strikes on Erusea's capital and used Spare Squadron to test the auto-intercept network for weaknesses.
  • What were the supply ships launched in Mission 17 carrying? The book reveals that the supply ships launched from Tyler Island's mass driver contained ammunition and fuel for the MQ-101s, as well as engine lubricant and munitions (such as Helios missiles) for the Arsenal Birds.
  • The "After the Blue Dove" short story in Aces at War explains what exactly Nagase was doing on the Pilgrim One space mission: Osean astronomers detected a second asteroid on a collision course with the planet, and given the damage done twenty years ago not only Ulysses but all the weapons intended to destroy it, they arranged for a secret mission to send a team of astronauts to destroy or divert the asteroid instead, which ended up being the Pilgrim One mission, and Nagase was selected to be the ship's pilot.
• All Your Base Are Belong to Us:
  • The ISEV^note (International Space Elevator) is occupied by the Eruseans at the outset of the war. The nearby city of Selatapura, which seceded from Erusea, is also taken.
  • The LRSSG hijack an important Erusean base under cover of night via a heavily-guarded winding canyon.
  • In a "heroic" example, the LRSSG later are forced to take over an old Erusean castle that was housing both Erusean conservatives (read: anti-war soldiers trying to survive) and refugees to resupply for their final battle against the Loyalists at the Space Elevator.
• Alpha Strike: During the climax of Operation Daredevil, Osean and Erusean forces, from bombers to warships and every air squadron available, fire everything they have at the final Arsenal Bird. The attack fails when the Arsenal Bird activates its APS barrier and No-Sells every single warhead coming at it, before crippling the navy and most of the air force. It's only when Cossette shuts down the shield that Strider Squadron has a real chance at taking down the airborne carrier once and for all.
  • Also possible to the player if they select any of the multi-AAMs. Firing a bunch of them at a single target and immediately following them with two standard missiles will often result in more incoming warheads than the soon-to-be-disassembled bandit knows how to handle. This is an efficient way to take out anyone in Sol Squadron... provided you don't miss.
• And There Was Much Rejoicing: Allowing Erusean bombers to destroy the airbase (and thus kill McKinsey) in Mission 5 earns you a mission failure, but also makes everyone in Spare Squadron cheer. Given that McKinsey is ostensibly the most hated character in the game, it comes as nothing short of cathartic.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Checkpoints retain your score, and if you haven't taken any damage prior to a checkpoint, retain that as well if you go down afterwards (or manually restart from them), making them a huge frustration-saver on a No-Damage Run, a machine guns-only run, or S rank attempts. As an added layer of frustration relief, restarting from a checkpoint restores all of your ammo. The only drawback is that your overall mission time keeps ticking when you restart from a checkpoint, even if there haven't actually been any yet.
  • There is a significant first-time completion bonus on missions that helps make sure you can afford a high-end plane on your first playthrough, even if you're struggling to get rank bonuses and thus offsetting the Unstable Equilibrium.
  • There is an option to reduce Collision Damage resulting from low-angle/speed impacts with the ground.
  • Running out of standard missiles won't completely screw you over, since they will keep reloading anyway but at a much slower rate than normal.
  • Any medal that does not specifically state a difficulty requirement can be done on any difficulty, even easy.
  • Mihaly's EML can't take you down in a single hit. So long as you've taken less than a certain amount of damage, it will only take you to 99%, no matter how much damage you'd taken before. It's even Lampshaded by Mihaly, who notes that the shot "partially missed", and if you had been shot down immediately, it wouldn't be much of a fight.
  • Using the target designator in Mission 13 does not violate the requirements for the machine guns-only medal, so long as it is only used to destroy the ballistic missile silos. Though, alternatively, they can be ignored entirely, which merely results in more missiles to shoot down in the second stage of the mission, rather than an immediate failure.
  • In Missions 16 and 17, holding down the target button will help identify unknown targets from different directions and from further away, especially in the clear HUD view which lets you zoom in on a target with that function. Your allies will eventually identify unknowns on their own if given enough time.
• Anyone Can Die: This game has a noticeably higher major character body count than previous games in the series, which is especially evident when you join the expendable 444th Fighter Squadron. By the end of the game, you and Count are the only named survivors of said squadron, and other allied squadrons don't fare much better either. Ex-President Vincent Harling returns only to be killed off, and even Princess Rosa's adorable dog is killed!
• The Alliance: The International Union Peacekeeping Force, which consists of Osea and countries in southeast Usea.
• Arc Welding: While most Ace Combat games have standalone stories with some Continuity Nods here and there, Ace Combat 7 has plot points connected to many games in the series, mainly Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies and Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War. Erusea and Osea, two major countries from the two games, finally go to war against each other directly, and the motivations of both factions' leaders are tied to the aftermath of the conflicts that happened in their own games. Princess Cossette wants to protect Erusea's sovereignty from a potential threat posed by Osea's space elevator because she doesn't want to see her country fall for the second time. The space elevator itself is also the brainchild of then-Osean President Vincent Harling, who envisioned it to be a symbol of unity and a bridge for mankind to reach into outer space after the Circum-Pacific War ended, and a replacement for the fallen Arkbird (which was built for the same purpose and, just like the space elevator, exploited for war). Belkans still looking to avenge their country after the events of Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War are once again revealed to be the root of the conflict, manipulating Erusea into going to war by providing them with advanced AI technology to create a drone army derived from the Zone of Endless project from Ace Combat 2 (and slightly expanded upon in its Video Game Remake, Ace Combat: Assault Horizon Legacy). Said drone army proves to be so advanced, it's implied that it paved the way for the rise of A.I. pilots in Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere as well. Mihaly's advanced G-suit that he gets halfway through the game to assist him with flying shares a lot of qualities with the COFFIN system utilized in Electrosphere, making it a likely predecessor to COFFIN]].
• Arc Words:
  • "Can you hear me?", which gains a new meaning after the Battle of Farbanti. At first, it reflects how in an era where information flows uninterrupted all the time, being cut off for even the shortest moment can have massive consequences. After the communications blackout, it's a plea to reach out to allies in a war where nobody can differentiate friend from foe anymore.
  • According to a Famitsu interview with the project leads, "Dark Blue", both as actual spoken words and as a color motif. If Avril is in a scene, there are good odds that she'll say the words. Furthermore, the game is functionally bookended by the term, with Avril's opening monologue introducing the concept and the final mission being titled "Dark Blue".
  • "Maintain element." Almost exclusively said by squadron leaders to keep their wingmen in formation. Planes that separate from the squadron are often hunted down by predatory opponents.
  • "Stick with Trigger and you'll make it" becomes a recurring line. The SP Missions hammer it home with ALEX pointing out that, for every mission where Trigger was present and where his fellow pilots stayed near him, the survival rates of said pilots skyrocketed compared to HQ's predictions.
  • "Dumbass". The moniker is used by and appended to numerous characters in the story, most prominently Trigger. It's even one of the unlockable nicknames the player can use in multiplayer mode.
  • "Salvation" for the SP missions, used by Matias Torres and the Alicorn's crew as justification for their actions.
• Army of Thieves and Whores:
  • Osea's 444th Fighter Squadron is a penal unit whose members have been convicted of severe crimes, with their commanding officer indicating that he can decide whether they live or not. Hell, even their AWACS insults them!
  • During the chaos on Tyler island, Avril heard a rumor that another penal squadron managed to get into the air and were shooting down Osean fighters as payback for being locked up.
• Armor-Piercing Question:
  • On Tyler Island, Avril takes a moment to rub salt in Princess Cossette's wound after she experiences that War Is Hell firsthand.
  Avril: You see... I used to listen to your broadcasts, Your Royal Highness. Just what did you see here?
  • Ionela gives ones to native Belkan and Grey Men successor Dr. Schroeder at the drone factory.
  Ionela: Is this about Erusea? Or about Belka?
• Arrow Cam: As is the norm for the Ace Combat series, missiles can be watched in flight by holding the missile button.
• Artificial Brilliance: Invoked with the Arsenal Bird. Any attempt to destroy it from a long distance is met with swarms of drones Taking the Bullet. If you fly in closer, the drones will simultaneously target you and spam missiles that will eat up and get past your flares, whilst the Arsenal Bird itself will also harass you with volleys of missiles from its AAM launchers. Flying below wing level to avoid the AAMs? The underside is studded with close-range defensive weapons (either machineguns for the first, or pulse lasers for the second) to make your life hell. Dare to attack the second one head on, especially from below? It'll slice you to ribbons with its main laser turret. You know, the one that was making surgical cuts on warships like they were made out of butter.
• Artificial Stupidity: Invoked—the autonomous drones have fittingly inhuman agility, but their systems aren't as flexible as a real pilot and they have exploitable quirks to their behavior. (This is integrated into the actual gameplay; almost every drone encountered has a nasty habit of flying straight ahead after firing on you, making them much easier to hit if you can seize the opportunity.) As a result, as the war goes on, Erusea's drones start to suffer higher and higher loss rates, which leads Mihaly to take back to the skies and provide newer and better flight data for them.
  • Also seen in the penultimate mission of the game: shooting down the human pilots in command of drone wingmen will cause the drones to "lag" and fly straight without a leader for a short time, making them easy targets for the player.
• Artistic License – Biology: In the opening cutscene, Avril claims an Osean fighter and the Erusean drone it was chasing "must have been doing thirty Gs at least". Even an extremely fit and well-trained individual wearing a G-suit would succumb to G-LOC and black out by 15 Gs. The F-15C's airframe also has a limit of 9 Gs; anything above that would risk it breaking apart in midair. Of course, given that the aircraft aren't actually shown doing particularly impressive maneuvers, Avril may have simply been engaging in some hyperbole.
• Artistic License – Ships:
  • During the mission "Fleet Destruction", if you sink the Erusean aircraft carrier Njörðr, her crew mentions the catapults becoming inoperable, despite Njörðr being a Kuznetsov-class carrier—a STOBAR "ski jump" design with no catapults in the first place.
  • At the end of Mission 19, you land on the (presumably Nimitz-class equivalent) aircraft carrier Admiral Andersen to rearm, repair and resupply prior to the final mission. The problem is that the carrier is stated to have run aground and been abandoned at sea weeks if not months prior to the mission, but Osea somehow finds enough of a crew to reactivate it and begin flight ops within 24 hours. At the bare minimum, you'd need at least a day to get the reactors started up again if you bypassed every safety check (and thus risked serious damage to the engineering spaces/crew if you messed anything up), not to mention all the other vital equipment for flight ops. Also, you'd need at least 1000 crew members^note (a normal carrier has close to 5000) working non-stop and knowing exactly what to do, or significantly more if they were less seasoned and stopping to eat and sleep.
• Artistic License – Law: Assuming Osea has a military court system similar or identical to the US's, Avril, a civilian mechanic, should never have been transferred to a military penal base, which is strictly for already enlisted personnel, regardless of whether or not she broke "wartime aviation laws". Even if she was flying a plane not properly equipped with a transponder, that would fall under the jurisdiction of federal courts (more specifically the Osean equivalent of the FAA), not the military, even in wartime and especially considering this all occurred over the Osean homeland. Of course, there are implications that this was all deliberate, to cover up the fact that an Osean military aircraft engaged and downed a civilian aircraft without attempting to signal or contact the pilot, which is itself a war crime in real life.
• Ascended Glitch: The August 2020 update, which added several skins in collaboration with the United States Armed Forces, had a bug where the Red Devils F/A-18F skin would show up as a glowing blue-white instead of the proper skin design. This was popular and amusing, but was quickly patched away. Later, with the game's second anniversary update that added several previous player character skins, a Crow Team F-16C skin, a Ridgebacks Team ASF-X Shinden II skin, UPEO skins for the Typhoon and Su-37, a glowing skin was also introduced for the X-02S Strike Wyvern that replicates the old glowing glitch at all times.
• Asshole Victim: Full Band spends much of his air time mocking slain comrades right after they bite it, being a Dirty Coward, and bragging about having classified intel that could have jeopardized the Stonehenge op. While Count doesn't like it, it's no big loss when he's accidentally killed by Count.
• Attack Drone: The presence and threat of unmanned aircraft is the central theme of the story. The Arsenal Bird and its 80 UCAVs are only the tip of the iceberg.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • 8AAMs; they can lock multiple missiles onto a single target, which looks cool, but is incredibly wasteful, as very few targets can survive a single special missile of any sort. Fortunately, after an update, 8AAMs tend to come with much higher payloads than 6AAMs or 4AAMs, mitigating how easy it was in the release version to waste them all on only a few planes. They also have very poor lock-on range even with upgrades, so by the time you're close enough to a large group of enemies to lock on and fire, said group will likely have scattered. The only time where it could actually be useful is against a large airborne enemy with lots of targets on it, namely an Arsenal Bird.
  • 8AGMs have all the problems of their air-to-air counterparts (except, of course, against ground targets instead of air targets) but come in smaller payloads, not having received the payload buff 8AAMs received. While situationally useful against hard targets like Aegis Ashore installations and warships, they're usually less useful than the less flashy but more efficient, more common, and more plentiful 4AGMs.
  • The F-104C Starfighter's Guided Rocket Launcher (GRKT) locks onto ground targets and fires an entire salvo of homing rockets that strike with pinpoint accuracy no matter how much you're moving around. The weapon is quite powerful at overwhelming CIWS and destroying ships and Aegis Ashores, but long range air-to-ship missiles are more efficient and generally have a higher ammo count. The toughest reasonably common ground targets in the game are tanks and air defense tanks, which both take only two normal missiles to destroy, making this a strong case of No Kill like Overkill.
  • The Integrated Electronic Warfare System (IEWS) on the ADFX-01 Morgan, XFA-27, and CFA-44 Nosferatu disrupts enemy missile targeting while enhancing that of you and your allies. In the campaign mode, there are very few instances on any difficulty where you would need such defenses, and it doesn't affect your allies at all. Multiplayer is a different story altogether.
  • The Tactical Laser System (TLS) packs a powerful punch, but is strictly boresighted (denying you the ability to lead your target like with a conventional gun), can't penetrate clouds, and requires you to face your target while you fire, which means you can't maneuver away from enemy missiles. Without the ability to lead your target (unless you're very dexterous), you also risk not doing enough damage against smaller targets or just plain missing them. Even when using it against big targets like the Arsenal Birds, their countermeasures will ensure you'll have to break off or get shot down.
  • Post-stall maneuvers allow you to slow down suddenly and force the enemy to overshoot, and look cool while doing it. Unfortunately, to initiate a PSM, you have to be flying very slowly (under 500 km/h), which makes you an easy target. It's mainly useful as a last-ditch escape if you have no momentum for anything else.
  • The DarkStar from the Top Gun: Maverick aircraft set is a futuristic, sleek-looking, and very powerful stealth craft with a design worthy of the original aircraft that Project Aces created themselves, but it has some obvious drawbacks.
    • Don't fly it from inside the cockpit view. The plane only has two viewports to the sides, and the in-game cockpit adds a third to the roof for the player's sake, because looking out directly ahead would otherwise give you nothing but a giant X obscuring your field of vision.
    • It has the highest straight-line speed in the game, but handles only marginally better than a beached whale, making it a royal pain in any close-range, high-maneuverability dog fight or anything requiring course correction, like the final flight to ascend from the Lighthouse's core. Don't even think about dogfighting in the clouds, as the lasers that replace the machine gun are useless in clouds.
  • The ADF-11F Raven, also a futuristic fighter and is the very same airplane that you fight in mission 19. It comes with a pulse laser as its primary weapon, giving it near hit-scan capabilities right off the bat. One of its secondary weapons are deployable UAVs, which can score hits on anything, including the very ADF-11F drones you fight. With all this it comes with a couple of major drawback: it's not as manueverable in your hands and it has a rather large hit box, making you a rather easy target. The latter is extremely noticeable in the tunnel flying sequence in Mission 19, where if you so much as look left or right, the plane collides with the tunnel and explodes.
• Back for the Dead: Former Osean president Vincent Harling, in a mission that serves as the Call-Back to the mission that introduced him in Ace Combat 5, no less.
• Badass Boast:
  Mihaly: There are pilots like you in every generation. And I've felled every last one of them.
• Bad Boss: Colonel McKinsey, who runs the 444th, and to a lesser extent Bandog, the AWACS officer who serves as their Mission Control. McKinsey is an open Glory Hound who plans to ride to victory on the sweat (and corpses) of his pilots. Bandog treats his prisoners with nothing but scorn, even encouraging Trigger to let his comrades die and focus on the mission by pointing out he has no need to be honorable for a bunch of criminals, but he's no McKinsey: he shuts the Colonel up to stop him from interfering with a bombing run on his own base that would have killed everyone if he hadn't intervened, and allows the prisoners to use a base for resupply after it's clear the current op would need more munitions to complete. In fact, the "good" Colonel is so hated that Bandog drily comments that nothing of value was lost if McKinsey is shot down during "Transfer Orders".
• Balkanize Me: By the game's third act, with everyone having lost central communications and mapping, national borders are thrown into disarray... especially Erusea, which is composed of many different nations, cities, and kingdoms absorbed into its own kingdom. At least one long-defunct kingdom declares itself independent, and it's heavily implied that even if Erusea doesn't completely cease to exist, it'll only ever be a shadow of its pre-war self.
• The Battlestar: The Arsenal Birds are gigantic Airborne Aircraft Carriers that carry an insane number of AAM batteries and laser weapons on top of their scores of UAVs. Taking one of these beasts on in direct combat is a monumentally dangerous task no matter how you approach it, and their sheer amount of firepower pretty much guarantees heavy casualties among the attacking forces.
• Becoming the Mask: In an odd, non-character sense, the 444th Air Base, originally established as a complete fake to draw Erusean bombers, gradually became more and more realistic to make sure the Eruseans remained fooled. First, it was just balloon vehicles and painted runways with empty shells of airplanes, then they started having the convicts run jet engines to fool Erusean thermal imaging, before actually flying rebuilt planes and making dry runs at Erusean bombers, and finally, shortly after Trigger's arrival, started actually shooting back, turning a decoy air base into an actual, functional air base with its own fighter squadron.
• BFG:
  • Osea's plan to neutralize one of the hijacked Arsenal Bird hinges on the reactivation of the lone Stonehenge cannon that was spared by Mobius 1 due to being non-operational at the time. It ends up being the only superweapon still available to Osea that can outright shoot through the Arsenal Bird's impossibly powerful APS barrier, and promptly stops functioning once it fires the shot that splits the Liberty in two.
  • The Alicorn is equipped with two powerful railguns that can vaporize ships in a hurry, but they're not significantly bigger than the ship guns found on most capital ships. What instead qualifies the submarine for this trope is the hidden 600-mm/128-caliber rail cannon, whose barrel length exceeds 70 meters and makes up part of the runway for the Alicorn's fighter complement. It is also its most dangerous weapon, being able to fire projectiles over a distance of over 3,000 kilometers—a good fraction of the range of an ICBM—and among the projectiles are two tactical nuclear shells that allow Torres to carry out his grim plan of ending a million civilian lives in order to terrify the world into stopping the Lighthouse War.
• Big Badass Battle Sequence: Mission 19 is the culmination of all that transpires during the cutscenes following the mid-war crisis of Erusea's Enemy Civil War. Here, you join up with the Osean air force and some rebel Erusean squadrons in an attempt to free the ISEV from the radical Erusean government forces and bring down the last Arsenal Bird. A massive furball between the combined Osean-Erusean alliance and the Erusean government drones ensues over the sea surrounding the ISEV, topped by the Arsenal Bird's appearance and the alliance's massive Alpha Strike on it, which fails due to its APS barrier. Princess Rosa manages to disable the shield permanently, allowing you to empty your payload into the Arsenal Bird as the triumphant One-Woman Wail of "Daredevil" hammers on.
• Bittersweet Ending: The Lighthouse War has ended, but many people have died on both sides. Erusea has lost another war, its military and air force have been utterly decimated a second time, and its future as a country—and as a kingdom—is uncertain. In addition, many of its conquered provinces used the chaos of the IFF network's destruction to declare their independence. Osea did not escape the war unscathed as well; its naval power took a serious blow early in the conflict, it lost both Arsenal Birds, and the revelation that Belkans were once again responsible for instigating a conflict will no doubt cause issues among Osean officials. Moreover, if one takes what happens in Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere into consideration, various governments will eventually collapse and Mega-Corps will take over, conflicts will become commonplace, and the fact that its protagonist is a combat AI far superior than its predecessors trivializes the actions and sacrifices of everyone who fought in the Lighthouse War.
• Blackmail: Avril has her ways of pulling favor among the Spare Squadron. In the disorder to pack up the air base and ship everyone elsewhere across Usea, someone left an old rotary phone unplugged. Avril monologues that prisoners aren't allowed to use phones and that she's good at remembering numbers. The next scene heavily implies that she made a phone call that would have inconvenienced McKinsey if he didn't offer to take her along on his plane. He agrees, but she isn't the least bit surprised when he ultimately takes off and leaves her behind.
• Book Ends: The game begins with Avril staring up at the sky and ends with Cossette staring up at the space elevator, both of them in the same pose.
  • At the beginning of the game, Avril speaks of the "dark blue" color of the sky at high altitudes. At the end of the game, she asks Trigger what color the sky is when he flies out of the space elevator. The answer is the title of the final mission.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • The Self-Forging Fragmentation Submunitions (SFFS), or, in common parlance, cluster bomb. While not as flashy as cruise missiles or dedicated anti-ship missiles, when dropped from the correct (low-ish) altitude, an SFFS bomb will one-shot or at most two-shot any non-boss ship in the game. It also benefits from a relatively obscene ammo count (especially compared to cruise missiles) and a large blast radius for non-ship targets, and, unlike cruise missiles, can't be intercepted. It also for this reason renders the Guided Pentration Bomb (GPB) completely worthless in every aspect, the GPB being weaker and having a smaller blast, a shorter useful range, and less ammo. Nearly every high score run of Missions 11 and SP02 feature an F-15E or Su-34 armed with them for a reason.
  • The standard missiles, which technically have infinite ammunition and can be enhanced with upgrade parts that allow for more speed, homing ability, and lock-on capabilities, which are useful for taking down the more agile enemy planes.
  • The XFA-27's Multiple-Launch Standard Missile (MSTM) weapon, which is essentially four more standard missiles that are affected by special weapon parts. While it's not flashy for a weapon wielded by a superplane, it definitely does its job well by allowing pilots to spam standard missiles nonstop on multiple targets, making it a solid choice for annihilation missions that don't feature too many difficult targets (like battle cruisers and highly agile aircraft). It's also useful for Missions 16 and 17, given the risk of collateral damage that multi-lock missiles and bombs run there.
  • Regular Unguided Bombs (UGBs). They're only a little more powerful than standard missiles, and ships and the Arsenal Birds take reduced damage from them, but you can carry a lot of them, they have a nice big blast, take out tanks and air defense tanks in a single blast instead of two missiles, and have a short cooldown. All-in-all, they're excellent general-purpose air-to-ground weapons that are often more useful than fancy guided weapons like GPBs or 4/8AGMs.
  • The MiG-21bis's Machine Gun Pods (MGPs) are only rivaled by UGBs in how primitive they are, but in a world of fancy laser weapons, missile spam, railguns, and attack drones, simply strapping two more machine guns to your plane is often one of the most effective weapons you can pick. While they don't have the range or homing or hitscan or per-hit damage of other weapons, bearing down on an enemy with the integrated machine gun and MGPs blazing puts out a horrific amount of damage per second that can tear through almost anything.
• Boss-Only Level:
  • The final mission, "Dark Blue", is home to only 2 hostiles: two ADF-11F Raven drones, nicknamed Hugin and Munin. It is notable in that the boss fight prolongs itself by way of the UAVs detaching themselves from the base aircraft, with one continuing to engage you in battle while the other attempts to escape through the space elevator's undersea tunnels.
  • The third DLC mission, "Ten Million Relief Plan", is populated by nothing but aircraft and equipment fielded by the Alicorn, which is saying a lot considering you end up fighting about 20 SACS Rafale Ms and up to nearly a hundred SLUAVs launched from the submarine. And this is before taking into consideration the flock of barrier drones deployed after half of the ballast tanks are destroyed.
• Boss Remix: The boss theme of the DLC mission "Anchorhead Raid", "Mimic", has three variations to it depending on the flow of the battle: one for both Rage and Scream together, one for after Rage has been shot down, and one for after Scream has been shot down. Both variant tracks double as musical storytelling. In the Scream version, the drums become incoherent, intentionally slipping notes and disregarding the timing of the rest of the instruments, reflecting Scream's psychotic breakdown after watching her brother die. In the Rage version, the drums go into an extended drum solo, still keeping time with the rest of the instruments but not following their rhythm, showing Rage's all-encompassing, well, rage towards Trigger and Count for killing his sister. Ultimately, both characters (and both their versions of the song), which had functioned quite well up to that point despite themselves, devolve into angry incoherence after their sibling dies.
• Bragging Rights Reward:
  • The special skin for the F-104 Starfighter requires earning an S rank in every mission on Ace difficulty.
  • Beating the game's most difficult challenges, like attaining the coveted S rank in all campaign missions on Ace, doesn't actually get you anything except unique skins for some high-end planes to show off in multiplayer. Some also unlock additional nicknames, which is just as inconsequential for actual gameplay.
• Break Out the Museum Piece:
  • Downplayed with the 444 Squadron—they're equipped with mothballed planes hastily recommissioned to make their base seem more "authentic", including ancient F-104 Starfighters and MiG-21s and an eclectic mix of Su-33s, F/A-18Fs, Mirage 2000-5s, and MiG-29As. However, it's not because newer planes are strictly unavailable, but because the 444, being a penal squadron, isn't considered worth Osea's time or effort to equip with anything better, and the original intent didn't even call for the planes to be able to do more than run their engines to fool Erusean thermal imaging. It's only thanks to the efforts of Avril Mead, the "Scrap Queen", that their planes are fully functional and able to keep up with those used by proper squadrons.
  • The Osean Army moved in to capture the abandoned Stonehenge and put effort into repairing the only cannon that wasn't destroyed by Mobius 1 in order to use it to destroy one of the Arsenal Birds. The cannon, which is now two decades old in the Strangereal timeline (as it was built in the late 1990s), still proves to pack enough firepower to one-shot the Arsenal Bird in half even with its shield active.
  • The nickname that comes with the F-4E is "No Plans to Retire", alluding to how the Vietnam-era fighter still sees plenty of use today due to its sheer reliability.
• Call-Back:
  • A somber female chorus rendition of the Leitmotif of Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War is heard when Harling is killed at the end of Mission 04, with the song titled "Tears of Razgriz".
  • The player is associated with Mage Squadron. This wouldn't be the first Osean squadron named after a term for a magic user, as shown by Wizard and Sorcerer Squadrons. During the Battle of Farbanti, radio chatter also mentions an Osean Wand Squadron.
  • Mission 12 is entitled "Stonehenge Defensive", a role reversal of Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies's twelfth mission, "Stonehenge Offensive". In Shattered Skies, Mobius 1 destroyed the seven operational Stonehenge cannons (the 8th one had been put out of commission before the ISAF attack after Ulysses fragments hit its power supply), and in Skies Unknown, Trigger and the Cyclops and Strider Squadrons fly cover for Osean forces repairing the eighth gun. The musical accompaniment for the mission, "Stonehenge Defensive", is also comprised of elements from the track "Stonehenge Offensive" from Shattered Skies, only played in reverse. Slipped into the song as well are the first three notes of the ISAF trumpet leitmotif, though the following four notes that would complete the theme are different, highlighting the blend of the familiar and the new.
  • The Arsenal Birds take more than a few design cues from the Arkbird. Stark white paint, upwards-sweeping wings, a large number of small control surfaces that evoke the image of feathers, a bird-like frontal area, a similar (if not identical) resupply strategy and resulting aft-ventral configuration—the craft is essentially a successor to the legendary spaceplane. Given that both craft were developed by the Osean Federation, this only makes sense. The Arsenal Birds also boast a similar armament to the Arkbird and the musical cues that accompany their presence on screen sounds like a more menacing version of "White Bird" at times. Their shape also evokes a more streamlined version of the P-1112 Aigaion, and its ancestor, the XB-0 Hresvelgr.
  • The Arsenal Birds' Helios long-range airburst missiles are similar to the Nimbus missiles used by the Aigaion.
  • President Harling's plane is once again code-named Mother Goose One, and the mission that you meet him in is very similar to the mission in Ace Combat 5 where you escort his transport through a hole in the enemy's anti-air radar system. When Harling is killed at the end of the mission, the music even briefly plays a version of 5's theme.
  • Belkans are once again involved in a plot that manipulates two global superpowers into war with each other in the name of revenge. This time, Gründer sold their advanced AI technology to Erusea, allowing the Radicals to develop a large drone army, which they use to manipulate Princess Rosa into declaring war on Osea.
  • The drones at the focus of the latter part of the narrative, specifically the ADF-11F Hugin and Munin, are a part of the restarted Zone of Endless AI fighter project from Ace Combat 2 and Assault Horizon Legacy. The underlying plot of those games centered around Gründer Industries taking advantage of a war on Usea to create the ultimate AI pilot and next-generation superplane for it to fly, the ADF-01 FALKEN. The ADF-11F Raven of Skies Unknown appears to be a continuation of the same project, having flown under similar circumstances. The ADF-11F also sports the Z.O.E. "squadron" logo on its cockpit just to hammer the point home.
  • The latter half of Mission 13 has the Eruseans launching ballistic missiles, one of which is hidden behind a dam. Where have we heard that before?
  • The "trash can with wings" drone that Avril sees in the opening cutscene looks very similar to the Yuktobanian drones used in the second mission of Ace Combat 5. Several pilots in 7 make note of the Erusean drones' odd evasive maneuvers, something that Chopper comments on in 5 in reference to the Yuke drones' evasion tactics.
  • The first DLC "Unexpected Visitor" takes place only two days after Mission 13, "Bunker Buster". The briefing begins with members of the LRSSG wondering how Fencer is doing after being injured in Mission 12 ("Stonehenge Defensive"), with the confirmation that he's out of the hospital but not yet cleared for duty.
    • It also takes place at Artiglio Port, the same area you attacked with Spare Squadron in Mission 8 ("Pipeline Destruction"). Said attack is mentioned, with Count commenting that it's been a while since then.
  • The submarine Alicorn, a major feature of the first three DLC missions, is explicitly stated to have been sold to Erusea (via General Resource) by Yuktobania, whose previous super-subs Scinfaxi and Hrimfaxi were bosses in Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War. The Alicorn is even classified as a Super-Scinfaxi-class sub.
  • In Mission 02, Brownie expresses concern about civilians being caught in the path of shot-down enemy aircraft. This is exactly what happened to the family of the side story narrator in Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies, with a plane shot down by Yellow 13 crashing into his house and killing his family. This also doubles as Foreshadowing to what happens later down the storyline of this game as well, as mentioned below.
• Call-Forward: Several to Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere:
  • Dr. Schroeder refers to having a young female assistant named "Massa," a mistranslation of the middle name of Yoko Martha Inoue, the researcher who perfected Sublimation with Abyssal Dision as her test subject. Supplementary materials also suggest that Simon Orestes Cohen (the creator of Nemo) was a part of Schroeder's team alongside Inoue.
  • Jaeger repeatedly mentions his plans to tell his war stories to his son (confirmed to be Erich Jager), who would be 3 years old at the time of the Lighthouse War.
  • After Neucom in Ace Combat X, General Resource Limited returns, playing an important part in the DLC missions; Erusea purchased the Alicorn from Yuktobania via GR Trading, then had it towed across the ocean by GR Marine Transportation, and Mimic Squadron was under GR Guardian Mercenaries. You can see adverts for a Neucom phone in Anchorhead as well.
  • Both Osea and Erusea launch a high-altitude strike on each other's satellites. Decades later, Neucom, which bought out Erusea's space and aviation agency, or UPEO, the IUPF's successor organisation, does the same thing to General Resource.
  • The entire behavior of Erusea's drone army and Z.O.E. by extension, as well as ALEX and its simulation of the Lighthouse War, is this for Nemo.
• Canon Immigrant: The IUPF makes its entrance into the main series here, after first appearing in the non-Strangereal based Ace Combat: Joint Assault.
• Casting Gag:
  • Dan Woren again plays a commanding officer of a special air force squadron made up of convicts. Unlike that time, he's a total Jerkass here.
  • D.C. Douglas plays a mad scientist obsessing over gathering combat data. Unlike last time, he grows repentant by the end and survives the events of the game. That Dr. Schroeder's specialty is in artificial intelligence also calls to mind the times Douglas voiced an AI himself in the forms of Legion, Valimar, and Pod 042.
• Central Theme: Who is Friend or Foe? in a war where information is everything? Much of the game's tension is being unable to figure out for sure who's really the enemy and who you can trust.
  • Harling's death is the result of Osea's IFF system being compromised, allowing an Erusean drone (which appears as an Osean allied fighter on everyone's radar) to sneak in right behind Trigger himself and shoot him down in the chaos of his extraction.
  • At one point, the Spare Squadron comes under attack from a squad of drones. However, these particular drones initially appear on their IFF systems as allied fighters. This designation confusion both allows the drones to get a drop on the unsuspecting Spare Squadron, and also leaves them unable to properly retaliate for fear of causing a Friendly Fire incident—a fear which comes true when Full Band is mistakenly (or deliberately) tagged as an enemy and shot down by Count.
  • During the Battle of Farbanti, Osea and Erusea launch simultaneous anti-satellite attacks in attempt to destroy the other side's military satellites. Both these attacks succeed, essentially removing IFF from the picture entirely. However, the sheer amount of debris the destruction of these satellites generate ends up damaging nearly every other satellite in orbit, which essentially cripples global satellite communications networks. Being unable to tell who is friend or foe, coupled with both side's chains of command being utterly broken due to a lack of functioning communication systems, leads to chaos throughout the Usean continent, making good on the game's title: Skies Unknown.
  • The game also deals in the power of false information. Erusea used a spoofed IFF to assassinate Harling and later to ambush Spare Squadron, Bandog falsely tagged Full Band as an enemy (leading to his death), and Erusean hackers fed false intel to Osean AWACS officers to get General Labarthe killed. It actually ties well into the themes of who is friend or who is foe, since it shows how difficult to tell what is truth and what is a lie in a world dependent on the flow of information.
• Cannon Fodder:
  • The Osean military doesn't care if a squadron of convicts gets killed in battle.
  • Erusea feels this way about their drone forces; it was even a selling point for them. It allows them to shield the Arsenal Bird and the ISEV from missiles, and they never have to worry about living pilots getting killed.
• Challenge Run: The game's achievements encourage three full story challenge runs that must be completed in campaign mode and cannot be earned in free mission mode. Additionally, several level medals are awarded for completing that level with certain constraints.
  • "Photon Blitz" is awarded for completing a speedrun of the campaign in under four hours.
  • "Not A Scratch" is awarded for completing the campaign without taking a single hit.
  • "Machine Gun Maniac" is awarded for completing the campaign without ever using any weapon other than machine guns (the Raven and DarkStar's integrated pulse lasers and the MiG-21bis's machine gun pods both count as machine guns for the purposes of the achievement, and the target designator in Bunker Buster is permitted so long as it's only used on the missile silos).
  • Long Day awards "First Try" for destroying at least 50 targets without using the return line.
  • First Contact awards "Relieved" for shooting down all the drones before any allies send seven distress signals.
  • Bunker Buster awards "Clairvoyant" for taking out all the real missile silos in under five minutes.
  • Lost Kingdom awards "Getting the Job Done" for taking Mihaly down in under five minutes without using any special weapons.
  • Daredevil awards "Dropping the Bird" for taking down the Arsenal Bird without using machine guns.
• Checkpoint Starvation: Barring some rare exceptions, most campaign missions tend to be pretty light on checkpoints. You only get an autosave once a mission objective is either completed or changes due to unforeseen events, and a long time can pass before that happens. Annihilation missions (Long Day, Pipeline Destruction, Fleet Destruction, etc) are notorious for this, because their first phase is a full 15 minutes of attempting to wreak havoc in an op zone that's absolutely crawling with things shooting at you. Dying at any point in this phase resets you back to the very beginning.
• Chekhov's Gun: The eighth gun of Stonehenge, which was rendered inoperable after a meteorite damaged its power or control systems prior to the events of Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies and which was conspicuous by its non-target status during the assault on Stonehenge in Ace Combat 04, is finally repaired and fired over sixteen years in real life and nearly as long in In-Universe after first being seen.
• Chess Motifs: A variant occurs in the DLC regarding Trigger and Matias Torres. ALEX's battle simulations between the two are represented using a chessboard with Trigger's plane and the Alicorn as their own pieces, resulting in stalemates. Both of them are regarded as singularities by David and ALEX, where they do not follow the standard rules of their game and thus are not bound by regular roles and movements attributed to any of the chess pieces. Before the third and final DLC mission, the Alicorn is represented as approaching the king, while Trigger's plane arrives to defend it.
• Clarke's Third Law: Erusean General Labarthe states that Gründer's drone technology is so advanced that understanding it would be equivalent to magic or alchemy. Erusean Conservative pilots even call it alchemy later on in the same mission.
• Clown-Car Base: The OFS Admiral Andersen is loaded to the brim with planes that it was transporting to other bases. This lampshades how the Kestrel had full access to every plane available in the game's roster, when it canonically could only use carrier-based planes.
• The Computer Is a Lying Bastard: Simply put, the stated statistics of aircraft mean almost nothing and are often incredibly misleading. For example, the stated statistics indicate that the MiG-21bis handles like a brick, but in actual gameplay, it's one of the most agile planes in the entire game and is able to outturn many of the highest-end planes in the game, despite their stated superiority in maneuverability.
• Concealment Equals Cover: The TLS and Pulse Lasers cannot penetrate clouds, which merely act as concealment against guided weapons (which may lose lock and home worse when flying through) and don't even offer more than the most basic visual cover against unguided projectiles.
• Confusion Fu: In the "Unexpected Visitor" DLC, Mimic Squadron uses advanced electronic countermeasures to fool your HUD and targeting system into thinking there are multiple targets surrounding Rage and Scream themselves. Scream acts as the bait as she flies in front of Trigger while Rage takes shots at you.
• Continuity Nod:
  • The southern Usean countries that hosted Osean and IUN forces are the very same countries which tried to sign an alliance with Osea, which caused protests from other nations, including Erusea.
  • The 2016 trailer shows a brief look at the destroyed Stonehenge from Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies. A few moments later, a cutscene shows a meteor storm entering Earth's atmosphere. The 2018 Gamescom trailer shows the last of its cannons firing, the eighth gun, which had been rendered inoperable by a meteorite impact before Operation Stone Crusher in Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies, while the other seven guns are still utterly smashed from Mobius 1's attack on the facility. Osea is revealed to have been secretly rebuilding the smashed Stonehenge site, and brings in power equipment to get the 8th gun up and running. It is the setting of Mission 12: Stonehenge Defensive, where Trigger has to defend Stonehenge against a massive Erusean assault. The cannon only gathers power for one shot, which it uses to destroy one of the Arsenal Birds as it approaches the area. Afterwards, the cannon collapses to the ground.
  • During the operation at Stonehenge, Húxiān (Cyclops 4) takes a hit just like Yellow 4, but unlike Yellow 4 she's not wounded and is ordered to withdraw instead.
  • Farbanti gets thrashed again, this time at the hands of the Kestrel fleet. Conversely, Port Hewlett is yet again the target of an attack, though this time it's from Erusea instead of Yuktobania.
  • On the topic of the Kestrel herself, Ace Combat 5 fans would know the Kestrel II in Skies Unknown to be the successor to the original Kestrel, which was sunk at the end of The Unsung War. However, the Kestrel II is sunk off of Farbanti in the early days of the war and is never seen in action by the player.
  • Mobius Squadron makes a return to combat once again, only this time as part of the IUN's peacekeeping forces and only playable for a side campaign (specifically, the VR missions). The antagonist is again the Free Erusea terrorist organization. Free Erusea gets mentioned again in Mission 17 as the Erusean News Network reports on rumors that they have become active yet again after the Battle of Farbanti.
  • The Mission Briefing officer for the LRSSG has the same baritone as the Mission Briefing officer of the Sand Island Airbase. They are implied to be the same person, as they shared the same voice actor, that being Jamieson Price.
  • A space center on Tyler Island similar to the Basset Space Center, along with its iconic mass driver, is the setting of Mission 17 ("Homeward").
  • The aircraft carrier which the Strider Squadron launches off of in their bid to put a stop to the war once and for all is christened the Admiral Andersen, after the brave admiral of the Kestrel in Ace Combat 5. Avril even recounts the tale of how Andersen steadfastly made sure that the capsizing Kestrel managed to launch the fighter squadron that ended the Circum-Pacific War before it sank.
  • Captain Kei Nagase herself shows up in the ending. She is now an astronaut on a spacecraft named Pilgrim One, which has just returned from an exploration mission in the Asteroid Belt. She thanks Trigger for liberating the space elevator so that she can land safely.
  • In the same vein as airplanes from Air Ixiom and Air Erusea showing up at Apito International Airport in Ace Combat 5, there are several airplanes from Emmeria Airways appearing at Selatapura Airport in addition to planes from Air Erusea and Osea Airlines.
  • The "Unexpected Visitor" DLC features a Gaze article in the background talking about a submarine that Erusea purchased from Yuktobania through a third-party company. The author of the article is Albert Genette. The Yuktobania connection comes from how the Alicorn, the submarine in question, is actually a heavily upgraded and upscaled Scinfaxi-class to the point that it qualifies as its own class, the Super Scinfaxi-class.
  • The briefing for Anchorhead Raid reveals that Captain Torres became an Erusean hero because he managed to save much of his crew when Mobius 1 destroyed the Erusean fleet at Comberth Harbor in the Continental War. It is even revealed he was the captain of the Erusean battleship Tanager, which you can personally sink in Ace Combat 04. In addition, when North discusses Comberth Harbor during the briefing, he pulls up a list of ships sunk during the Continental War; those names actually correspond to named ships that show up as targets during the AC 04 mission.
• Continuity Snarl:
  • Being set just 1 year before Ace Combat X: Skies of Deception creates In-Universe Technology Marches On issues for that game, what with no one there making the slightest mention of the Lighthouse, the ascent of Attack Drone armies, and other such events. There is all of one thing there that might have received a Call-Forward here, namely a throwaway line about a satellite network being restored that could have followed the anti-satellite attacks in this game, but that is tenuous.
  • A minor example is in the SP Missions, which take place prior to the second Battle of Farbanti. Count's personality is closer to his appearances after the earthshaking mission that is Farbanti despite the fact that Wiseman is still alive during the hunt for the Alicorn, and he's constantly designated as Strider 2, even in "Ten Million Relief Plan", where Cyclops is also deployed. That said, Count does have his moments, such as being happy Wiseman isn't watching his every move and being the most vocal about wanting to destroy Torres when he initially surrenders.
• Contrived Coincidence:
  • Avril gets thrown in the 444th for unauthorized wartime flight, because her test flight of her F-104C just happened mere hours after the Lighthouse War officially began, and before she (or most of the rest of the world) was even given notice of the declaration.
  • In Mission 15, Osea and Erusea's simultaneous satellite attacks happened at the exact moment you're running Mihaly down in the last minutes of the Battle of Farbanti, disrupting everyone's electronic devices and conveniently allowing Mihaly to escape. Not only that, but the simultaneous attacks were carried out by accident as well, with Osea shooting down the satellites that Erusea hijacked and Erusea shooting down the Osean satellites they did not control, resulting in a massive debris field that takes out whatever was left after the attack.
  • The final battle just so happen to take place in the same day as Nagase's return trip from her seven-year-long mission into outer space.
• Cool Airship: The Arsenal Birds, a pair of absolutely titanic flying-wing-shaped aerial warships used to defend the Lighthouse, with a whopping 1,100-meter wingspan and a plethora of weapons and smaller escort UAVs. They're armed to the teeth with cutting-edge technology, including a deployable energy barrier that's impervious to all but the very strongest projectiles Strangereal can offer. It says something when one of these behemoths had to be shot down by Stonehenge, while the other needed its APS barrier neutralized permanently for Trigger to bring it down.
• Cool Boat: The Alicorn, the massive Erusean super-submarine featured in the DLC SP Missions. It's nearly half a kilometer long, can stage aircraft operations like a carrier, and boasts an impressive arsenal, namely two railguns with an effective range of 400 kilometers. David North recounts that it spent nearly two years stuck to the bottom of the ocean with most of its crew still alive after accidentally running aground during sea trials. Once Captain Torres goes rogue, he annihilates an Osean naval fleet with the sub's railguns and starts his grim crusade to kill a million people.
• Cool, but Inefficient: Numerous upgrade parts sound cool in theory but prove rather disappointing in practice, like the Machine Gun Radar Lock^note automatically pulls the machine gun reticle towards the target you're locked onto, but since it doesn't account for bullet travel time, it doesn't actually increase your chances to hit unless you're in a situation where you would've hit anyway, like from right behind the target or the Anti-Stealth Microwave Radar^note hostile stealth planes are few and far between, and the ones that appear normally engage you in combat anyway, making the upgrade completely useless for anything beyond chasing down stealth-capable aces, of which there are exactly three.
• Cool Plane: It's not an Ace Combat game if it doesn't introduce real-life and fictional superplanes.
  • During your escort of McKinsey's aircraft in Mission 10, a dangerous experimental UCAV shows up after all hostiles are down, setting up for a boss fight. It's a white unmanned aircraft with forward-swept wings, an angular windowless cockpit, and no vertical tail, unique enough to be distinct from the droves of UCAVs that are deployed from the Arsenal Bird. It's also shown to be incredibly agile, performing barrel rolls on the fly. Said UCAV is the experimental ADFX-10, which ends up being the prototype for the ADF-11 encountered in the final mission, itself being the core of the ADF-11F Raven mentioned below.
  • Near the end of Mission 19, two black superplanes unexpectedly arrive and strike at the skydiving Cosette. They are the ADF-11F Raven, an even more advanced successor to the ADF-01 FALKEN. The main visual difference between the Raven and the FALKEN is that the former's wings aren't forward-swept, instead being backward-swept with canted wingtips, and the Raven lacks the FALKEN's vertical tailfins. The key difference between the two, and the most distinctive trait of the Raven, is that the Raven is actually a combination of a "RAW-F" body and either an ADF-11 drone (the completed form of the ADFX-10) or a manned cockpit module using a COFFIN system. On the UAV version, if the RAW-F is sufficiently damaged, the ADF-11 will detach from the RAW-F, expand its wings, and fly off, turning into an extremely maneuverable craft surpassing even the ADFX-10. In the campaign, the two Raven drones, Hugin and Munin, controlled by an advanced version of the Zone of Endless AI and loaded with tip-of-the-edge combat data from Mihaly himself, prove to be the deadliest planes on the planet by far, destroying a dozen of your allies in seconds. Hugin and Munin serve as the final boss of the game, and are rightfully the strongest enemies in the entire game.
  • Mihaly flies an Su-30SM. This plane is specialized version of the thrust-vectoring Su-30MKI and MKM. In Mission 18, he enters the fight in a X-02S Strike Wyvern, an evolution of the PS2 games' own forward-swept variable wing X-02 that comes equipped with a railgun.
  • Interestingly, Trigger appears to have two canonical planes. Media shown after Mission 10, such as the DLC trailers, uses an F-15C to represent him, but by the final few missions, Trigger has switched to an F-22 with wing-mounted stealth weapon pods.
  • All 3 of the Season Pass aircraft undoubtedly qualify, as original superplane designs^note The "Advanced Dominance Fighter" programme started by Belka unique to Ace Combat—the ADFX-01 Morgan from Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War, ADF-01 FALKEN from Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War, and ADF-11F Raven (finally averting Mission 20's Unusable Enemy Equipment).
    • The ADFX-01,^note "Advanced Dominance Fighter eXperimental" nicknamed "Morgan", is an at-least-24-year-old prototype by the time of Skies Unknown, with its distinctive bulky twin engine design, forward-swept wings, and top-mounted TLS pod. It's also a Super Prototype in a way, as the ADFX-01 was originally a test platform for Belka's newly developed weapons (like the Multi-Purpose Burst Missile (MPBM), which was never adopted by other planes in the ADF series).
    • Its successor, the ADF-01 FALKEN, shares a largely identical airframe layout but ditches a conventional glass canopy in favour of the COFFIN^note "Connection For Flight Interface" cockpit that gives the FALKEN its trademark appearance. Unlike the ADFX-01, the FALKEN conceals its TLS in its nose, which opens to reveal the emitter.
    • The latest member of the ADF program is the ADF-11F Raven, still based on the same twin-engine layout of the ADFX-01 & ADF-01 FALKEN but using a rear-swept wing design without vertical tails. It's also armed with some of Ace Combat's most futuristic weaponry—the Tactical Laser System and two Weapon UA Vs—and is the first aircraft in the series to use a Pulse Laser instead of a gun.
  • Another 3 original superplanes were released in celebration of Ace Combat's 25th Anniversary - the XFA-27 from Ace Combat 2, CFA-44 Nosferatu from Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation, and ASF-X Shinden II from Ace Combat: Assault Horizon.
    • The XFA-27 is one of Ace Combat's earliest original designs, having debuted in Ace Combat 2 alongside the ADF-01 FALKEN as the first playable^note The FALKEN was exclusively flown by Z.O.E. superplane in the series. Constructed during the Usean coup d'état over two decades ago, the XFA-27's swing wings and swept fins were designed for acceleration and maneuverability.
    • Developed by Estovakia for use on the "Aerial Fleet" during their civil war, the CFA-44 Nosferatu is a carrier-based stealth fighter built with strong offensive capabilities in mind. As a result, it can be armed with numerous experimental weapons: two Electromagnetic Launchers (EMLs), three retractable All Direction Multi-Purpose Missile (ADMM) batteries, or internal IEWS pods.
    • A Canon Immigrant from the Assault Horizon universe, the ASF-X Shinden II was designed in collaboration with Macross creator Shoji Kawamori as a next-generation fighter for the JASDF. Best described as a combination of the F-35 and the Su-47, the ASF-X's relatively grounded appearance was the result of setting Assault Horizon in the real world.
• Crazy-Prepared: Evidently, the Federation of Central Usea set up range tables when they were building Stonehenge, despite the fact that in its intended use of shooting falling asteroid fragments, it would need its supercomputer targeting array to have any chance of hitting its targets. Even in its later Erusean use of long-range aerial interdiction, it would be nearly useless without computerized targeting.
• Creepy Children Singing: Although Mihaly's granddaughters aren't creepy themselves, their singing is given a creepy context in a cutscene before the final mission, with shots from the viewpoint of the Zone of Endless AI, as well as automated factories preparing for a Robot War.
• Crippling Overspecialization:
  • The Erusean military, on their drones in general but the Arsenal Birds in particular. The drones represent a fast, precise, and cheap counter to the vastly more powerful allied forces, consisting of the Osean Air Defense Force (and their naval counterparts) and their IUN allies (consisting of most of the nations that formally comprised ISAF, who by themselves were able to beat Erusea in a war). The Arsenal Birds have an argument as the most indestructible superweapon yet created in Strangereal, with their massive drone swarms, Macross Missile Massacre capabilities, and nearly-impenetrable defensive shields (and, ironically, they're stolen from Osea). Having both on air superiority duties lets Erusea occupy most of Usea. However, once Osea and the IUN manage to shoot one down with Stonehenge, Erusea has to shrink the defensive envelope of the remaining one, and Osea and the IUN manage to liberate most of Erusea's occupied territory... in a single off-hand mention in a briefing.
  • Some planes and special weapons are massively specialized for a single mission profile, to the detriment of pretty much everything else.
    • The A-10C is an excellent ground attack plane with a very low stall speed, huge reserve of machine gun ammo, and vast reserves of any of its three air-to-ground SP weapons (4AGM, UGB, and RKT), but it's in a game with maybe one pure ground attack mission, and its poor agility and speed make it probably the worst dogfighting plane in the game, especially when it can only engage other planes with its machine gun and standard missiles.
    • The F-15J is entirely specialized the other way—it's the only plane with only guided air-to-air SP weapons (SAAM, HCAA, QAAM), leaving it in a rough spot in ground attack scenarios (especially against hard targets like ships).
    • The F-104C's GRKT is probably the single most specialized weapon in the game. It fires several rockets all at one target, doing tremendous damage and easily overwhelming defenses like CIWS. However, such targets are rare, and its long cooldown makes it hard to use to in most situations. It's unmatched against ships, but in the regular campaign, that's only really relevant in two missions and it's not very useful against the much more common tanks and SAMs and AA guns.
• Critical Existence Failure: Discussed in Mission 18, "Lost Kingdom". Getting hit by Mihaly's EML will turn your plane from undamaged to 99% in one hit. Count and Jaeger will comment on how your plane should be shrapnel by now and is just barely holding together.
• Crosshair Aware: In the campaign, particularly devastating weapons like EMLs or Helios missiles display their area of effect on the radar shortly before they hit, giving you a chance to escape the blast. A disturbingly small chance on occasion, but a chance nonetheless.
• Crossover: With Top Gun: Maverick. The game was given the "Top Gun Maverick Aircraft Set" DLC, released on the same day as the movie in theaters (on May 26th, 2022).
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • Trigger's first encounter with Erusea's hijacked Arsenal Bird ends in a disastrous defeat for the IUPF, with the entire Skeleton Squadron wiped out and Osean command forcing a retreat due to being unable to even put a dent in the airship. ^note Sure enough, the Arsenal Bird spams UCAVs, abuses the cloud mechanic to hide itself, and is deceptively fast despite its size... and has Deflector Shields, which it deploys once it has taken a certain amount of damage.
  • Champ versus Mihaly in the canyons of Yinshi Valley. The former thinks he can go toe-to-toe with the Erusean ace, ignoring Bandog's orders to disengage and pulling a Pugachev's Cobra to get behind "Mister X". Mere seconds later, Mihaly pulls a Kulbit and shoots down Champ at near-point blank range. Mihaly's bored tone when Wit berates him for not downing Champ straight away confirms that he was toying with his target and hoping there would be at least a worthy fight, which he does get moments later against Trigger.
  • In "Ten Million Relief Plan", immediately after being forced to surface by a concentrated VL-ASROC attack by several Osean ships, the Alicorn deploys its twin 200mm railguns and shreds the entire Osean surface fleet in seconds.
• Darker and Edgier: In addition to having one of the higher body counts in the series, Skies Unknown touches on some fairly dark themes, such as the usage of convicts as military assets, the ethics of efficient drone warfare, and the collateral damage war has on society, as well as deconstructing the typical Ace Combat player through the character of Mihaly (see below). This trope especially comes into play in the last act when the collapse of Usea's satellite network plunges Erusea into civil war, sparks refugee crises across the continent, and very nearly allowed two highly advanced drones to launch an apocalyptic Robot War. There is also a lot more swearing.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts:
  • AA guns and CIWS try to inflict this upon you, and it's very likely that you'll take one or two hits from them over the course of a mission. However, there are very few cases in which they're likely to actually get the thousand cuts they need.
  • Flying close to an Arsenal Bird not only gets CIWS lighting you up, but also opens you up to missile spam that will force you to peel away unless you like watching your health deplete in steady chunks to zero.
• Cult: It's heavily implied that Captain Torres turned the Alicorn's personnel into his personal cult, worshipping nuclear destruction as "salvation" and his brand of nuclear-enforced peace. Several pilots throw away their lives to sacrifice themselves for his vision, hollering "Salvation" as they die like suicide bombers, and one pilot fervently chants that he will always obey his commanding officers at all times like some kind of prayer. Even to the end, none of Torres' sailors attempt to man the lifeboats and willingly follow his commands to flood part of the sub simply for another chance to enact nuclear terrorism— er, "salvation".
• Deconstruction:
  • Of the trope Would Not Shoot a Civilian. For most of the war, Erusea uses drones to target Osean military targets without even injuring a single civilian. However, this is due to the work of the radical faction within the Erusean military, who use Belkan AI technology to develop an advanced drone army. The drones' performance and accuracy goes beyond all expectations, which they use to gain public opinion on their side and create an opportunity to declare war on Osea, even manipulating the royal family. To put it simply, the radicals avoided civilian casualties simply as a means to their end.
    • Taken further, the use of drone launchers disguised as commercial shipping containers is a bad idea: later in the game, you're clearly attacking shipping containers that might contain drones. You get points for blowing them up no matter what, but there's no guarantee that they're launchers. The use of camouflaged drone launchers results in civilian shipping being crippled. This is further confirmed in the trailer for the "Unexpected Visitor" story DLC, where near the end of the video, the news ticker at the bottom says that container shipping traffic is deadlocked everywhere because containers are being inspected to make sure they aren't drone launchers, and there aren't enough inspectors to keep traffic moving.
  • Mihaly A. Shilage is also a deconstruction of typical Ace Combat players; a Living Legend ace pilot who finds little to no enjoyment in life other than flying, he's been flying for so long through so many wars, it's putting a strain on his aging body. He also doesn't care what he shoots down, even if it's a harmless fleeing pilot who poses no threat like Brownie, even toying with her as she's scared out of her mind before taking the shot anyway—the same thing we've been doing before as Mercenary Cipher and even Mobius 1 himself.
  • Of previous Ace Combat games, which depict war as clean and controlled and flying as safe and reliable, only breaking these rules to twist the plot. Clouds constantly block the player's view and missiles, with the plane itself icing up if it spends too long in them. Powerful and sudden crosswinds can knock planes off course or into the ground. Lightning will cause instant Interface Screws, with pilots often recovering straight into a mountainside. War itself is shown to be brutal, where Anyone Can Die is in full effect; people can (and do) just perish from random fire and events, with Plot Armor kicking in just a few times. Identification tech is unreliable, not every target really is one, and weapons don't just cleanly do what they're supposed to. As a result, almost every mission has some sort of Plot Twist in it.
• Deflector Shields: Receiving wireless energy from the space elevator, the Arsenal Bird is able to deploy a large spherical barrier called the Active Protection System around itself to protect against long-range missile strikes. Said shield is so powerful, even a concentrated missile attack won't hurt it. However, it's not so mighty as to withstand a direct hit from Stonehenge.
• Despair Event Horizon: The LRSSG commander reaches this after the satellite communications networks go down, throwing the entire continent and both sides into chaos, and their one chance at restoring peace is killed by friendly fire. It gets so bad that your AWACS operator is forced to step in as the de facto commander for the rest of the game.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • Different planes have their gun types accounted for; planes like the Su-37 and Su-35S (which have a single-barrel autocannon) have a lower ammunition reserve and fire slower, while the A-10 has its famous GAU-8 Avenger with a cap of 4800 rounds, higher damage, and a faster fire rate. Similarly, planes like the F-22 and F/A-18F (which have multi-barrel Gatling guns) have higher fire rates and ammo caps.
  • There is, overall, a surprising level of detail on the various mission maps. In Mission 1, you take off in the midst of an air raid, and the activity of the base reflects to prove it, with people running around, ground vehicles mobilizing for emergency response, and other aircraft lining up to take off behind you as choppers lift off from helipads. And the kicker is that those units don't just disappear once you get far enough from the base; they all have their own set locations and objectives to get to. For example, as you begin your takeoff roll, a pair of Chinook helicopters next to you take off as well. If you follow them, they cross the channel and hover near a burning watch tower, ostensibly for the purposes of recovering injured personnel. In Mission 2, when you begin the attack on the airbase, you can not only hear enemy radio chatter referencing the preparation of the drones you fight in the last part of the mission, but, if you have a good eye, you can actually see the disguised container trucks moving across the airfield from their staging positions to their launch positions.
  • Explosions actually take the speed of sound into account. If something blows up far enough away from you, there's a noticeable delay between seeing the detonation and hearing it.
  • In Mission 3, you conduct a joint operation with the Navy. Before you start the mission, you play a mini-game to refuel your plane in midair. However, if you select a naval aircraft (like the F-14D), you take off from the Navy's carrier instead of refueling with the tanker.
  • Halfway through Mission 3, Brownie gets severely damaged and has to withdraw, while your job is to protect other retreating allied aircraft from the Arsenal Bird's drones. While you're doing this and she's about to leave the area, Mihaly shows up and shoots her down. Even though you are far away from them because you are to protect the other allies, if you follow Brownie, you can see the whole encounter play out in-game, Mihaly's Su-30 and all. Unfortunately, he is invulnerable; Brownie must die for the sake of the plot.
  • If you think you can shoot down the Arsenal Bird in Mission 3 with a powerful enough plane, think again. If you deal enough damage, the Arsenal Bird will activate its shield early.
  • During the first duel with Mihaly, he has dialogue for his wingmen for every time he hits Trigger with a missile. There are about five conversations, even though most planes can only survive two missiles from Mihaly.
  • In Mission 11, Wiseman will show that the support pylons of the ocean platforms can be destroyed, sending the platform and anything on it crashing into the water. However, even though you can't directly lock onto the pylons until after the event, you can still shoot and destroy them with dumb-fired missiles and other unguided weapons. The dialogue will even change, with your fellow pilots in awe of you hitting something with no targeting and Long Caster even swapping his line to reference you instead of Wiseman.
  • In the final mission, after you shoot down either Hugin or Munin, the surviving drone will quickly shoot down Wit in retaliation. If you're fast enough, however, you can shoot down the other drone before it can kill Wit, which is addressed in a minor dialogue change later in the mission. If Wit is shot down, Seymour will said that he will avenge his death, but if Wit survives, both of them will tell you that they'll take on the last drone together.
  • Also in the final mission, your plane will take off from the aircraft carrier Admiral Andersen. You can choose any plane for the mission, but if you pick a non-carrier-based plane, your plane will launch from further back on the carrier's runway. If you pick a carrier-based plane, it will launch from the middle of the carrier with normal procedures, including using a catapult and jet blast deflector.
  • It is possible to land your plane in the 444 Zapland hangar, which triggers special dialogue acknowledging that you landed the plane off of the runway.
    Control Tower: Go back to flight school already. The aircraft seriously can't handle your shit.
    Control Tower: Do you even know how to land a plane?!
• Didn't See That Coming:
  • Unknown Known: Erusea neglects to secure Stonehenge after it once again falls within their territory, not because they don't know of its power, but rather because they don't see how a wrecked superweapon could be useful. By the time they realize that it's not completely useless (Mobius 1 only smashed seven of the eight guns during the Usean Continental War, as the eighth had been silenced by a meteor impact that took out its power supply, but left the gun itself intact prior to the war) and there's a reason there's a small pocket of Osean forces there, it's almost too late for them to do anything about it. This failure to recognize the importance of this particular known value and close the pocket around Stonehenge sooner costs Erusea one of the Arsenal Birds.
  • Unknown Unknown: neither side could foresee that they would launch their ASAT missions at exactly the same time while Osea was besieging the Erusean capital of Farbanti. On top of this, neither side had a real contingency for what to do if their entire communications network goes dark, resulting in widespread chaos and anarchy as nations secede, entire military units rebel, and people start shooting at each other.
• Difficult, but Awesome: In multiplayer, the EML is a One-Hit Kill on all planes with a value below 2000 points. Manually lining up your plane to aim it is the challenge. You can get a kill or two on an unsuspecting player at the start of a match, but good luck when they all gather into a furball.
• Disaster Dominoes:
  • The fourth mission, "Rescue", is centered around "Operation Lighthouse Keeper," a daring, intricate mission to rescue former president Vincent Harling from the Lighthouse, but it all falls apart about halfway through.
    • While Mage and Golem squadron successfully clear the Lighthouse of anti-aircraft weapons for the Sea Goblin rescue team to land, they come under attack from MQ-99 drones launched from the mainland; this ends up dividing the mission's air support as they intercept the drones, leaving Sea Goblin without effective air cover.
    • Sea Goblin encounters heavier-than-expected resistance; from the radio dialogue, they apparently made it no further than their landing pad before getting pinned down.
    • Shortly after locating Harling, a thermobaric rocket demolishes Sea Goblin's helicopter, and a second one finishes off the survivors; his escort, Colonel Johnson, is forced to find alternate transportation off the Lighthouse by stealing an Erusean Osprey.
    • No sooner does "Mother Goose One" (Johnson's Osprey) lift off the landing pad when a new swarm of drones shows up, these being the more advanced MQ-101s (which are known to herald the arrival of an Arsenal Bird). The drones waste no time attacking both Mother Goose One and the IUN squadrons, turning the extraction into an aerial furball.
    • As the aerial battle commences, one of the IUN-PKF squadrons, Gargoyle, receives the code word, "Babel", and attacks the Lighthouse; while the attack is unsuccessful due to the missiles being intercepted by drones, it only adds to the confusion and chaos as lines of communication and coordination begin to break down between IUN and Osean forces.
    • During the chaos, Mother Goose One is hit by a missile. While the aircraft continues flying, the cockpit is seriously damaged, and Johnson is mortally wounded. With only Harling inside the stricken aircraft, the escorting pilots try desperately to contact him, to seemingly no avail.
    • Not long after losing radio contact, Mother Goose One, ostensibly under Harling's control now, turns back towards the Lighthouse, still not responding to hails or directions to leave the airspace, even as drones begin to swarm the aircraft.
    • Finally, a missile, assumed to be a stray one fired by Mage 2 but later revealed to have been fired by a drone spoofing Mage 2's IFF, strikes Mother Goose One, causing the aircraft to explode in midair with no survivors. With the primary objective failed and the Arsenal Bird Liberty entering the airspace, the IUN-PKF forces declare the mission a failure and pull out.
  • Osea and Erusea's simultaneous anti-satellite attacks kick off an ablation cascade, a well-documented hypothetical real life Disaster Dominoes scenario wherein space debris starts hitting satellites, breaking them and spreading more debris that breaks more satellites and making more debris and so on, that destroys most of the global satellite network and creates an information blackout that plunges the world into chaos.
• Disc-One Nuke:
  • The F/A-18F Super Hornet and Su-33 Flanker-D, some of the earlier planes you unlock and more or less equivalent aircraft between the US and Russian branches (each only has a single pre-requisite - the F-14D for the F/A-18F and the MiG-29A for the Su-33), share access to some of the most powerful special weapons in the entire game, including the EML railgun and the Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile (LASM), which makes mincemeat of otherwise highly durable warships. While the planes start to fall behind later in the game, they can easily last you a long time just by themselves.
  • In multiplayer, the MiG-21bis. It's far more maneuverable at both high and low speeds than its stats would indicate, and due to its massive parts cap, it can buff its missiles so high that normal missiles maneuver almost like QAAMs. This, combined with its low "cost", makes it a monster in low-points and no-subweapon rooms, and surprisingly competitive in unlimited rooms.
  • If a player is persistent enough, there's nothing stopping them from grinding out enough MRP to unlock the YF-23, F-22, or Su-57 by playing multiplayer or Free Mission after playing the first mission in the story. Any MRP you earn is permanent and carries over, so you can play through the campaign on your first try with the best planes. Previous games in the series required completing the campaign before even unlocking Free Mission mode, and better aircraft were unlocked through campaign progression instead of the now free-form Aircraft Tree. You still have to beat the campaign to unlock the X-02S Strike Wyvern though.
  • With the appropriate DLC installed, players can hop into the cockpit of an ADF-11F Raven (stat-wise the best plane bar none) from the moment they fire up the game for the first time. Its somewhat lackluster choice of special weapons tends to let the Raven be overshadowed by the F-22 and the X-02S once they become available, but it remains one of the most powerful planes in the game and can make most of the campaign that much easier, especially for new players with limited access to advanced planes and upgrade parts.
    • The ADF-01 FALKEN boasts established air superiority performance, but its Fuel-Air Explosive Bomb (FAEB) can dish out damage to clustered ground targets surpassing that of the SFFS.
  • Early missions against drones can be handled easily via Hyper-Velocity Air-to-Air Missiles (HVAAs), first available on the F-2A and later on the Su-33 and YF-23. They have decent accuracy from a distance due to their speed, allowing you to One-Hit Kill drones about as quickly as you can get the missiles to respawn on your plane's hardpoints.
• Disposable Vehicle Section: One of the core features of the AI-piloted ADF-11F Ravens.
• Don't Celebrate Just Yet: In Mission 19, all seems to be well when the second Arsenal Bird is finally destroyed... and then the two new super-drones Hugin and Munin show up and start to tear the Oseans and Eruseans new ones. The remaining fighters are forced to make a landing at a nearby abandoned carrier so that they can regroup.
• Drone Deployer:
  • The Arsenal Birds are designed as mobile drone bases, capable of deploying several dozen at a time.
  • The ADF-11F Raven deploys its own Attack Drones. It's also a subweapon the player can use.
• Dude, Not Funny!: No one, not even Bandog, is amused at Full Band literally chortling over High Roller's death and cracking shitty jokes at the newly-dead pilot's expense. His mocking is met with a frigid silence until Bandog breaks the ice by mocking him:
  C'mon, guys, where's your sense of humour? Your buddy made a joke. Laugh already.
• Dude, Where's My Respect?: Zig-Zagged—at first, it's averted, as Trigger is a new pilot who quickly earns the respect of the Mage Squadron and becomes trusted enough by high command to send on extremely dangerous missions, then played straight when he gets reassigned to Spare Squadron, as Spare is a penal unit, and the base CO, McKinsey, takes all credit for Spare's achievements. Then the trope gets subverted as Spare Squadron's accomplishments convince HQ that they're worth being incorporated into the military proper. All members of Spare Squadron are pardoned and some are sent off to other squadrons, but Wiseman vouches for Trigger and Count, which gets them both absorbed into the Long Range Strategic Strike Group as members of Strider and Cyclops Squadrons. Finally, owing to his "great success" commanding Spare Squadron, McKinsey is reassigned to a prestigious post on the front lines.
• Duel Boss: In Mission 18 ("Lost Kingdom"), you fight Mihaly for the third and final time as he pilots an X-02S Strike Wyvern equipped with an EML, and Strider Squadron, fully aware that only Trigger is able to match the Erusean ace, resign themselves to forming a perimeter around the duel so that no other hostiles may interfere. Meanwhile, Mihaly instructs the rest of Sol Squadron to retreat and pursue their objective of claiming Shilagean independence from Erusea, adding that he's not the one that will be guiding them towards that objective.
• Dwindling Party: 444th Fighter Squadron is sent up against impossible odds again and again and is guaranteed to lose some of their members in every other mission, to the point that even your named wingmen are not safe. After the initial mission, each subsequent level sees Spare Squadron's ranks dwindle: High Roller is shot down by enemy fighters, Champ is killed by Mihaly, Full Band is marked as a hostile by Bandog and is subsequently shot down by Count; while Tabloid survives to see the 444 considered a proper military unit, he suffers an off-screen death helping civilians on the ground. By the end of the game, Trigger and Count (and Avril, but she's the mechanic) are the only known survivors of the original squadron.
• Easier Than Easy: Casual Easy difficulty is recommended for players new to Ace Combat as a whole. It gives the player both unlimited guns and standard missiles while significantly reducing damage taken from enemies.
• Easy Level Trick: Mission 13 ("Bunker Buster") requires 5 missile silos to be taken out by directing bombers to deliver ground penetration explosives within a fairly strict time limit. Complicating this are the 3 dummy silos scattered amongst the real ones, and the fake ones are randomised each time the mission is started. However, the fake silos do not change if the mission is restarted, and they can be determined either by looking closely at them (the fake ones are painted on concrete and two-dimensional, while the real ones aren't) or shooting at them with your machine gun before attempting to bomb them (the fake ones will be removed as targets from your map, and Count will comment on finding a fake). It's possible to play the mission the first time with the sole purpose of finding the fake silos, and then reset the mission knowing which three silos to ignore for the actual bombing runs, to maximize the time you have and focus on landing the bombs on the silos.
• Elite Mooks:
  • Mister X's Sol Squadron stands head and shoulder above any regular enemy pilot you'll encounter on the battlefield. Mister X himself is the most dangerous human enemy in the game, and his wingmen are all ace pilots in their own right. They also fly nothing but top-tier planes that can withstand significantly more damage than most of the regular enemy planes. That they tend to show up at the end of long missions when you're likely to be low on ammo only makes them that much more dangerous. Thankfully, you're never required to actually shoot them down.^note The first time they show up, you just need to survive for a couple minutes until everyone's IFF goes haywire. The second time, you "only" need to defeat Mister X himself while the rest of Sol Squadron watches the duel from the sidelines.
  • About halfway through the campaign, XSAM batteries begin to replace the regular SAM sites, with the former having significantly higher missile speed and better homing capabilities, making them far more challenging to evade than the basic variant.
• Empathy Doll Shot: Just to hammer the War Is Hell point home, the cutscene on Tyler Island quickly jumps from soldiers being lined up in a firing squad, to a girl clutching her teddy bear, to Princess Cossette flinching from the sound of the gunshots.
• End of an Age: The onset of unmanned aircraft with AI comparable or superior to regular pilots brings forward the question: "What does it mean to be unmanned?". Avril recounts that her grandfather gave her a magazine with the title "Era of the Drones" and the tagline "Soon, there will be no one gripping a control stick and taking to the skies", referencing the increasing replacement of human pilots by unmanned aircraft. On the Erusean side of the story, Dr. Schroeder tries to extract flight data from the aging Mihaly in order to improve the UAVs' war performance and produce powerful drones armed with a depth of combat experience and unhindered by human limitations. Eventually, several characters start voicing their disapproval of UAV technology being used in the war, claiming that it has no place in the conflict and is no better than witchcraft, thus defying the trope.
• Enemy Civil War: Both sides. The spread of false information causes infighting within both Osean and Erusean militaries. While Osean forces are able to re-organize and join up with anti-war Erusean elements, Erusea pretty much disintegrates as a nation.
• Enemy Mine:
  • In the third SP Mission 'Ten Million Relief Plan', even Erusea is horrified of what Captain Torres and his crew planned to do, so they send the specifications of the Alicorn super submarine to Osea to allow the LRSSG to take the fight to Torres, before he can accomplish his goals of ending the war swiftly and violently with his nuclear shells. It is, however, implied that Erusea dragged their feet on sending the blueprints, and that at least one faction of Eruseans had a vested interest in nuking a capital city.
  • In the final two missions, all forces that are against the use of drone warfare team up together to take the fight to the Erusean radicals, who attempt to prolong the war even after the entire world had been thrown into chaos following the satellite disaster. After taking care of them, the coalition later fights Hugin and Munin to stop them from kickstarting a devastating Robot War.
• Energy Weapon:
  • The F-15C, MiG-31B, and Su-57 can carry Pulse Laser (PLSL) pods that shoot out blue laser blasts, similarly to how previous games used the Machine Gun Pods (MGPs).
  • The F-15E and Su-37 Terminator can carry a single TLS pod that resembles a streamlined version of the Morgan's "Zoisite" TLS, and fires a continuous white laser beam at significantly reduced damage compared to the PS2 games.
  • Much like the Arkbird before it, the Arsenal Bird Justice has a massive laser cannon that fires a large, continuous purple beam and a pair of Pulse Laser turrets which shoot out blue laser blasts.
  • The ADF-11F Raven is able to fire a TLS beam from its beak, much like its predecessor, the ADF-01 FALKEN. It can also deploy smaller UAVs that also use TLS. The playable version of the plane not only features the TLS as a subweapon, but also replaces the machine gun with a PLSL cannon.
  • The ADF-01 FALKEN included in the second DLC also fires a continuous laser beam from its retractable nose, only this time, it's clear blue like the game it debuted in. It also retains a power level closer to its pre-nerfed incarnation, taking 3 "pulses" to destroy an enemy bomber while the TLS on all other planes takes 5.
  • The third DLC adds the ADFX-01 Morgan, which can equip its classic "Zoisite" TLS pod.
• Escort Mission: Two of them.
  • Mission 10 has you escorting a transport plane. You need to protect the plane from long-range anti-air sites scattered across the countryside and a couple of squadrons of planes.
  • Mission 16 requires you to see a civilian vehicle through a chaotic urban battlefield where enemy units aren't immediately identified as such.
• Establishing Character Moment: The mission "444" is an establishing character moment for the entire Spare Squadron. It starts off with Champ forcing a take-off after cutting off Tabloid's plane on the taxiway, and telling the Air Traffic Control (who unsubtly keeps implying Trigger can't fly his plane) to "go to hell" after they call him out on it. Count tries to assume command of the squadron, but nobody listens to him, High Roller sets up a betting pool on who's going to live and who's going to die, Full Band proceeds to Speak Ill of the Dead when mentioning how Trigger got transferred over to the Spare Squadron by shooting a missile "in between old Harling’s eyes", and last but not least, AWACS Bandog sends out a warning to the squadron: "This is the penal unit. I decide when you die." When the mission is over, Colonel McKinsey throws everyone into solitary for disobeying his orders to not fire on the enemy bombers, despite the fact that he and most of the base personnel would likely have been obliterated by said bombers had Spare Squadron not intervened. It all goes to show how dysfunctional the Spare Squadron is.
• Exact Words:
  • Several of the in-game medals require the player to perform certain feats with machine guns. The MiG-21bis's MGPs count as such.
  • On your first mission in the 444th, Erusean bombers are fooled into thinking that the base (which was initially a decoy) is legit. McKinsey orders you to intercept them to make it more convincing. However, he did not say to shoot them down (though you need to in order to progress), and throws the whole squadron in solitary for "disobeying" orders.
• False Flag Operation: Erusea sics drones on Spare Squadron during a recon operation. But what's worse than just killer drones? The drones are conventional aircraft converted into UAVs and painted in Osean colors (and they spoof IFF signals, making them a violation of international law). One can tell that the planes are drones by the weird glowing bars below the cockpit canopies, but that requires getting a little too close for comfort.
• Fantastic Racism: Since the Circum-Pacific War, Belkans have become stereotyped as warmongering conspirators who frequently instigate conflicts with their advanced technology. Following Erusea’s descent into civil war from the ablation cascade, Erusean conservative forces on Tyler Island indiscriminately massacre the Belkan engineers and their families who lived and worked near the island’s mass driver, blaming them for leading their country to ruin. During Mission 18, the retreating Osean forces on the aforementioned island end up discovering the mass grave where the killings took place. The radicals aren't much better in that they're killing every citizen they come across.
• Fictional Geneva Conventions:
  • As part of the game's analysis on the growing role of drones in warfare, Erusea appears to be exploiting a loophole in laws prohibiting combatants from disguising themselves as civilians with intent to attack—apparently, loading an armed drone into a shipping container and getting it into position across state lines via civilian freight doesn't quite constitute a war crime (it helps that the Princess immediately leans on how this allowed them to hit military assets without damaging civilian centers, in contrast to messier counter-attacks, which caused Osea to get lots of flak from the media). As autonomously self-guided drones are not people, they cannot be prosecuted.
  • In the DLC, it is mentioned that the Alicorn is a violation of the in-universe START 2 treaties (STrategic ARms Reduction Treaty, named after the real-world treaties) due to its capability to carry and deploy nuclear weapons. Interestingly, in the real world, while there was an enacted START I treaty and a planned START II treaty, only START I was successfully enacted, with START II replaced by SORT and New START.
• Final Boss Preview: Exactly halfway into the game, you fight a prototype drone with extreme maneuverability and combat skills, to the point that Strider Squadron, who were following it, didn't expect anyone to be able to shoot it down. Two drones of the same type appear in the final mission, codenamed Hugin and Munin. They split from their "shell"—the ADF-11F—after being shot down, forcing Trigger to fight them again as ADF-11s, the final enemies of the game.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: In Mission 9, after you finish taking out all of the aircraft that were tagged as enemies, Bandog will inform Spare Squadron that there's just one left to take out. The fact that Full Band specifically is the one to ask where it is gives a hint as to what's about to happen to him.
• Forced to Watch: In Mission 10, the Bulgurdarestian forces guarding the border are itching to assist Spare Squadron and Roper 1 as they head toward the border, but their commanding officer denies permission to fire on the Erusean aircraft harassing them, as it would be taken as a pretext for invasion, so the big mass of blue "Friendly" units can do nothing but watch. Indeed, the Eruseans even broadcast a warning to Bulgurdarest that any attempt to fire on Erusean forces will be taken as hostile military action, and they're already preparing a ground invasion of Bulgurdarest if they're dumb enough to try and help Spare Squadron.
• Foreshadowing: It wouldn't be an Ace Combat game without it.
  • The news broadcast after Mission 1 shows Erusean UAVs launching from cargo containers, one of which is labeled "North Osea Gründer Industries". And in Mission 2, some of the Erusean radio chatter talks about giving "feedback for those war merchants" and complaining about manuals written in a foreign language, both hinting at a Belkan connection behind the drones.
  • As early as Mission 2, you can get a Jump Scare when certain ground targets explode with a huge blast. Strangely, it also goes unremarked on by either your AWACS or your wingmen. Eventually, you find out that it came from warheads for the Arsenal Birds' Helios airburst missiles, which have the same effect: a massive blue explosion that causes your HUD to temporarily fritz out.
  • In Mission 2, the five MQ-99 drones perform an aerobatic "bomb burst" maneuver. Later, in Farbanti, this is shown to have been learned from Mihaly and the Sol Squadron.
  • At the end of Mission 2, Knocker replies to Brownie's concerns of innocents being killed with, "You shoot, and someone gets killed. The guys in charge take care of the rest." Come Mission 4, Trigger shoots, and Harling inadvertently gets killed. The "guys in charge" take care of it by finding Trigger guilty of murder and transferring him to the 444th.
  • Similarly, Brownie expresses concern of innocents being killed by falling enemy aircraft. During Mission 19, Tabloid dies saving a child from a shot down drone crashing.
  • No matter how many of the Arsenal Bird's engines you disable in Mission 3 before it puts up its shield, the ending cinematic will always show it recalling its drones and leaving with all engines fully functional. At first it seems like an egregious case of Gameplay and Story Segregation... until the penultimate mission, where it is revealed that the Arsenal Birds have automated repair systems which allow them to restart damaged engines after a short while and owe to their extreme longevity.
  • During Mission 04, an Erusean controller says that the Arsenal Birds' strategic AI sent Liberty over Justice to come defend the space elevator. After the communications blackout, nations annexed by Erusea claim independence and start purging anybody related to Belka and the drone technology in revenge, choosing their liberty over justice towards the real culprits (the Radical Eruseans and what's left of the Grey Men).
  • One of the first things Bandog says to Trigger is that "I decide when you die!" Bandog later tags Full Band as an enemy, causing Count to inadvertently shoot him down. Bandog claims it was an accident, but several in Spare Squadron think that it really was Bandog making good on his threat.
    • Bandog also unintentionally gives another bit of symbolic foreshadowing when he responds to Count's snide remarks towards Trigger with, "You wouldn't understand. Not until you take a good look in the mirror." "Harling's Mirror" is an In-Universe riddle to describe the dichotomy between whether Harling intended to destroy the Lighthouse due to it causing the war, or save it in the hopes that it could bring peace. Count experiences growing jealousy towards Trigger, as well as his superiority complex over being under the (benevolent) thumb of Wiseman. Wiseman's death, making Count the de facto leader of Cyclops Squadron, and the final battle at the Lighthouse allow him to put aside his jealousy and recognize Trigger for the true ace he is.
  • The first time Cyclops Squadron and Strider Squadron are introduced, it is mentioned that they are returning from a deep reconnaissance mission into Erusean territory. When one of the Spare pilots questions what they are doing so far behind enemy lines, Full Band says that all he could dig up was that they were investigating "the ruins." Said ruins turn out to be that of Stonehenge, and Osean forces move in to capture it in order to repair the remaining cannon and use it to shoot down one of the Arsenal Birds.
  • During the mission where enemy planes are tagged as allies ambushing Spare Squadron, an Arsenal Bird starts launching Helios missiles into the area as well. Tabloid is puzzled as to why the Eruseans would fire Helios into the area indiscriminately without caring that this might shoot their own planes down. The enemy planes are also conspicuously silent during the mission, without the usual enemy chatter that often accompanies them. This is another hint that those planes don't actually have any pilots inside them: they're all being flown by AIs.
  • Trigger and Count encounter an odd drone while on an escort mission, one that is much more maneuverable and capable than the previous UAVs. It is a prototype of the final drone they fight, based on Mihaly's (and Trigger's!) flight data.
  • Mage Squadron's AWACS calls attention to Osea's satellite-based IFF system in the second mission of the game, mentioning how it is almost infallible and explains how it is what allows for Osea's almost-instant IFF tagging. Later, the entire system goes down when Erusea destroys Osea's communications satellites, forcing Trigger to rely on the more traditional (and slower) visual processing-based IFF systems and AWACS data link for the rest of the game.
  • During the first battle at the space elevator, Gargoyle Squadron's flight leader suddenly yells "Babel, babel, babel!", followed by the entire squadron turning towards the space elevator and firing a volley of missiles at it, though the UAVs intercept them all. Mage 1 wonders what the hell's going on until they conclude that command forgot to keep everyone informed again. When the satellite network goes down, this sort of right-hand-versus-left-hand conflict becomes commonplace.
  • There is an early hint in Mission 4 that the Erusean military is factionalized. Erusean radio chatter shows an Arsenal Bird system operator complaining to someone else about a senior officer who is ordering him to have the drones fire "warning shots" at Harling's escape craft. The operator (who sounds rather young himself) then snidely remarks that "He's an old-timer. Has no idea how drones are used." This is the earliest hint in the game that the younger Eruseans are very gung-ho about using drones aggressively while the older Eruseans are more cautious, a split that becomes official after the satellites go down.
  • In Mission 16, there is some Erusean radio chatter reporting that the drones are behaving strangely and are not acknowledging new orders being transmitted to them. One officer asks if the drones can be switched to slave mode instead. Shortly after, an Erusean pilot alarmingly reports that he was fired upon by a friendly drone. At the end of the mission, the drones do go rogue, and in Mission 19, the remnants of the Radical faction slave their remaining drones to human-operated aircraft to gain control over the unstable network.
  • Playing the SP missions in order (between Bunker Buster and Cape Rainy Assault) foreshadow later plot developments:
    • Anchorhead Raid has a Erusean commander rush the defences to defend an Erusean fleet meant to crush Osea at an upcoming decisive battle, lest "Labarthe and the conservatives" get traction. You later escort Labarthe himself in the middle of the aforementioned anti-war conservatives trying to fight the pro-war radicals.
    • At the end of Anchorhead Raid, a Erusean agent hands Torres the nuclear shells to enact Torres' plans of "world peace" via nuking the Osean capital of Oured. Given Torres declared independence from Erusea earlier, why would Erusea keep helping someone trying to attack Osea, and why would Erusea only send the blueprints to Osea to stop the Alicorn? The radicals were likely supporting Torres behind Erusea's back, leading to confusion.
    • Mimic Squadron shows up and ignores Clemens' order to stand down, much like the ADF-11s ignoring Erusea's attempt to get the UCAVs to stand down. Their behavior is even mimicked by the ADF-11s; shooting one down before the other causes the other to go berserk, and depending on which one you shoot down, they may dissolve into near-incoherent madness as they randomly fire at you, or channel their fury into overdrive as they focus a barrage on you.
  • The ALEX AI being used to simulate an entire war winds up foreshadowing all of Electrosphere, which was a simulation run by one man to predict the outcome of a war.
• Foregone Conclusion: Thanks to various Call-Forwards and attempts at Arc Welding, some subtle, by this point it's clear to many fans that the war has long-term consequences, as shown in Electrosphere, especially the creation of Nemo.
• Four Is Death:
  • Osea's expendable penal fighter squadron is the 444th Fighter Squadron "Spare". They are sent on the most dangerous missions to earn redemption either through victory or through death, with the latter being implied to be the far more common outcome. This is also further emphasized by the fact that the squadron (and their airbase) is nearly always referred to as the "four-four-four" or "four-forty-four", rather than the "four-hundred-forty-fourth".
  • Mission 4 has you leading an operation to rescue Vincent Harling. However, this one doesn't have a happy ending like in the fifth game.
• Four Lines, All Waiting: The game utilizes a Switching P.O.V. amongst four characters, though three of them are relegated to Cut Scenes, and the fourth, the Player Character, is never seen.
  • Trigger's adventures are detailed in the "Three-Act Structure" trope.
  • Avril Mead, the "Scrap Queen", is the star of the opening Cut Scene. A Wrench Wench, she restores a mothballed F-104 Starfighter and takes to the skies. The realistic outcome backfires when she's tagged as a bandit, shot down by Osean fighters (her own side), and then jailed. However, this leads to her helping run the 444 Air Base and keep its planes flying. After Trigger and Count are transferred out, the jailers and jailed band together and make a run for it; she ends up on Tyler Island, where she links up with Trigger again. Thereafter, she sails to the ISEV and helps mastermind the coalition of Oseans and Erusean conservatives.
  • Princess Rosa Cosette D'Elise is the ruler of Erusea, rallying the troops and starting an offensive war against (what she perceives to be) Osean intentions of dominion; she's seen and heard mostly through propaganda transmissions. After Farbanti is captured, the remains of her government try to spirit her away, but her transport is shot down and she's left marooned on Tyler Island, where Avril's group find her and take her in. Confronted by the bloodthirsty attitude of the Erusean radicals, Cossette joins forces with Avril in helping to end the war, and even personally destroys the mechanisms within the ISEV that power the Deflector Shields of the second Arsenal Bird, allowing Trigger to land the finishing blow.
  • Dr. Schroeder is a Belkan researcher who is responsible for Erusea's Attack Drones. Hired by the Erusean military to provide (a veneer of) Bloodless Carnage, keeping Erusean lives safe and minimizing Osean civilian casualties, he uploads and refines the drones' AI by taking readings from Mihaly A. Shilage, an aging Ace Pilot who serves as The Dragon for Erusea as a whole. He is at the ISEV, attempting to upload his latest AI to the drones, when Avril and Cossette seize it; seeing the slaughter his drones have wrought, he performs a Heel–Face Turn and helps brief the LRSSG on two Super Prototype drones who turn out to be the Final Boss.
• Fragile Speedster: MQ-99 and MQ-101 drones are inhumanly agile, but they go down in a single missile hit, while manned jets and the somewhat less agile drone-controlled versions of normally-manned jets take at least two normal missiles, and some, such as the A-10C, can survive even that.
• Frame-Up: Harling's death in Misson 04 seems to be the result of you firing a missile while your plane was pointed at his, but in Mission 16, Labarthe reveals that an Erusean drone disguised as an Osean fighter was the one that fired the killing shot, and that an Osean (you in particular, but he doesn't seem to be aware of it) was made to take the fall. Count is relieved to hear that you were innocent all along.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • For the part in Mission 4 when you shoot a missile in the general direction of former President Harling, triggering the cutscene in which he gets killed, it turns out that another missile gets fired from off screen at the same time. In Mission 16, it is mentioned that a drone disguised as a friendly fighter was the actual culprit. After Harling is shot down, the cutscene shows the drone flying past your plane from behind and to the right.
    • If you splash the last two drones harassing the transport with guns, the off-screen missile gets launched anyway, with the cutscene triggering on impact. And that missile actually spawns out of nowhere.
  • In Mission 10, a Z.O.E. emblem can be seen on the unknown drone, hinting who is supplying Erusea with drones and helping drive the war, but it's so small and fast that it's very easy to miss.
  • In the cutscenes with Dr. Schroeder in them, if one were to look really closely when his name badge is in the frame, they’ll notice that the letters ‘Z.O.E.’ are directly underneath his name.
• Gameplay and Story Integration:
  • Tabloid is the one who came up with the idea of sticking with Trigger in order to make it through each suicidal battle the 444th goes through. This is reflected in gameplay, where his plane will stick close to yours no matter where you go, even as you're on the run from the enemy F/A-18 drones with spoofed Osean IFFs in Mission 9.
  • After the Osean and Erusean satellite networks go down, you start having to manually ID targets to determine if they're friend or foe, and until those forces get that data, they don't know if you're friend or foe either, and forces that turn out to be friendly once IDed will shoot at you.
  • The briefing screens change not only based on who Trigger is deployed with, but they also differ before and after the satellites go down. Before they go down, the briefing map will update slideshow-style with enemy territory, movements, and objectives automatically updating from data forwarded from high command. After the satellites go down, you can actually see the person operating the briefing computer manually clicking and inputting the information, and the briefings are a lot more simplified due to the loss of communication.
  • Once scattered forces start coordinating more fully in the endgame, Long Caster updates IFF manually upon beginning missions. You even see initial targets show up in yellow for a moment before the data is sent through.
  • During the final two missions, it's stated that secure comms are still down and the plan isn't subtle at all, so everyone's just communicating on open frequencies. Accordingly, allied Eruseans still have red tags in radio subtitles, normally reserved for enemies.
  • Normally, Gameplay and Story Segregation is in effect when it comes to what planes you pick in what missions, as you're able to sortie advanced-tech fighters in peak condition even when you're, say, in a penal unit where it's stated that every plane at the base that isn't a fake is a relic that's been mothballed for some time. However, the final mission does have a mission-specific explanation: In the cutscene leading up to the briefing and the sortie setup, Avril comes across a hangar in the abandoned carrier that's absolutely packed with fighters, and when you prepare to take off, she radios you to inform you that she personally worked the fighter you're in to tip-top shape.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • You unlock planes through the Aircraft Tree. However even when you're supposed to be doing time for Spare Squadron, players still have access to the Aircraft Tree, which allows you to unlock military-grade planes and install military-grade upgrades. You also still have the Queen's Custom to apply to newer planes even after being separated from the Scrap Queen for a good chunk of the game. Later in the story, where you're most likely unlocking late-game planes, it prevails after the simultaneous anti-satellite operations disrupt the chain of command and military resupply lines.
  • Two examples from Mission 4:
    • You can still get an S rank even though you've been accused of killing the former President of Osea.
    • The game doesn't take into account if you're going for the Gun Run, as the cutscene will, rather jarringly, still show a missile shooting down Mother Goose One.
  • Although Brownie's death in Mission 3 is intended to present Mihaly unfavourably as he attacked two retreating pilots, several of the named aces that can be shot down for bonus points also spawn fleeing and will only start engaging Trigger if he fires first. As Skies Unknown doesn't track the player's "Ace Style" (unlike Zero), Trigger's choice of targets doesn't affect the story.
• Geo Effects: One of the new features is the introduction of clouds as a gameplay element. Flying into one can cause your aircraft to become more sluggish, and thicker clouds will interfere with your lock-on capability, disturb missile trajectory, and may completely darken your vision. Furthermore, all but the wispiest of clouds completely block the Tactical Laser System and Pulse Laser. Fly too high up and your plane will begin to ice over, stalling you and obscuring your vision in the process. Fly through a thunderstorm and your instruments may become less useful or fully inoperable.
• "Get Back Here!" Boss: At least six of the 24 secret ace pilots you can spawn in the campaign not only appear in out-of-the-way locations; they actually flee the battlefield the moment they spawn instead of joining the fight. Others don't actively flee but head in weird directions that can make it just as difficult to track them down (and some of them pilot stealth planes, making them even more elusive).
• Glass Cannon: The MiG-21bis has tremendous offensive capabilities with its gun pods, but it also has the lowest defense rating in the game and is one of the few planes that cannot get enough hitpoints to withstand an EML hit in multiplayer, which most other planes can with the level 2 hitpoint boosting part.
• Gone Horribly Right:
  • The penal unit's fake military base puts effort into looking as important and convincing as possible in order to distract enemy forces and waste their time. It works, to the point where Erusea is willing to send several bombers to flatten them.
  • Colonel McKinsey stresses the successes of the 444th Squadron to make himself look better to his superiors in the hopes of a promotion. Later, he indeed does get a promotion, but as a leader on the front lines of the conflict instead of the cushy office job that he was gunning for.
  • Late in the war when Osea occupies Farbanti, both Osea and Erusea decide to shoot down the other side's military satellites. Not only does this blind the militaries of both sides, but the resulting debris destroys almost all of the civilian satellites as well, plunging the entire world in chaos. Each country was unaware that the other had the same exact plan, making this a complete failure on part of their intelligence.
• Goroawase Number: One of the achievements requires flying a total of 76,500km in the campaign mode. In Japanese, "7-6-5" can be read as "na-mu-ko", or "Namco".
• Gotta Catch Them All: The game has 24 named aces that spawn on Normal difficulty or above once specific conditions are met after you've finished the campaign once. Defeating one unlocks a unique skin for the plane they're flying, and downing them all is rewarded with the Bird of Prey achievement. Some aces also need to literally be caught first because they start fleeing the op zone the moment they spawn.
• Grand Theft Prototype:
  • Of a superweapon variety. Erusea's lightning blitz against Osea and its allies resulted in the capture of the two Arsenal Birds, Liberty and Justice, used to defend the nearby orbital elevator.
  • Osea returns the favor by taking over Stonehenge and reactivating the one cannon Mobius 1 didn't destroy^note (prior to the events of Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies, one of the cannons' electrical or control systems was smashed by a rogue fragment of Ulysses, silencing the otherwise intact asteroid defense cannon) and uses it to bring down one of the Arsenal Birds. Unfortunately, while the shot tears through the Arsenal Bird's shields like a hot knife through butter and splits the Arsenal Bird in half, the stresses placed on the old gun by firing it once more render it as inoperable as the other seven.
  • Osea attempts to carry this out upon the super-sub Alicorn in the first DLC mission, only to be beaten to the punch by the sub's commanding officer, Captain Matias Torres, who leads his crew in a mutiny and seizes the sub for his own horrible, insane goals.
• Gratuitous French: The ending song, "pensées", sounds like it's a love song, but is really a long string of gibberish to even French speakers, as the lyrics simply do not make sense and lack coherence despite being sung in phonetically correct French.
• Guide Dang It!: While the Campaign Assault Records screen does give hints toward spawning certain ace pilots (some of them are quite specific), many of them still require some seriously tricky precision at times. Be it flying through an absurdly tiny tunnel in the Roca Roja desert or downing every enemy on screen inside a ridiculous time limit, there's a lot of trial and skill required to get them all.
• Hegemonic Empire: Erusea is revealed to be a collection of different nations and ethnicities that have all at one point been annexed and assimilated by the old Erusean kingdom, among them being Mihaly’s homeland of Shilage. Following the communications blackout caused by the Osean and Erusean ASAT attacks, several of these nations take advantage of the chaos to declare independence from Erusea.
• Heir Club for Men: The epilogue reveals this is in full effect in Erusea. The king and any sons or brothers, as well as presumably any uncles or nephews he may have had, died during the Lighthouse War, leaving Princess Rosa Cossette D'Elise the sole living member of the royal family. Erusea's legislature is mentioned to be working on changing the law so Cossette can become queen, but until they can manage that, the throne is vacant.
• Heroic Mime: Lampshaded in Mission 14, when Count mentions that the best part of Strider Squadron is how Trigger never runs his mouth off.
• Hijacked by Ganon: Once again, Belka is involved in instigating a major conflict in Strangereal. Dr. Schroeder states that this trope is all the Belkans have left after they nuked their own country and had much of their own territory claimed by other nations.
• Hired Guns: Mimic Squadron, hired by Brigadier General Clemens to assassinate Trigger. Their loyalty to him is minimal, as they continue their attacks despite him trying to call off the hit.
• Hopeless Boss Fight:
  • The Arsenal Bird's first appearance in Mission 3 boils down to the IUPF being unable to even get close to it as it sends a ridiculous amount of missiles and drones after them, while taking advantage of the game's cloud mechanic to cover itself. The best Trigger can do is dodge until a retreat order is issued, as firing missiles will only prompt some UCAVs to take the hit for the Arsenal Bird, despite the airship having multiple target hitboxes. Even if the IUPF pilots do manage to inflict some damage on the Arsenal Bird, it just activates a Deflector Shield, which destroys all missiles and forces away all aircraft within the shield's radius. After that, command orders all squadrons to retreat.
  • You fight Mister X a total of three times, so naturally you can't destroy him the first or second time you cross paths. Surviving long enough for all the scripted radio chatter to play out is the only way to end these first two fights, and often easier said than done thanks to his skill and plain impossible flying.
• Hope Spot: The game has quite a lot of these.
  • Brownie's plane gets hit by a missile but is still able to fly. Her squadron leader orders her to return back to base with another escort plane, while the rest of the squadron hold off the enemy force. Just when the two planes are about to exit the combat zone, they fly straight into Mihaly.
  • The mission to rescue ex-President Harling goes roughly at first, with the initial Sea Goblin squad being completely annihilated, but Colonel Johnson manages to rescue Harling and the two fly a V-22 Osprey out. Just when it seems like they're going to make it, the plane catches a missile and Colonel Johnson is killed, and for some unknown reason, Harling decides to pilot the plane back to the space elevator. When Trigger tries to shoot a drone that is trailing the plane, the missile instead hits Harling's plane directly, downing the aircraft and killing everyone onboard.
  • Osea stages an invasion of Farbanti to neutralize Erusea's civilian and military leadership and hopefully end the war, as most of the past wars ended with the capture of the enemy capital. Here, however, the global satellite communication network is destroyed, throwing everything into chaos. In addition, with most of Erusea's top ranking officials killed in the fighting, there's nobody with the authority to actually convince all of Erusea to surrender.
    • During the Battle of Farbanti itself, after Wiseman is killed by Mihaly, Trigger duels Mihaly one-on-one and actually scores a few good hits, and is implied that he got within one missile shot of bringing Mihaly down and avenging Wiseman. Unfortunately, the satellite network is destroyed at that exact moment and everyone's HUDs on both sides of the battle subsequently malfunction. Mihaly takes that moment to slip away in the confusion, while Trigger and the rest of the squadron are left reeling and unable to pursue them.
  • Osea then attempts to back an anti-war Erusean general who has the influence to reunify the country. However, despite Trigger's best efforts, the general is killed by an Osean fighter under orders from an AWACS who had been given false intel from the Erusean radicals.
• I Did What I Had to Do: Strider Squadron feels bad for having to raid rural Shilage. They know how culturally important it is, but they need the food, fuel, and ammo supplies stashed in the castle. Húxiān mentions that she feels like a burglar, but Jaeger reassures her that it's for the best, even if he himself vows to never tell that part of the story to his son. They start feeling even worse when they notice the lines of refugees crowding the roads, now realizing that they're not just stealing from rebel militants, but civillians as well. The reluctance extends even to Long Caster, who drops his usual casual demeanor to broadcast demands of surrender to the defending enemy forces and making it clear Strider Squadron doesn't want to fight anyone that they don't have to, but unfortunately, Sol Squadron is having none of it and gives Strider an earful for acting like common bandits. Mihaly's entrance puts an end to the discussion, as he uses the event to challenge Trigger to a duel.
• I Have Many Names: as is traditional for the franchise, you start out with just a callsign ("Mage 2") and a TAC name ("Trigger"), but gradually accumulate notoriety as the game goes on. Trigger starts to be referred to as "Three Strikes," referring to the three sin lines painted on his plane's tailfin(s) whilst in the 444 Squadron, and which Trigger retains as personal heraldry. When Trigger joins the Long Range Strategic Strike Group, their first mission results in the Eruseans nicknaming them "the Snowbirds" because of the long migration from the nearest Osean airbase to Snider's Top, site of Mission 11. And during the next mission, Trigger and Wiseman become known as the "Osean Big Shots," as they are, unquestionably, the best Ace Pilots on their side. All three nicknames are referred to repeatedly during Mission 15, amongst others.
• I'll Kill You!: Once one half of Mimic Squadron is shot down, the other will lose it. in between Scream's mood-swinging and grief and Rage's anger, they'll start screaming this between any (barely) lucid moments they might have.
• If My Calculations Are Correct: Specter 1 constantly mentions during the search for the Alicorn that the patrol squadron really only needs one aircraft to survive out of the four P-1s fielded, something which irritates Count since he doesn't believe they're expendable. Count gets particularly pissed at Specter 1 if all but one aircraft goes down while still believing that they only need the surviving one to get the sonobuoys deployed. If all four aircraft make it out alive, Specter 1 thanks the LRSSG and muses that this outcome certainly wasn't in the calculations, before Count tells him that they can't rely on calculations when they have an X-factor with them.
• Immune to Fate: In the SP Missions, David North says that some individuals are exempt from rules that should apply to everyone. These individuals, called "singularities", make it between difficult and outright impossible to determine how an engagement would play out against them in a simulation. Since Matias Torres and Trigger are two such individuals, ALEX determines that an accurate simulation between the two would take months to create.
• Impeded Communication: Both Osean and Erusean forces, at the height of the Battle for Farbanti, launch anti-satellite missiles hoping to cripple the other side at the same time, not realizing that they had the same idea. Not only does this take out military satellites, but civilian ones as well due to the debris field it creates. This brings global communication to a halt and leads to massive infighting on the Usean continent. With radical and conservative Eruseans, independent forces, and the Oseans fighting each other (or themselves, due to IFF not working), all sense of order is gone until the final battle, when the latter groups join forces to fight the Radicals.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: The Erusean drones used against Osea's navy in the initial offensive manage to not harm a single civilian, even when attacking Osean ships in their harbors. Not a single civilian is caught in the blast of any of the weapons the drones fire, nor (presumably) are any civilians caught in the secondary blasts from the ships the drones hit. That the drones manage not to shoot down Osean fighters and crash them into civilians or their property is also impressive.
• Improbable Piloting Skills: Champ disobeys Bandog and decides to engage Mihaly's pursuing Su-30SM by performing a not-quite-Pugachev's Cobra in a MiG-29A, which has never displayed such a capability in real life, to get behind Mihaly. Sadly for Spare 8, the Erusean ace quickly shows him up with a Kulbit and disintegrates him with a missile at point blank range. And then Mihaly finds his match in Trigger, the one pilot he could not instantly kill with his usual point-blank missile attacks.
• Infinity -1 Sword: The YF-23 Black Widow, F-22A Raptor, and Su-57 are the final planes at the end of their aircraft trees. They're quite powerful in their own right, but there's one plane that's stronger.
• Infinity +1 Sword: The X-02S Strike Wyvern requires beating the campaign to open up in the Aircraft Tree, and requires the purchase of at least one of the YF-23, F-22A, or Su-57, and 2 million MRP to unlock. Its stats are unparalleled among the base game roster.^note The DLC superplanes are intentionally overpowered in their own right, but that's why they're DLC.
• "Instant Death" Radius: Get out of the way when the Arsenal Birds fire up their Deflector Shields, or you're dead.
• Institutional Apparel: Downplayed with Spare Squadron when they're not off on missions. Being both fighter pilots and convicts, the 444th Squadron pilots' flight suits also double as their prison jumpsuits, despite being military green rather than bright orange, as seen with Tabloid when he meets with Avril. Their only identifier as convicts is an orange armband that states their prisoner number.
• Interface Screw:
  • Flying into the clouds during an electrical storm will cause your HUD to flutter slightly. Getting struck by lightning makes the plane lurch as the systems spasm, and then the entire interface starts to wobble and flicker for a full minute, with your radar dropping out at random until it recovers.
  • One late-game escort mission has your allies and even the escortee set as valid targets. You have to double-check the target label to avoid failing the mission.
  • For a couple of missions after the satellite IFF network goes down, targets have to be manually ID'd with a flyover before they're marked as friendly or hostile. Locking on manually and focusing on them speeds up the process. Attacking prematurely enough times will cause Long Caster to mark the mission as a failure, citing the inability to distinguish friends and foes as a detriment.
• Interface Spoiler: Those who have purchased the Season Pass have full access to the entire game's soundtrack from the menu. Careful not to read the song titles before you play the game.
• Irony:
  • In Mission 12 ("Stonehenge Defensive"), you, the Oseans, are defending the Stonehenge from the attacking Eruseans, a complete role reversal from Mission 12 of Ace Combat 04, Stonehenge Offensive. This is further compounded as the mission boils down to the Oseans hijacking an Erusean superweapon to shoot down an Osean superweapon hijacked by the Eruseans.
  • In Mission 4 ("Rescue"), the Eruseans assassinate Harling by using a drone to shoot his V-22 down, and Trigger gets blamed for the act because he was the closest at the time of the whole fiasco. Fast forward to SP Mission 2 ("Anchorhead Raid")—Trigger can shoot down multiple V-22s carrying Erusean officers leaving the battlefield, which means the Eruseans are now on the receiving end of having key high-ranking officials being shot down this time.
  • In Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War, Galm Team is given the option of escorting the OFS Kestrel under the command of a Captain Andersen on its maiden voyage to a naval base, where it will be properly fitted with armaments for self-defense. Come Mission 20, and it is revealed that the OFS Admiral Andersen was hurriedly shipped off on its maiden voyage in an effort to combat the rise in drone technology at the start of the war, but also didn't have any defenses ready.
  • A meta example happened with the development of the game. Director Kono mentioned that the "CFA" in "CFA-44 Nosferatu" stands for "Carrier Fighter Attacker", and that the plane initially couldn't be added into the base game because its delta wings clipped through the aircraft carrier hangar when rising up to the deck on the elevator. Some slight modifications to the design had to be made to make it work for the 25th Anniversary DLC.
• It Can Think: The drones initially avert this for most of the game, but there are a few moments that imply that the drones are smarter than they let on.
  • During "Last Hope," the F/A-18 drones escorting Schroeder's plane suddenly attack Trigger and Count even after the two defend them from Erusean conservatives. During the fight, the drones not only call for backup from nearby MQ-99 drones (by overriding the authority of the Erusean radicals, which shocks them), but Schroeder makes some comments that imply that the drones know Schroeder is carrying Mihaly's flight data and are actively trying to kill anyone who may try to stop them from obtaining the data for themselves.
  • Hugin and Munin play this trope to a T. Not only are they loaded with Mihaly's flight data, giving them almost unparalleled combat prowess, but they also are very smart. To start, when they go active, they immediately proceed to the Lighthouse and establish air superiority while they wait for the Lighthouse's transmitter to power up so they can upload Mihaly's flight data when it does. When Trigger crashes their party and turns the battle in his favor, they begin studying him and recording his flight characteristics, adding it to their own data banks. And then, when one of them is destroyed, the other, instead of fighting, flees into the Lighthouse's tunnel and hacks the tunnel doors to try and prevent Trigger from following, even staging an ambush within the tunnels itself. It was pretty much all but said in words that if they had succeeded, they would have brought a real Robot War to Strangereal.
• It Only Works Once: The Oseans capture and repair the remaining railgun of the Stonehenge battery to destroy one of the Arsenal Birds. However, because it's been neglected for over a decade, they can only get one shot in. Fortunately, it hits home, and the Arsenal Bird is destroyed, turning the tide of war in Osea’s favor.
• It's Up to You: Lampshaded and used for characterization. Spare Squadron is mostly interested in keeping themselves alive, which leads to Bandog constantly berating them to follow Trigger's example: shut up and actually get on with the mission. Even afterwards, when you face Mihaly, the rest of Strider and Cyclops Squadrons quickly realize that they're no match for the Erusean ace and leave him to you.
• Job-Stealing Robot:
  • Heavily implied during the DLC mission "Unexpected Visitor." Apparently more than a few Erusean fighter squadrons found themselves Reassigned to Antarctica and replaced by drones, with a least one pilot joking how the furball is a meeting place for those squadrons.
  • The final mission of the campaign has a friendly Erusean pilot angrily asking what happened to Erusea's legendary ace pilots, and wondering if relying too much on drone development is to blame for the country's massive collapse in piloting skill.
• Justified Tutorial: The escalating combat situations at the start of the war is reason enough for Clown to fulfil his role as squadron leader and give a refresher course on combat tips while the first few missions ease you into the game's mechanics.
  • The first mission has Clown suggest switching to your special weapons—your F-16's 4AAMs—to take out a group of four enemies.
  • The second mission introduces you to the cloud mechanic. Clown will mention to be careful not to stay inside for too long, or your plane will ice up and slow down. There is a highly maneuverable drone flying around inside a cloud that forces you to go inside and engage it, trying to shoot it down under conditions that give lowered lock-on and missile accuracy.
• Kangaroo Court:
  • Heavily implied to be the reason why Avril was sent to the penal base at Zapland under the guise of breaking wartime aviation laws. Osea needed mechanics to restore mothballed aircraft as decoys for the base, and they knew Avril had successfully restored a supersonic fighter—there is also a subtle implication that the Osean government, already reeling from a loss of reputation from their counter-attack on Farbanti damaging civilian infrastructure, was trying to cover up the fact that they shot down her aircraft—a civilian aircraft, technically—without making proper identification and attempting to signal to her before engagement.
  • Although the evidence was circumstantial at best,^note (basically boiling down to "An Osean missile hit Harling's V-22, and Trigger was the closest") Trigger is very quickly court-martialed and sentenced to the 444th in under a month. As Harling's death was a huge morale loss for Osea, Trigger became a convenient scapegoat for the operation's failure.
• Keystone Army: Once an Arsenal Bird goes down, its MQ-101s cease to be a threat.
• Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better: Downplayed example. Missiles and machine guns are more practical compared to the energy weaponry that is available for some of the mid-tier airplanes and the X-02S. The TLS and EML are powerful but need focus in their aim (though the latter works through clouds), and there's often less ammo compared to bombs and special missiles.
• Lampshade Hanging: Upon learning that Tabloid is actually Belkan, Avril comments that Belkans are known for their conspiracies, to which Tabloid replies that it's just a stereotype, reflecting the sentiment of fans of the series who believe that Belkans always have a hand in whatever conflict that took place in each game somehow. Of course, this game is no exception as well, when it's revealed that the whole reason for the war is that some upstart Erusean officers got their hands on Belka's advanced AI technology, and Dr. Schroeder—a Belkan—worked with the EASA to collect flight data from Mihaly to improve their performance.
• Laser-Guided Karma: In the aftermath of Mission 10, the debriefing mentions that Commander McKinsey gets sent to the front lines for being The Neidermeyer that he was. He did stress his achievements he "accomplished" while commanding the 444th to the top brass.
• Last Chance Hit Point: Getting hit by the EML on Mihaly's X-02 will not destroy you instantly, but will bring you to 99% damage regardless of whatever damage you had before.
• Last Lousy Point: Certain achievements, like acquiring S-Rank on every mission for one difficulty or downing all of the named aces, will have one or two major hurdles that will be a roadblock, the most common ones being:
  • The named ace in the F-35C, Mantis, requires you to fly directly along the mass driver rail in Mission 17. However, you have to fly very close along it, and for the entire length, during a part of the mission with a hidden timer in the background counting down for when the armada of planes that the ace accompanies spawns. And you won't even know if you did it right until you can find, identify, and then shoot down the ace among the dozen or so other stealth fighters he spawns with.
  • S-ranking Missions 9 and 13. Both of these missions have a series of main targets for you to go after, but due to the point requirement, you're also going to have to take down a large number of other enemies, which is a lot harder than it sounds when outside circumstances related to the mission force you to either move fast to make the time requirement or just not die to unavoidable missiles.
  • The achievement for flying 76,500 kilometers can only be obtained through campaign mode. This requires numerous playthroughs of campaign mode over and over, and—not counting multiplayer achievements—will most likely be the last one players will obtain.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Mihaly's training software◊ looks exactly like a game of AC 7.
• Legacy Vessel Naming:
  • The aircraft carrier Kestrel II plays a part in the story, as a successor to the original OFS Kestrel. It is sunk during its maiden voyage during the initial attack on Farbanti at the start of the war.
  • The Admiral Andersen breaks the Theme Naming tradition of Osean vessels as a tribute to the original Kestrel's captain, who proved instrumental in ending the Circum-Pacific War. It plays a larger role, being the abandoned carrier that launches Trigger's craft in the final mission against yet another Belkan attempt at revenge.
• Let No Crisis Go to Waste:
  • During Operation Domino, one of the Erusean port facility staff jokes that all the freshly-sunk ships are going to net them a fortune once the war's over, and suggests buying stocks in salvage companies in advance.
  • It's very heavily implied the Erusean Radicals are supporting Torres' quest for nuclear terrorism, as they pass on intel to one of his sailors despite Erusea trying to apprehend Torres when the Alicorn launches. His target is, after all, Osea.
  • It's further implied the reason why Mega Corps take over the world in Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere is due to the anti-satellite missiles of Osea and Erusea destroying worldwide communications and shipping; it's no wonder why Neucom and General Resources, who both have communications as one of their moneymakers^note You can see a Neucom-made smartphone ad in Anchorhead and the latter with shipping as part of their major operations, wind up being the two big corps in Electrosphere.
• Lightning Bruiser: The Arsenal Birds are both extremely heavily armed and deceptively fast for their enormous size. If you don't take out the main propellers quickly, most of your time in a fight against one will be spent just trying to catch up with the monster even if you pilot the fastest planes the game has to offer. It's telling that even with most of its propellers destroyed, an Arsenal Bird still matches your standard cruising speed of 600 km/h.
• Luck-Based Mission: The seventh mission has you providing cover as a recon wing retreats to friendly airspace, pursued by enemy craft. The dogfight takes place in a lightning storm. If your fighter is hit by lightning—which it can and will be—your nose is automatically pushed towards the ground by about 45 degrees; since you're also weaving your way between a bunch of stone pillars, this can result in experiencing an unscheduled landing before you have a chance to react. If your fighter is hit by lightning or is even near a lightning strike, your HUD will short out, removing your ability to aim munitions until it finally sorts itself out (which, depending on the Beam Spam going on at any given moment, may take a while). Your Lazy Backup do not participate, as they are (justifiably) nervous about following you into this maelstrom. You are fighting drones, which are more maneuverable than your planes and outnumber your side. It's an Escort Mission, with seven different allies spread out across a battlefield easily 15 km across—reducing, if not simply eliminating, the viability of any of the multi-target AAMs. And if lightning happens and they happen to fly into the ground, it's an instant Game Over.
• Macross Missile Massacre:
  • In addition to the returning 4- and 6-Target Air-to-Air Missiles, the game introduces 8-Target Air-to-Air and Air-to-Ground Missiles for a handful of craft - so many at once that the 8AAMs are carried in entirely separate pods underneath the wings. Following up an 8AAM or 8AGM launch with firing off the two standard missiles would allow the player to send 10 missiles foe-wards within a second. Additionally, there is the returning Rocket Launcher Pod, here abbreviated to RKT, which rapidly fires off a large volley of unguided rockets, and its more advanced version the GRKT, which fires a rapid volley of homing rockets.
  • The Arsenal Birds have massive batteries of ten VLS anti-air missile launchers, which have the agility to perform the classic Macross Missile Massacre "missile bloom" and the following inverse "missile bloom" effect, resulting in about ten missiles doing a 270 degree or more turn to converge on a single point, often your tail.
  • Taken even further with the reintroduction of the CFA-44 Nosferatu and its All Directional Multi-Purpose Missile (ADMM) sub-weapon. Unleashing a salvo of 12 rounds can result in the very fast destruction of your targets.
• Made of Indestructium: As Count himself is surprised to discover, the main propellers of the Arsenal Birds are extremely resilient. You can knock them out for a little while, but they'll eventually come back online and still function without a bent blade to be seen.
  Count: The main propeller is moving again! Just how hard is that thing!?
• Madness Mantra: In "Anchorhead Raid", Mimic Squadron shows up to deal with Trigger and Count at the end of the mission. If you kill one sibling, the other has a full psychotic breakdown, screaming "I'll Kill You!" over and over again.
• Magnetic Weapons:
  • The F/A-18F, Su-33, and X-02S can mount an underslung EML, previously only seen on the CFA-44 Nosferatu, as one of many examples of the integration of advanced weapons systems with proven airframes, befitting of the 20 Minutes in the Future setting.
  • Osean forces repair or replace the wrecked systems of the eighth and final gun of the Spaceguard Turret Network "Stonehenge" that was destroyed in a meteorite impact prior to Mobius 1's attack which silenced the turret network during the Usean Continental War, bringing the aging hybrid electromagnetic/chemical-propelled cannon back to life for one last shot to bring down one of the Arsenal Birds.
  • The Alicorn featured in the DLC missions has two 200mm railguns, which are capable of firing neutron warheads. Its captain wants to use them or the Alicorn's aircraft to kill a million people to scare Osea and Erusea into ending the Lighthouse War. At the conclusion of the final DLC mission, it turns out that the Alicorn has a hidden 600mm railgun under its runway, which is what Torres plans on ending a million lives with.
• Mêlée à Trois:
  • Hoo boy... After all the world's satellites get destroyed, chain of command for both sides become non-existent. As a result, the Erusean military splinters into various factions including (but not limited to): anti-war conservatives, pro-war radicals, and those who want to liberate nations annexed by Erusea many years ago (of which there are plenty). Most dangerously, Erusea loses control over its drone army, who begin to operate independently under the direction of their strategic AI, following their own plan to win the war themselves, no matter who gets shot in the process. Some prisoner soldiers assigned to Osean penal units also turn against their captors. Finally, with all this going on, allies end up shooting at each other anyway because everyone's IFF systems are still faulty. Interestingly, your squadron remains loyal to Osea this whole time, and you never actually engage other Osean forces if they have been identified as Osean.
  • In "Unexpected Visitor," Mimic Squadron announces their arrival on the scene by attacking Erusean fighters and then targeting the Osean forces. Their behavior is so unpredictable that Long Caster strongly advises that you destroy them ASAP despite not knowing who they are.
• Mickey Mousing: Director Kazutoki Kono wanted one last song on the soundtrack that truly had feeling to it, so Keiki Kobayashi composed "Daredevil" for the second half of Mission 19 in spite of the game quickly approaching its original release deadline. The decision was made to delay the release of the game to restructure the gameplay of that mission to play out in time with the music. The end result is "Daredevil" slowly building up to a drop, at which point a One-Woman Wail signals the Arsenal Bird's shields finally coming down for good.
  • The first DLC mission has Trigger intercepting a fleeing group of planes, one of which has a cruise missile on board. When the threat is eliminated, the frantic music crescendos before transitioning to Ominous Latin Chanting.
• Mildly Military:
  • The 444th Fighter Squadron is composed of a bunch of expendable convicts and Jerkass operators, so they're not as professional as the official military forces. They are prone to swearing, cracking jokes, and insulting each other.
  • Downplayed with the Long Range Strategic Strike Group. It's an official military group and its members are more professional than the 444th, but it still has looser regulations than what you would expect. AWACS Long Caster constantly eats on the job, and members of the two squadrons in the group appear to be interchangeable at will, with Count and Húxiān, who are both members of the Cyclops Squadron, replacing members of the Strider Squadron in some missions (Jaeger states that rotations between squadrons is Wiseman's doing). After the satellite attacks, the LRSSG is left with no clear chain of command, and they drop all professionalism and just do what they need to survive.
• Military Mashup Machine: The Alicorn from the DLC missions is essentially a submarine aircraft carrier battleship, with a pair of powerful railguns that can easily tear any other warship afloat apart, a durable hull that can withstand concentrated attack, a CATOBAR flight deck, a capacity of up to thirty aircraft, and a whole mess of drones, missiles, and various smaller defensive guns. It also has an enormous 600mm L/128 railgun hidden under the flight deck with intercontinental range and the ability to deliver weapons of mass destruction.
• Minimalist Run: Invoked:
  • One of the medals requires doing a full completion of the campaign without using any weapon except machine guns. This means no missiles and no special weapons except for the MiG-21's machine gun pods. Another medal simply requires doing the same on the final mission.
  • Another medal requires defeating Mihaly in the final battle with him without using special weapons in under 5 minutes.
  • Inverted by the medal for taking down the second Arsenal Bird, which requires never using machine guns throughout the entire level, which is harder than it sounds.
• Min-Maxing: Some experienced players in online mode have been known to equip their planes with bombs—leaving them with no air-to-air special weapon—to free up equipment cost for more aircraft parts.
• Misbegotten Multiplayer Mode: Multiplayer has an extended tech tree and exclusive cosmetics, but there are only two gamemodes available: team deathmatch and free-for-all.
• Misfit Mobilization Moment: During Mission 9, Spare Squadron encounters a squadron of fighters masquerading as allies, who lock on to them. The squadron then forms up with Trigger so Bandog can mark the hostile fighters, which allows Spare Squadron to easily deal with the enemies.
  • Subverted when Bandog appears to trick Count into killing Full Band, after which Spare Squadron is officially disbanded and Trigger and Count transfer to the LRSSG.
• Mood Whiplash:
  • Mission 3 starts with Mage Squadron showing up and cleaning house to a cool rock beat, and once you take the planes down, the pilots celebrate and say how "even a rabid dog would know better" than to mess with them. Then the Arsenal Bird shows up and everything goes straight to hell.
  • Mission 09 sees Trigger finally leading the Spare Squadron into a great victory against the enemy planes, only for Full Band to be accidentally shot down by Count because the former's plane is tagged as an enemy by AWACS Bandog—it's heavily implied that Bandog might have done it on purpose.
• Mook Horror Show:
  • Missions involving the LRSSG eventually become a terrifying experience in-universe for the Erusean military thanks to the sheer amount of destruction Trigger inflicts and their complete inability to stop him. It gets so bad that a recurring MiG-31B pilot in the first two DLC missions immediately beats a hasty retreat upon realizing "Three Strikes" is in the area, claiming his aircraft is suffering from mechanical problems (a remarkable coincidence that his squadron pokes fun at).
    Erusean Port Facility: It's not a hallucination! It's a nightmare!
  • There's also Mihaly A. Shilage, aka Mister X. Every time he shows up on the battlefield, one of your allies isn't going back. Everyone is terrified of fighting him and flees immediately at the first sight of him. Hugin and Munin, the two super AI drones with flying skills based on Mihaly, are so effective in the battle that your allies are dropping like flies and only Trigger alone is capable of going up against them.
• More Dakka:
  • The MiG-21 can carry a pair of machine gun pods, which fire very rapidly and up the plane's number of gun barrels from one to five, resulting in massive damage output.
  • The A-10 and its infamous GAU-8 Avenger carry more ammo than any other machine gun on difficulties where machine gun ammo is limited: 4800 rounds, where most other American aircraft (and derivatives thereof, as well as the MiG-21bis and MiG-31B) carry 2400, and everything else carries 800.
• Mythology Gag:
  • The various songs that play in Multiplayer matches include "Gambit", "Megalith ~ Agnus Dei", and "Zero", among others.
  • The medal awarded for dealing laser damage to enemies in multiplayer is called "Excalibur", after the superweapon from Zero.
  • The last time an enemy boss deployed UAVs equipped with laser beams to swat down incoming missiles was in Ace Combat Infinity, where the Butterfly Master was never seen without a flock of MQ-90Ls that made her aircraft impervious to missiles until most drones were incapacitated. During the final mission, Hugin and Munin each deploy a pair of Weapon UAVs that intercept your missiles with laser beams and otherwise impede your endeavors to damage the superdrones.
  • Ace Combat 2 had not yet introduced Special Weapons to the franchise, so players still only used standard missiles. The XFA-27 was the first super plane to be introduced to the series, and what made it stand out from the other planes was that it always had four missiles ready to fire off instead of two like with every other plane. This is replicated with the plane's Multiple-Launch Standard Missile (MSTM) special weapon—essentially four additional standard missiles at the ready.

Tropes N to Z

• Necessary Drawback:
  • The ADF-11F Raven and DarkStar use Pulse Lasers instead of traditional guns. They're quite powerful, but you only have one compared to two PLSL pods on other planes, the lasers still can't penetrate through clouds, and the effective range of the lasers is literally half of how far externally mounted Pulse Lasers can shoot.
  • The more powerful a plane is, the lower the number of chaff/flares that it has available^note Entry-level planes can pack over half a dozen flares, while top-tier planes usually only carry two, three at most. Advancing through the Tech Tree essentially trades defensive measures for better offensive capabilities, and you're expected to compensate for it with your growing skills at evading missiles.
  • In addition, more advanced planes have lower upgrade part caps for the three categories, resulting in less upgrade flexibility.
  • Several planes, such as the Typhoon, the F-15J, and the Rafale, carry HCAAs, or High Capacity Air-to-Air missiles; these are slightly stronger (both damage and homing-wise) standard missiles that can only target single aircraft and can only be fired two at a time, but reload almost instantly. As this would be brokenly powerful against the swarms of drones you fight regularly, Erusean MQ-101s have built-in damage resistance specifically against HCAAs, such that even with the damage part equipped, HCAAs will always take two shots to kill them, despite regular missiles always taking one; this leaves 4AAMs and 6AAMs as the most effective special weapons against them.
  • Speaking of damage reduction, the Arsenal Birds also come with innate DR against bombs. This is a developer response to a common strategy in previous games of simply bombing the slow-moving, tanky, high-target-density aerial fortresses using high-damage area-of-effect air-to-ground weapons. While it's still possible to blow the Arsenal Birds up with FAEBs and the like, it will take quite a few more than you'd expect. The MPBM also likely does a relatively low amount of damage at least in part to prevent similar cheese (along with multiplayer balance, of course).
  • Naval vessels also have damage resistance against bombs, presumably to prevent them from being torn apart too easily with UGBs or GPBs, as well as to encourage the use of LASMs, which are specifically designed to take down ships.
  • The ADMM on the CFA-44 Nosferatu has been restored to its former overpowered state as it originally was in Ace Combat 6^note Accuracy and damage were nerfed for multiplayer purposes in its appearances in Ace Combat Infinity and Ace Combat: Assault Horizon, but has also restored its original lengthy reload time (even with parts reducing the cooldown), and the ammo is counted per missile instead of per salvo.
• New Game Plus: Due to the fact that everything you unlock in this game is permanent, any campaign you start after the first plays out like a regular NG+ run in other games by giving you access to advanced planes and equipment from the get-go. It's impossible to play a completely virginal campaign more than once on the same player account. Replaying campaign missions in order also has the advantage of the "Round Bonus", an escalating and quite significant cash reward that tends to make Level Grinding faster and more varied than repeating the same high-reward missions over and over again.
• No Communities Were Harmed:
  • The city of Selatapura is believed to be one for Singapore, considering that it was a third-world city before its economy prospered due to the construction of the space elevator, which resulted in having first-world standards. It's located in western Usea and was formerly part of Erusea. This would make Erusea a superpower parallel to Malaysia, which Singapore was ejected from in 1965, or Indonesia, which was once a Hegemonic Empire in the past. Unlike Erusea and Selatapura however, Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia have only been embroiled in border and territory disputes.
  • Large parts of central Usea have naming conventions that imply it to be the Strangereal equivalent of Mexico and Central America, but isn't explored too much more than the Roca Roja Desert and the city of San Salvacion.^note That is, the capital of the nation of San Salvacion and home to the Stonehenge site.
• No-Damage Run: Invoked. One of the in-game medals, and thus by extension, some of the achievements/trophies, require you to do a run of the campaign without ever getting hit. This is much easier said than done.
• No Ending: For the VR campaign. After the third mission, the debriefing officer wonders out loud if the fight against Free Erusea is about to enter a new phase, considering that the third mission had them using a drone-operated transport plane as a decoy and then unleashing a four-plane stealth fighter squadron. And... that's it.
  • Dataminers discovered that there were three additional VR missions planned that would have ended the campaign. However, the "ending" would have simply consisted of the sixth mission debriefing mentioning that Free Erusea had exhausted all of its assets and that it was no longer capable of committing any more attacks.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Spare Squadron ends up going to solitary per Col. McKinsey for "disobeying orders" multiple times. Even though disobeying orders saves the operation every time—ignore the "no weapons" order when the enemy starts assaulting the sham base (including the control tower McKinsey is in) with everything they've got, ignore the "no resupplying" order in order to have enough weapons and fuel to complete a raid on enemy facilities, etc.
• No One Could Survive That!: In Mission 07, if Trigger is struck by one of Mihaly's missiles and is not destroyed, Sol 2 asks if Trigger is down (implicitly expecting a yes), but Mihaly remarks that Trigger simply took it "in a non-critical area" and offers to explain how to do that when they return to base. This gets flipped around later in Mission 18, where Mihaly takes multiple missiles to finally shoot down and Count remarks that he's "flying in a way that minimizes the damage", clearly expecting that one missile should've made his plane eat dirt.
• No Prison Segregation: Avril is sent to the 444th penal squadron because they needed a mechanic. The story never indicates if there are any other female prisoners in the 444th besides her, and doesn't go dark enough to hint if she was ever in any danger being locked up with male pilots who were officially convicted of non-violent crimes.
• Nostalgia Level: Being the game that connected with many previous games in the series, it has several of them:
  • Mission 4 ("Rescue"): You're leading the operation to rescue former President Harling, who's trapped inside the Space Elevator, from behind the enemy lines. This mission harkens back to two missions in Ace Combat 5 that Harling appeared in. At first you must sneak through a hole in the enemy's anti-air radar network, similar to how you guide Harling's plane in Mission 8 ("Handful of Hope") in the fifth game. When you break through and deal with the anti-air defenses, Sea Goblin arrives to rescue Harling just like in Mission 20 ("Ancient Walls"). Sadly, it doesn't end as well this time.
  • Mission 9 - "Faceless Soldier": In the latter half of the mission, you're ambushed by a squadron of "allied" planes in a mountainous landscape, similar to how the 8492nd turns on you in Mission 18+ - "8492" in the fifth game.
  • Mission 12 ("Stonehenge Defensive"): Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Your battlefield is Stonehenge once again, except this time you're defending it instead of attacking. For bonus nostalgia points, you can select the Su-37 with Yellow Squadron's paint scheme as your craft in the mission (if you pre-ordered the game), and it's the exact same mission number as "Stonehenge Offensive" was in Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies.
  • Mission 15 ("Battle for Farbanti"): Once again, you're fighting at Farbanti. The western part of the city still remains flooded just like how it was in 04. The battle even takes place on the same date as the first Battle for Farbanti (September 19) except it's fourteen years later. At the end of the mission, you also encounter Sol Squadron, just like how Mobius 1 has a showdown with Yellow Squadron.
  • Mission 16 ("Last Hope"): The stage takes place in Anchorhead, the same city that appeared in Mission 3 ("City On Fire") of Ace Combat 2 and Assault Horizon Legacy, where Scarface One must destroy the enemy aircraft carrier. The city is heavily expanded upon, but the overall geographical features still remain the same, with two large metropolitan areas separated by a mountainside tunnel and a long suspension bridge over the bay area.
  • Mission 17 ("Homeward"): The northeastern part of Tyler Island is a space center similar to the Basset Space Center in Mission 6 ("White Bird (Part I)") of the fifth game. The mass driver even plays a role in the mission, except this time you're the one who's trying to stop the enemy from flying away with the payload.
  • Mission 20 ("Dark Blue"): The first half of the mission begins with you taking off for the final time from an aircraft carrier that just happens to have every plane in the game available to choose from, like with the Kestrel from the fifth game. The latter half of the mission has you flying into a long tunnel similar to the one in Mission 27 ("ACES") also from the fifth game, complete with shutters closing down on you. Not only that, having to choose the right path to continue along as some shutters close faster than others harkens back to the "Tunnel Vision" mission in Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere.
  • SP Mission 3 ("Ten Million Relief Plan"): There are a few similarities to Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War in this mission. The player needs to locate a target by using a sensor that detects waveforms to tell the player where the target is and how close they are, much like locating Kei Nagase in the mission White Noise. In addition, once the target (in this case the submarine Alicorn) is located, the player must engage a submarine, and like the Hrimfaxi in "Demons of Razgriz", it will at times submerge only to pop up again somewhere else.
• Not What It Looks Like: Played for Drama. Mission 4 ends suddenly when the player fires a missile, cutting to a warhead taking Harling's plane out of the sky. These are two different missiles, but Willing Suspension Of Disblief regarding Cutscene Drop conspires to make the player think they just shot Harling, the person they were trying to save.
• Nuke 'em:
  • It's strongly implied that the Eruseans were trying to do this in Mission 13 "Bunker Buster", not dissimilar from in the mission "Breaking Arrows" in Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies. While nuclear weaponry is never specifically mentioned, there is almost no use for IRBMs (or, indeed, any theater/strategic-level ballistic missiles) other than delivering nuclear warheads, as they're very expensive, and to any observer, there's no apparent difference between a nuclear and conventional ballistic missile, and it would therefore be responded to as if it were a nuclear weapon. The missiles, when destroyed, make a massive explosion that is very different from the Arsenal Birds' Helios missiles and similar to that of V2 in Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War, though other high-yield non-nuclear weapons are known to exist in the Ace Combat universe, so it is left somewhat ambiguous. The fact that the detonations don't trigger an EMP, as nuclear high-altitude explosions normally do, further detracts from the nuke theory.
  • Captain Torres plans on launching spent nuclear shells on the Osean capital of Oured. The Alicorn's firing capabilities gives it as much range as Stonehenge itself. The LRSSG directly call it a "mobile Stonehenge", so Oured would have no defense against a strike from over 3,000 km away.
• Ominous Latin Chanting:
  • "Faceless Soldier", from the mission of the same name, features chanting while Spare Squadron unites together to face unknown enemies.
  • "Archange", the song that plays when Trigger faces off against Mihaly for the final time, starts off with traditional Gregorian chanting before becoming a bit more complex.
  • "Awakening", "Alicorn", and "The Hero of Comberth Harbor", which play during the Ten Million Relief Plan DLC mission. While there hasn't been any official release of what the lyrics actually are, u/Watering_Cannot on Reddit has deciphered what is most likely to be the two most possible arrangement of lyrics for "Alicorn", both of which contextually make sense.
• One-Man Army: The "One-Mobius-Army" title obtained through the PlayStation VR missions is a nod to Mobius 1 being the key to winning the Usean Continental War in AC 04.
• One-Woman Wail: Used every now and then in various missions throughout the soundtrack.
  • "Daredevil", which plays in the second half of the penultimate mission, features a singer who starts off fairly gentle, but then really opens her pipes at the moment in the dialogue when Cossette successfully sabotages the wireless power transmitter in the Space Elevator required for Arsenal Bird Justice to maintain its shield.
  • "Hush", plays the trope straight, in that the female singer is not accompanied by any backup vocals. The song is a case of Long Song, Short Scene though, as only a snippet of it is heard during the final mission.
• Orphaned Etymology:
  • Golem 1 Knocker refers to Arsenal Bird Liberty as "Big Baby Huey" in "Two-Pronged Strategy", despite the fact that the character's country of origin, the United States, doesn't exist in the Strangereal canon, thus making the character non-existent by extension. On the other hand, since Osea can be seen as Strangereal's counterpart to the US, it can be argued that the cartoon could actually existed in-universe but was made in Osea instead of America.
  • AWACS Long Caster mentions that he'll take the squadron out to eat at an "Italian bistro" in town, despite the fact that the country of Italy doesn't exist in Strangereal. (Pizza does exist, though.)
  • There's also an early offhand mention of "Jesus" and several mentions of a capital G "God", which would mean that Christianity somehow exists. (Ace Combat X: Skies of Deception showed Christmas exists.)
  • The game's description of the MiG-29A specifically explains how its nickname is of Russian origin.
  • The F-2's description is more vague, saying how "Its country" (Japan) built it with their territorial needs in mind.
  • Special mention also goes to the F-15J: While the description does a good job of not mentioning its country of origin outright (in the same manner as the F-2), they seemed to have overlooked that the "J" in the aircraft's designation stands for Japan, since the F-15J is in fact a Japanese licensed copy of the F-15C built by Mitsubishi.
• Paper Tiger: The 444th's "air base" is actually just a military prison with a single access runway. Everything else is balloons for vehicles, wooden shells for buildings, and painted-on airstrips. Erusean bombers fell for the decoys a bit too well, necessitating the activation of the penal fighter squadron just so that the Eruseans didn't figure out what's really going on. The penal unit wasn't even supposed to take off; their primary objective was just to taxi out of the hangars and essentially rev the jets' engines and mill about on the tarmac (and later in the air) in order to look busy, for the purposes of looking like the air base was trying to scramble jets in response. Unfortunately, the base was too convincing; Erusea sends a massive group of bombers and their escorts to flatten them soon after Trigger's arrival, forcing Bandog to unlock the convicts' weapons so they can shoot down the enemy. As a consequence, the 444th Fighter Squadron went from a paper tiger to a real one.
• The Pardon: Spare Squadron's members get one for their heroism in the conflict, with most of them joining the regular force while Trigger and Count are absorbed into the LRSSG's Strider Squadron.
• The Password Is Always "Swordfish": Full Band comments that you'd be surprised how many people leave the password to their computer on a note nearby.
• Permanently Missable Content: The 25th Anniversary DLC adds 3 additional super planes, 12 new aircraft skins, and new emblems. All is well and good if you actually buy the bundled package, but Steam users immediately discovered that if you individually buy the planes, you lock your account out of obtaining the skins even if you later buy the DLC bundle.
• Player Nudge: Briefings tend to heavily suggest choosing a plane good at air-to-air combat if Mihaly is going to show up. This is most obvious in the Mission 18 briefing.
  Long Caster: They appear to have converted a freeway into a runway, so we can expect them to have the capacity for air combat.
  Húxiān: Aircraft are our only threat.
• Plot Armor: You encounter enemy ace pilot Mihaly several times, and until the final fight, he "flies in a way that minimizes damage" and his plane only gets damaged in "non-critical areas"^notesomething he also says about you if he hits you with a missile and you survive and is effectively invincible no matter how many times you hit him with missiles, guns, or other weapons.
• Poor Communication Kills:
  • Erusea's definitive strategy to fight the war is by hacking Osean satellites and using misinformation to spread confusion.
  • The entire war is the result of this between Osea and Erusea. Erusea believes that Osea was trying to gain global influence by building the Lighthouse Space Elevator so close to its borders, so they try to prevent that by declaring war on Osea. Osea itself having a history of meddling in other countries' affairs in the past didn't help its case. However, it's later revealed that Osea—under the leadership of Vincent Harling—really was genuine in their attempt to help Usea in their restoration efforts through the use of the Space Elevator and has no other ulterior motive, thus making the entire war All for Nothing.
• Powerful, but Inaccurate: The entire shtick of HPAAs or High-Power Air-to-Air Missiles, and by extension, the almost-exclusively Russian aircraft that can use them. They do much more damage than normal missiles and are significantly faster, but they have poor homing capabilities.
• Power Up Let Down: The level 1 missile damage upgrade does nearly nothing. Every enemy that takes two missiles to take down without it still takes two with it, and every enemy that takes three without it still takes three with it. It may save a few rounds of machine gun ammo in finishing off said targets and might save a missile or two against harder targets like Aegis ships, but those are much better dealt with using specialized weapons.
• Rapid-Fire "Shut Up!": Should you fail your first mission with Spare Squadron by letting the Eruseans blow up the 444th's Air Base with their bombers, you get treated to an amusing 'secret' conversation where AWACS Bandog delivers this to your pals in Spare, who are busy laughing and insulting McKinsey and Bandog in response to what happened. It does nothing in making them shut up.
• Real-Place Background:
  • The Shilage Castle in Mission 18 ("Lost Kingdom") looks very similar to the real-life Spiš Castle in Slovakia.
  • Selatapura is—barring the Space Elevator and Writing Around Trademarks treatment of Marina Bay Sands—surprisingly accurately modelled after Singapore.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech:
  • Wit gives one to the LRSSG when they attempt to raid Shilage Castle for supplies.
    Wit: You defile this country. As long as you're here, this country will never know peace.
  • Ionela gives one to Dr. Schroeder after learning that he started the drone program as vengeance for losing Belka, his homeland.
• Rearrange the Song: A couple of songs featured in Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies were rearranged for the game's respective missions:
  • In the 2nd half of Mission 9 - Pipeline Destruction, "Three of a Kind" (a rearrangement and Dark Reprise of "Aquila") will play in the background.
  • Mission 15 - Battle for Farbanti's theme takes cues from "Farbanti" with strong emphasis in orchestra while featuring the game's Leitmotif.
  • Mission 12 - Stonehenge Defensive features a reworked version of "Stonehenge's Attack".
• Reassigned to Antarctica:
  • This is what happens to Trigger when he supposedly shoots down and kills Harling. He's officially transferred to the 444th Squadron, but in reality it's a penal unit stationed in the middle of nowhere whose sole purpose is to serve as an expendable decoy force.
  • It is implied that a majority of the defending Erusean pilots during the first DLC Mission "Unexpected Visitor" are this, due to a large chunk of Erusea's air force being replaced by drones. They're all very eager to get into the fight, and some of them don't even care about the objective they're defending—they're just happy to be flying.
  • In an inverse example, Colonel McKinley desperately wants a cushy job away from the frontlines. Thanks to his stealing the credit for Trigger and Count's performance that gets the 444 pardoned, his superiors reward him with a ticket to the front lines, where, surely, his gallantry and tactical prowess will save him.
• Recurring Riff:
  • The main leitmotif is for human achievement in general, and for Trigger and his impact on the Lighthouse War in specific. It can be heard in:
    • Cut Scene: "Drag Racer," when Avril takes to the sky in her F-104.
    • "Charge Assault", which plays during Mission 1: "Charge Assault".
    • "Dual Wielder", which plays during the first part of Mission 3: "Two-Pronged Strategy".
    • Mission 9, "Faceless Soldier", during third checkpoint, complete with Ominous Latin Chanting to signal Spare Squadron's solidarity in the face of destruction.
    • Mission 11, "Fleet Destruction". "Siren's Song" features a calm, angelic choir singing the melody.
    • Mission 12, "Dragon Breath," which plays during the second half of the Stonehenge Defensive as Trigger takes on an Arsenal Bird head-to-head.
    • "Battle for Farbanti", which plays during the first part of Mission 15: "Battle for Farbanti".
    • "Daredevil", which plays during the second half of Mission 19: "Lighthouse", features a One-Woman Wail of the melody as Trigger goes up against the second and last Arsenal Bird.
    • Cut Scene: "The Admiral Anderson", a celebration of not only Trigger's recent successes, but of the final actions of the Kestrel at the end of AC5.
    • "LRSSG Briefing IV," which plays during the briefing to Mission 20: "Dark Blue." Perhaps intentionally, this is a "karaoke" version which lacks the actual melody but retains the chord progression and harmonies.
    • "Hush", which plays during the first part of Mission 20.
  • There is also a secondary leitmotif associated with Mister X, the closest thing to a Big Bad this game has:
    • Mission 4, "Rescue," first checkpoint; foreshadows the coming Wham Episode
    • Mission 7, "First Contact," third checkpoint; first battle against Mister X
    • Mission 11, "Fleet Destruction" (the easiest way to hear the two themes side by side)
    • Cut Scene "King of the Heavens" ("Mihaly's second sortie was designed to calculate how his physiology changed under the stress of combat...")
    • Mission 15, "Battle for Farbanti," second checkpoint; second battle against Mister X
    • Mission 18, "Lost Kingdom," second checkpoint; Duel Boss battle against Mister X
    • Cutscene: "King's Fall"
    • Cutscene: "The UAV Factory"
  • A third leitmotif is heard in "New Arrows Air Base Hangar," "LRSSG Briefing II" through "IV," and "LRSSG Debriefing II."
• Recursive Ammo: The SFFS and SOD (Stand-Off Dispenser) special weapons.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over:
  • Mihaly, the central antagonist of the story, flies a black Su-30SM, and later a black X-02S, with orange wingtips.
  • The SACS Unit, the personal submarine air force squadron under Matias Torres's command, all flies black Rafale Ms with red vertical stabilizers, and they're all as insane and bloodthristy as their superior.
  • The Strigon Squadron skin is the 7th skin available for the CFA-44 Nosferatu. It gives the plane a contrasting red and black camo pattern.
• Religious and Mythological Theme Naming:
  • Several Erusean ships are named after Greek deities, such as Enyo, Eris, Ceto, Dysnomia, Thalassa, Eunomia and Metis.
  • Unlike the above Greek theme, the Erusean super submarine Alicorn is Latin for the horn of the unicorn, keeping up with the mytholocal horse Theme Naming adapted by its predecessors Scinfaxi and Hrimfaxi.^Explanation(Adapted from Skinfaxi and Hrimfaxi, the horses of Dagr and Nótt, the personifications of Day and Night in Norse mythology.) This becomes even more meaningful when the Alicorn reveals its massive rail cannon that makes up part of the runway, which is raised upward from its hull, protruding into the sky just like a unicorn's horn.
  • The Dual Boss UAVs in Mission 20, Hugin and Munin, are named for the two ravens who spied for Odin in Norse Mythology. The names are quite appropriate for a pair of ADF-11F Ravens.
• Riddle for the Ages: What motivated Harling to deliberately steer his plane towards the Space Elevator? The Oseans are convinced that he was making a desperate attempt to protect the Elevator from missile fire. However, the Eruseans believe that he was deliberately trying to destroy it. In-universe, this riddle becomes known as Harling's Mirror, due to the fact that the answer a person comes to regarding this question directly reflects how they view the Space Elevator and what it stands for.
• Robot War: A surprisingly realistic take on the genre. Erusea starts the war by smuggling unmanned drones (developed using technology from Belka) to Osean naval ports, which do a lot of damage without harming civilians. They even use regular aircraft that are controlled by an AI system that are equipped with spoofed IFF signals to trick Osean pilots into thinking they’re friendlies. However, when the Usean satellite network is taken out by Osean and Erusean anti-satellite missiles, and Erusea collapses into a civil war, the AI goes rogue as it doesn't know when to cease its functions. The Final Boss of the game is a pair of highly advanced rogue UAVs that are trying to use the International Space Elevator's transmission capabilities to transmit their combat data to automated drone factories across Usea in order to mass-produce an entire army of drones to win the war on their own.
• Roc Birds: Jaeger compares the Arsenal Birds to the legendary Roc. Considering its size compared to regular fighters,^note A wingspan of 1100 meters objectively makes it one of the single largest aircraft in all of human fiction it's pretty apt.
• Rock Beats Laser: Stonehenge's last railgun (rusted over and barely functional, as it is running on an improvised power supply made of Osean generator trucks) goes up against an Arsenal Bird, with the latter activating its shields. Stonehenge's handicap is made worse by Erusean spies killing off the civilian contractors manning the observation vehicles, forcing the operators to use a (probably paperback) range table set that was conveniently located in the operations room. Stonehenge's railgun fires for the last time and its projectile punches through the Arsenal Bird's shield, cutting the giant drone in half as well.
• Rule of Three: Several important details of the game occur three times:
  • Chronologically, the Lighthouse War is the third continental-wide conflict in Usea, following the Usean coup d'etat and the Usean Continental War.
  • You fight Mihaly A. Shilage, aka Mister X, and the Arsenal Birds three times each throughout the game.
  • Trigger flies for three squadrons throughout the story: from Mage Squadron, Spare Squadron, and later Strider Squadron.
  • Trigger gets three 'sin lines' on his tailwings when he joins Spare Squadron, which he later fashions to become the Three Strikes symbol once he joins Strider Squadron.
  • Three missions in the game take place at the Lighthouse Space Elevator, which is a key location and what drives the story of the game.
  • Even the DLC missions get in on this. There are three SP missions, all of which involved Captain Matias Torres, the rogue Erusean captain of the Alicorn-class submarine, which is itself the third super submarine that Yuktobania developed following the Scinfaxi and the Hrimfaxi that ended up fighting Osean pilots once again, as well as the third class of super submarines used in modern warfare after the aforementioned Scinfaxi-class and the earlier Dragonet-class.
• Run for the Border: Mission 10 is all about escorting Commander McKinsey to the border of Bulgurdarest^note also called "Borgo dell'Est" in-game; Italian for "Village of the East", a small nation on the eastern region of Usea (at this point within Erusea's occupied territory) that feels a broader kinship with Osea.
• Scenery Porn: The landscape can only be described as highly detailed and photorealistic, with revisited locations of previous games receiving an important graphical update (the Chopinburg Rainforest and its associated crater, as well as the Stonehenge ring, Anchorhead and Farbanti, for example). In the Gamescom Demo, one of the new locations, Yinshi Valley, is based on the Zhangjiajie National Forest Park in China, the same one that inspired the floating mountains in Avatar.
• Schizo Tech: While it's normal for the series to have old Vietnam-era fighters like MiG-21s and F-4E Phantom IIs flying alongside the likes of F-22 Raptors and assorted superplanes, Skies Unknown takes it even further by pushing the technological timeline even further back with the F-104C Starfighter and exemplifies its technological mish-mash with the F-14D Super Tomcat, which can now carry the advanced 8AAM stealth weapon pods that were designed for the F-22A (and will be entering Real Life service long after the F-14D was retired). The Soviet/Russian side of the tree also gets in on this, with the Su-33 and MiG-31, two of the older planes in the game, mounting the near-future Electromagnetic Launcher and Pulse Laser, respectively.
• Scissors Cuts Rock: Ships and the Arsenal Birds take reduced damage from all bomb-type weapons to keep players from cheesing them with Unguided Bombs or Fuel-Air Explosive Bombs. However, GPBs do so much damage that they still tear through ships with similar efficiency to LASMs despite the damage reduction.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: A large part of the Erusean military breaks off and joins the Oseans to fight the hard-lining government troops, who instigated the war and plan to use the Space Elevator to make Erusea a greater empire.
• Self-Made Lie: Colonel McKinsey unintentionally does this to himself. He leads the Spare Squadron penal unit from a prison disguised as an airbase, and hoards all of their accomplishments for himself in the hopes that he’ll be transferred over to a desk job far away from the frontlines. Instead, Osea High Command sends him directly to the frontlines, because they find him to be the right man to lead against Erusea thanks to his "accomplishments".
• Sensor Suspense: The first half of the third SP Mission, "Ten Million Relief Plan", has the LRSSG deploy sonobuoys into the high sea to echolocate the Alicorn before it sails out of range, then task Trigger with a more accurate spotting through the use of a Magnetic Anomaly Detector (MAD for short). The sonobuoys only give a general area for Trigger to search, leaving him to fly low and slow as the MAD readings spike upon getting closer to the Alicorn. Things get hairy when Torres anticipates such a tactic and deploys jammer buoys in advance to mess with the echolocation, forcing Ghost Squadron to rectify their predictions and leaving Trigger with less than a minute to pinpoint the Alicorn before it leaves the area; the soundtrack's suspenseful Scare Chord rises as time is about to run out, and everyone cheers once Trigger does manage to mark the submarine in the nick of time.
• Shoot the Bullet: Certain enemies, including CIWS turrets, AD tanks, and the ADFX-10 drone in Mission 10, can actually shoot your missiles out of the air.
• Shot at Dawn: During the cutscene on Tyler Island, there's a quick shot of two soldiers being lined up at gunpoint, holding their hands on their heads, before a reaction shot of Princess Cossette flinching to the sound of the gunshots.
• Shout-Out:
  • An enemy ace you encounter in the game is a MiG-29 by the TAC name of "Jester". His plane is colored with the same gold with blue undercarriage paint scheme as the two MiG-29s who crashed during the 1993 Fairfield Airshow in England.
  • The Selatapura equivalent of Singapore's National Stadium resembles Namco's famous circle section when viewed from above.
  • A Space Elevator, built to provide solar energy, becomes the point of contention between superpowers. Ace Combat 7, or Mobile Suit Gundam 00?
  • The game's opening scene, with Avril extending her hand toward the sky in the middle of a desert, is very similar to Isamu Alva Dyson's introduction scene in Macross Plus. It even has a similar background soundtrack.
  • The special skin for the Mirage 2000-5, flown by ace "Foudre", is taken from the French film Sky Fighters (Les Chevaliers du ciel).
  • The mission where the LRSSG uses a canyon to hide from Erusean forces before raiding a base is based on the 2004 version of Area 88.
  • Osean squadrons follow a Theme Naming convention after Sword and Sorcery and other fantasy elements. This leaves the LRSSG's Strider Squadron as a specific nod to The Lord of the Rings.
  • Brigadier General Clemens's superior officer shares a name with the Lieutenant General Shepherd in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.
  • In SP Mission 3, while hunting for the Alicorn, Count complains that the sailors should just start singing so it will be easier to find the submarine.
  • Torres' worship of nuclear annihilation for world peace, as well as ALEX rendering the keywords of his quotes in a specific ladder-like pattern, reference Genocidal Organ.
• Shown Their Work: Apart from the usual highly detailed and accurate plane exteriors and cockpit views, the developers took the extra step of making sure each plane had accurate gun mechanics; Russian planes like the Su-35 and MiG-29A have single-barrel autocannons which fire slower with a lower ammunition capacity of 800 rounds but hit hard, while European/US planes like the Typhoon, F/A-18F and A-10C have rapid-firing multi-barrel rotary cannons with higher ammunition limits of 2400. The A-10C also has an ever more powerful cannon on top of that with 4800 rounds of ammunition, referencing its iconic GAU-8 Avenger cannon.
• Siblings in Crime: Rage and Scream are a brother-sister duo, respectively, who seem to have a vendetta against Trigger. They're very eager to kill him.
• Simple, yet Awesome: The 4AAM and 6AAM are among the most mundane special weapons—just a salvo of missiles that seek out individual targets with mediocre reliability—but their usefulness in taking down the second Arsenal Bird can't be overstated. Each missile is powerful enough to destroy one of the Bird's weapons in one hit and its propellers in two, so a handful of passes is all it takes to (mostly) neuter the monster with minimal resistance and soften it up for the Coup de Grâce. The two missile weapons are quite useful in regular battles as well, but it's in this mission where they truly shine. The game even uses the first mission as a tutorial to introduce special weapons by lining up a squadron of enemies specifically for your 4AAM-equipped F-16 to shoot down.
• Slow Laser: PLSL bolts visibly travel much slower than light and even seem to be slower than EML slugs. This stands in contrast to the TLS, which fires a continuous hitscan laser beam.
• Space Elevator: One has been built in the Spring Sea southwest of Usea, near Selatapura. The site of construction becomes a point of contention for Erusea, claiming that it has been forced on their territory; this is seemingly one of their reasons for declaring war on Osea. In truth, Selatapura was handed over to the IUN as a trust territory according to the peace terms which concluded the Continental War. Said space elevator is primarily intended to deliver energy from orbit down to power plants groundside, and isn't fully completed yet, so it isn't yet able to function as a ground-to-orbit cargo delivery system.
• Speed Run Reward: One medal, and by extension, certain trophies/achievements, require doing a full run of the campaign with no more than four hours of flight time. Due to how checkpoints work, this means that restarting from them is ill-advised when attempting this.
• Space Whale Aesop: Much effort is put into the theme of overreliance on technology and the imapact that unmanned fighters can have on war. Unfortunately, rather than present drones as a useful-on-paper tool of war that have often been unreliable and caused undue collateral, the game's narrative instead treats the drones as perfectly precise weapons that helped ensure that Erusea minimized collateral damage in during their initial waves of attacks. No, the argument against drones ultimately boils down to it unintentionally creating a Forever War of automated facilities churning out drone fighters that continue to attack their targets because they don't know when to stop.
• Spiteful A.I.: AA guns are nearly harmless, doing only 1% damage per hit, but they're far more accurate and faster-shooting than their predecessors in other Ace Combat titles, and while little threat to mission completion, will aggressively do everything they can to deny you the no-damage bonus and thwart your No-Damage Run.
• Spread Shot: The SFFS special weapon.
• Subsystem Damage: All warships larger than gunboats have separate hitboxes for their various weapons, but trying to exploit this to reduce their firepower is largely pointless because they also have a hitbox for the ship itself (usually the conning tower) that is highly vulnerable to weapons like the LAGM. Where this trope really comes into play are the Arsenal Birds with their ridiculous number of subsystems, including eight propellers, ten missile launchers, numerous laser weapons and a set of critical components that is key to destroying them for good if no equivalent superweapon is available to counter them.
• Surprisingly Elite Cannon Fodder: Spare Squadron, initially, is seen as little more than a penal labor group, using mothballed and partially disassembled planes on the ground alongside decoys to give the impression of a larger air force presence than Osea actually has and draw enemy attention away from Osea's real forces. But little by little, they have to step up their efforts to appear "authentic" to the enemy, and before long they are being deployed on missions where the regular forces are too valuable to risk. Eventually they are recognized for their surprisingly effective contributions to the war, given general pardons, and disbanded with the former members being folded into other Osean units.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • Modern missiles are pretty good at locking onto what the HUD says they will, but a fire-and-forget infrared-guided missile pointed at a tight cluster of signatures is liable to make mistakes. This appears to be what lands Trigger in Spare Squadron, no matter what the player tries. It wasn't, but it's plausible enough that Trigger takes the fall.
  • In "Fleet Destruction", if you destroy the center platform of the runway at the northern sea base first, the planes trying to take off will fall off and crash because they don't have enough speed to reach flight yet.
  • As one can imagine, a squadron full of imprisoned fighter pilots does not a disciplined squadron make. Pilots regularly disobey their commanders, talk smack about each other, and completely disregard military protocol, even while taking off, in some cases actually cutting off other planes on the tarmac for a chance to take off first. The commanding staff has little, if any, respect for the pilots under their command, threatening them, insulting them, and generally treating them like the criminals they are, often throwing them in solitary for insubordination or just because they mouthed off. In combat, it's pretty much a free-for-all, with the main objective being "you're fodder, so act like fodder."
    • That goes double for the 444th's air base: Sure, you know that the entire base is just a huge sham to make it look like Osea's up to something in the middle of nowhere, but the enemy doesn't, and that's... kind of the point. As Spare found out the hard way, if you act convincingly like a massive air base preparing an aerial offensive, the enemy is going to treat you like one—they're going to do everything in their power to destroy it.
    • What happens once the chain of command goes down. Mention is made in multiple missions in the last fourth of the game about multiple Osean penal squadrons going rogue. Fitting that equipping political prisoners with their own fighters would let them take revenge on their captors as soon as their leashes come off.
• Take That!: In Mission 10, Count comments in disbelief at the sight of a (incomplete) border wall separating Osean ally Bulgurdarest from the rest of Erusea, heavily implied to be hastily constructed in the wake of nationalist rhetoric that led to the Lighthouse War. The developers couldn't resist a light jab at the United States' own political situation in 2019.
  Count: Look below, is that a... wall? They built a wall along the border. That's nuts!
• Talking to the Dead: During Anchorhead Raid's finale, shooting either Mimic down will make the surviving sibling snap. As the battle drags on, they'll begin talking to their now-dead twin as if they were still flying together. If Rage manages to shoot you down while Scream is dead, he even crows "I got him, Scream!"
• Theme Naming:
  • Osean airforce units seem to take their names from High Fantasy and medieval elements. Ace Combat 5 and Zero establishes the Razgriz (after the Valkyrie Randgrid), Wizard, and Sorcerer Squadrons, but this game adds Skeleton, Golem, Gargoyle, Cyclops, Strider, Basilisk, Salamander, Mace, Wand, Drake, Enchanter, Roper, and Mimic on top of the player's own Mage Squadron.
  • Each operation undertaken by Spare Squadron is named after a better poker hand than the operation name before, starting with Operation High Card and ending with Operation Full House.
  • With one special exception mentioned in the story, all Osean naval vessels are named after birds. Albatross, Kestrel, Vulture, Egret, Crane, Pheasant, Ptarmigan, Shoehorn, Stork, Puffin, Bunting, Sunbird, etc.
• This Means War!: Princess D'Elise claims that Osea has forced the construction of their Space Elevator on (formerly) Erusean soil, which is considered an illegal act threatening Erusea's sovereignty.
• Three-Act Structure:
  • Act I: the Featureless Protagonist, Trigger, rises to prominence within the IUN as a member of Mage Squadron. The main antagonists—unmanned drones in general, the Arsenal Birds in particular—are introduced, along with Mister X, The Heavy for Erusea. The Inciting Incident in particular occurs in Mission 4, at the International Space Elevator, in which Trigger is convicted of high crimes: specifically, while Trigger leads a rescue mission to save former President Harling, the Big Good of Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War, a missile traced to his plane instead downs Harling's craft. There are no survivors.
  • Act IIA: as mentioned in all the marketing materials, Trigger is consigned to an Army of Thieves and Whores, the 444 Penal Squadron. "Spare Squadron," flying planes cobbled together by Wrench Wench Avril "The Scrap Queen" Mead, are thrown at high-value targets with impunity, as they are considered expendable, and are subject to abuse from Bad Bosses, but win through the day. The Centerpiece Spectacular occurs in Mission 9, where Trigger's squadron-mates, finally recognizing the Ace Pilot amongst them, nominate him as their leader amidst a False Flag Operation; the 444th, now a squadron in truth as well as name, survive the ambush.
  • Act IIB: Trigger receives The Pardon and is returned to active duty as a legitimate member of the military. Along with Count, The Lancer from Spare Squadron, he is assigned to the Long-Range Strategic Strike Group, who are instrumental in weakening Erusean might throughout the continent. A massive operation uses Stonehenge to shoot down an Arsenal Bird; it succeeds, but only after Trigger is forced to attack it singlehandedly, slowing it for a killing blow. Finally, the IUN take Farbanti, ending the war but ushering in the Darkest Hour. LRSSG leader Wiseman meets his Mentor Occupational Hazard at the hands of Mister X. Additionally, a (non-intentionally) mutual satellite strike causes Disaster Dominoes that end all global communications, plunging Strangereal—and, more importantly, Usea—into chaos.
  • Act III: The LRSSG try to figure out how to survive as Erusea plunges into an Enemy Civil War: not only do Erusean radicals (who advocate for drone usage) and Erusean conservatives (who do not) start to scrap, but various regions of Erusea declare independence from their ancestral conquerors. (Trigger and Count also learn from an Erusean Defector from Decadence that Harling's murder was a frame-up, committed by an Erusean drone made to look like Trigger.) With the pro-war radicals holed up at the International Space Elevator with their remaining Arsenal Bird, the LRSSG team up with Erusean conservatives and launch an operation on the ISEV to destroy the last Arsenal Bird and end the war for good. The offensive on the ISEV creates a massive Enemy Mine furball, pitting the finest (remaining) pilots alive against the Arsenal Bird at the peak of its power (and without a railgun to take it out the easy way). After defeating the Arsenal Bird and capitulating the Erusean Radicals, a final twist reveals itself with the unexpected appearance of two extremely powerful AI-controlled ADF-11F Raven UAVs, who can prolong and escalate the war into an even darker stage should they transmit their combat data to automated UAV factories. This creates a final climatic battle for the fate of the entire world. With many sacrifices, the heroes successfully defeat their enemies, and Trigger flies off into the sunrise of history as a hero.
• Timed Mission:
  • Mission 13. You have five minutes in which to destroy five missile silos, and after that 60-second intervals in which to catch and shoot down IRBMs. (There is, at least, a checkpoint after the bombing runs are completed.) Failure to destroy any silos during the first phase results in that many more missiles you have to shoot down in the second part of the stage.
  • Mission 17. Most of the mission is a standard Annihilation run, but later, you have to save some civilians (among them Princess Cossette) that are hemmed in by Erusean soldiers. You have exactly one minute to destroy those troops and ignore the guys escorting them and firing back at you. The mission does not make this clear until the Non-Standard Game Over.
• Title Drop: In Mission 19, while describing the painting in the space elevator's lobby that was commissioned by Harling, Avril notices that its title is "Skies Unknown."
• To Be Lawful or Good: An important case shows up during the climax of "Ten Million Relief Plan", when Torres seemingly declares his intention to surrender and makes preparations to disarm the Alicorn. Bickering among the LRSSG ensues as Count and Húxiān call bullshit and want to sink it anyway to neutralize the threat it poses, before Long Caster and Jaeger remind them that striking down those who have surrendered is a breach of international law and that they'll "no longer be soldiers" the moment they violate said law. Luckily for them, Torres unsubtly prepares the rail cannon to fire at Oured, meaning that he never intended to surrender and as such is the one who stopped being a soldier first.
• Trailers Always Lie: An example that can be easily forgiven. The first reveal trailer for Ace Combat 7 showed someone geared up in a space suit getting ready to jump off the Lighthouse, and seemingly intercepted by an F-22 that flies past just as they do. This scene does happen in the story, but it's exactly what type of plane that intercepts that was intentionally kept hidden. This scene occurs at the end of the penultimate mission, as Cossette puts on a spacesuit to BASE jump from the Lighthouse while two ADF-11F drones arrive and fight the exhausted Osea-Erusea coalition, with one Raven flying past Cossette as she jumps off. Count's F-15C seemingly rams her by accident and causes an explosion, and Cossette's helmet can be seen flying off the screen just like the debut trailer, but she manages to survive.
• Trailers Always Spoil: This brief shot◊ from a pre-release trailer shows a flight of four Osean F/A-18F's, with three of them having some sort of red/magenta highlight on their canopy. These are not Osean Hornets, but actually Erusean Hornets flying Osean colors and running spoofed IFFs. These Hornets are also UCAVs, with the Eruseans having applied their newly acquired Belkan drone technology to conventional aircraft. That magenta highlight on the canopy is a tell-tale sign of what looks like a conventional aircraft actually being an Erusean UCAV.
• Trash Talk: The fight against Mimic Squadron over the skies of Anchorhead devolves into name-calling as Rage and Scream taunt and throw insults at Trigger and Count. Count obviously doesn't like being called a wuss by Scream, so he fires back just as hard as them.
• Trial-and-Error Gameplay: Briefings are much less obvious about what priority targets you'll have to hit than in previous games, so choosing the right plane and weapon may take a second try.
• 20 Minutes in the Future: The game takes place in Strangereal's 2019 and features a wide array of aircraft from the past five decades and the near future, with the Su-57 making its second Strangereal appearance after Ace Combat: Assault Horizon Legacy (where it was still known as the PAK-FA, and that game was set in Strangereal's 90s) before actually entering service with Russia, the first Strangereal appearance of the new Su-30SM, and the return of the F-35C, which still isn't in widespread use in real life. In addition, it features some of Ace Combat's near-future fictional aircraft and integrates many of their weapons, such as two variants of the Tactical Laser System (as both a beam and a pulse weapon) and the Electromagnetic Launcher onto real aircraft, as well as experimental real life weapons systems that haven't yet entered service, such as the stealth weapons pods carried by the F-22A Raptor. In non-weapons speculative near-future technology, one of the central points of the game's main conflict is the "Lighthouse" Space Elevator. Perhaps the most futuristic technology seen is the microwave shielding that both Arsenal Birds possess; said shield is able to withstand missiles and bullets, with only a high-caliber railgun projectile intended for asteroid interception being able to pierce it.
• Uniqueness Decay:
  • The Tactical Laser System, the defining powerful weapon of the FALKEN and Morgan, has been adapted into a subweapon that variants of common planes like the F-15E and Su-37 can equip. These particular subweapons are weaker than the FALKEN and Morgan's own variants, though.
  • The Electromagnetic Launcher, once unique to the CFA-44 Nosferatu, is now carried by more mundane aircraft, such as the F/A-18F and Su-33. However, it has been balanced out with a much slower fire rate and a single launcher design. The CFA-44 still has twin EMLs to allow for rapid fire.
• Unusable Enemy Equipment: The enemy has only a few planes that you can't fly yourself: the AV-8B Harrier and the F-117 Nighthawk in particular. There's also the game's super-plane, the ADF-11 Raven, but unsurprisingly, it is available as paid DLC. You also can't fly any of the enemy's dedicated bombers like the Tu-95, as is tradition with an Ace Combat game.
• Variable Mix:
  • Layers are added to the main menu music as you progress through menus. This also applies to the sortie music in later missions.
  • The soundtrack becomes muffled when flying through clouds.
• Version-Exclusive Content: All of the plane emblems and titles specifically relating to Mobius 1, including the Mobius Squadron, ISAF, ISAF Low Vis, and Free Erusea emblems, and the "One-Mobius-Army" title can only be accessed by those who have the VR missions. For months, Xbox and PC players had no means of obtaining them, and even PlayStation users had to pay extra for the equipment and access to the missions. Patch 1.10 added the ISAF, ISAF Low Vis, and Free Erusea emblems as bonus content to PC and Xbox, but nicknames unlocked from VR mode remain PlayStation-exclusive.
• Video Game Caring Potential:
  • The final mission features an allied pilot named Wit, the second in command of Mihaly's squadron, Sol, who will be shot down if you fail to shoot down the second target fast enough.^note Saving him becomes nearly impossible on Hard or Ace difficulty, as he'll be shot down within seconds of you downing the first target. There's no benefit to saving him other than the satisfaction of pulling it off and a line of gratitude.
  • There are various times where friendly NPCs are under attack while your main objectives are elsewhere. You can go rescue them, and you might even get an extra bit of dialogue for it. Bandog will chide you on Pipeline Destruction if you take out the UAVs that are going after friendlies instead of hunting the trucks, while your squad mates will cheer you on.
  • In Stonehenge Defensive, you can kill the enemy ground forces before they make contact with allied ground troops. If you're fast enough, you'll hear your ground force say "They disappeared!" in disbelief about the incoming enemy ground forces.
• Villainous Valor: In the Anchorhead Raid DLC mission, Hrothi Squadron, a squadron of MiG-31s, take off without loading any missiles in an effort to delay Trigger and Strider Squadron until reinforcements can arrive. They know full well that without missiles, they stand almost no chance of surviving, but they do it anyways if it can buy even a few more precious seconds.
• Villain with Good Publicity: The Eruseans engage in Would Not Shoot a Civilian with their drones, not out of any actual legitimate concern for civilian life, but because it gives them a huge PR win, while Osea's use of more conventional bombing makes them look bad in the eyes of many people on the Usean continent. During the Enemy Civil War, this distinction vanishes entirely, with the radical Eruseans explicitly slaughtering civilians.
• Violation of Common Sense:
  • In the mission "Long Day", Trigger can fly through a small tunnel and flush out enemies hiding inside. AWACS Bandog immediately thinks that Trigger crashed because he dropped off radar, but other members correct him by saying how crazy he is for flying through the tunnel.
    Bandog: Trigger crashed! Drooling idiot...
    Spare Squadron Pilot: No! He flew into the tunnel! He's crazy!
  • Several enemy aces only spawn after doing something profoundly stupid. Flying through a random tunnel for no reason (see above) is just one example. Others include things like flying through the underbelly of an offshore launch platform that's bristling with AA emplacements, intentionally taking heavy damage that could be avoided easily, or deliberately wasting time destroying targets of no importance to the mission.
  • Note that the enemy can get in on this as well. In Mission 13, Strider Squadron is assigned to destroy five of the eight Erusean missile silos near Sierraplata—the extra three are decoys. After you succeed, the Eruseans, instead of waiting for you to get bored and go home (which Long Caster would presumably have ordered you to do), reveal the existence of even more hidden silos by launching IRBMs from them. Needless to say, said missiles do not succeed at getting away.
• War Is Hell: True to Ace Combat form, the game does not shy away from the disastrous consequences of both sides of the war, worsened by the constant tampering of information in later stages of the conflict.
  • Cossette gets hit with this pretty hard. In the beginning she actively calls for her citizens to wage war against Osea, but quickly realizes the error of her ways when she sees civilian casualties in the wake of the war and she herself becomes a target for the radical government. To say she becomes guilt-ridden by her own actions near the end of the war would be an understatement.
  • Once the entire satellite network on the Usean continent goes down after a simultaneous attack by Osean and Erusean forces, all hell breaks loose due to the complete lack of an IFF, resulting in various faction splits and the spread of unfound rumours. The battle at Tyler Island essentially becomes a microcosm for the continent's state of anarchy, with Erusean forces even committing blatant war crimes by executing innocent Belkan civilians whom they hold responsible for the war.
• Wave-Motion Tuning Fork:
  • The "common" EMLs found on the F/A-18F Super Hornet and Su-33 Flanker-D open up into a pair of fork-like rails when selected as the active weapon. The "Arclight" EML on the X-02S Strike Wyvern and the "Purgatorio" EMLs on the CFA-44 Nosferatu are, however, fully-enclosed and have conventional round muzzles.
  • The main 600 mm railgun on the Alicorn has a pair of bare rails that are normally closed together and lay flat as part of the flight deck until the weapon is brought online, when they open up into a familar tuning fork shape.
• Weaponized Exhaust: Averted in one mission, which involves shooting down multiple recently launched IRBMs before they escape into the stratosphere. You can fly as close to them as you want, including right into their several-thousand-centigrade thruster blast, without taking damage. You can, however, get caught in the giant explosion that follows their destruction if you take things too far.
• We ARE Struggling Together:
  • The 444th Squadron is full of convicts that are almost never willing to listen to orders from their superiors, pilots that have varying degrees of glory-seeking, and an abusive Miles Gloriosus warden/colonel that even the sharp-tongued AWACS can't stand. They almost never stop bickering amongst themselves.
  • During Mission 04 ("Rescue"), Gargoyle Squadron is given confidential orders from the IUN to attempt to strike the Space Elevator without the other squadrons being informed of the attack. Clown quips that this isn't the first time that this has happened. This also Foreshadows the ensuing chaos from the satellite blackout later on, as everyone's communications being knocked out has severed the few things capable of keeping such confused military branches together.
  • The same mission also shows a split between older military minds and the younger users of drone technology, with the latter being tired of the former not understanding how their drones work. This serves as the early emergence of the Conservative and Radical Eruseans.
• We Have Reserves:
  • Spare Squadron is frequently reminded of who they are.
    Col. McKinsey: Remember, you are not bona-fide military. You are expendable.
  • Defied by the LRSSG in Mission 11, "Fleet Destruction". The commander sets up a return line for Strider and Cyclops Squadrons to refuel and resupply their aircraft. As he puts it, fighter planes and ammunition can be replaced, but pilots cannot.
• We Will Use Lasers in the Future: Strangereal is transitioning into this situation, now that the TLS is no longer prototype technology and is viable enough to be mass-produced, while the PLSL is emerging as an alternative for machine guns. There'll always be a place for kinetic weapons in Ace Combat, but energy weapons are now becoming practical alternatives.
• Wham Line: Mission 16 sees the player rescuing a defecting Erusean general from a battle in Anchorhead Bay, who reveals some important Erusean politics to your squadron partway through the mission.
  Labarthe: The open declaration of war, expanding the front lines—it was all the work of some young Erusean officers. They were referred to as the Radicals, but there was an unseen force guiding them. It was technology they borrowed from the Belkans.
  [Slightly later on]:
  Labarthe: There's more to Belkan technology than just UAVs. Faking IFF designations, for one, was an astonishing feat. They used it to make drones that resembled Osean fighters. And then to assassinate Harling and put the blame on enemy fighters.
• Wham Shot: Mission 4 ends very abruptly when you press the "fire missile" button, and watch helplessly as the missile apparently takes down Harling's plane.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: All your teammates from Mage and Golem Squadrons disappear from the story after Trigger is court-martialed and sentenced to the Penal 444th "Spare" Squadron.
• The Worf Barrage: A massive barrage of air-to-air, sea-to-air, and cruise missiles from a joint Osean-Erusean coalition does absolutely nothing against the second Arsenal Bird's Deflector Shields, making it abundantly clear that without Stonehenge, the shields are impenetrable.
• Xanatos Gambit: Erusea knows it can't fight a superpower like Osea on equal terms, so they proceed to ship armed UAVs in containers to Osea, where they are remotely launched and proceed to destroy naval bases across the country, crippling the nation's naval response and throwing it into chaos, while simultaneously launching a lightning offensive across the continent of Usea. By the time Osea and IUN forces can recover, Erusea and its allies have seized most of the continent, along with both Arsenal Bird carriers, and the crippling strike on Osea's maritime and naval forces means Osean forces are cut off from the mainland. Later on, when Osea seizes the Erusean capital of Farbanti, Erusea and Osea both launch anti-satellite missiles to take out the orbital satellite IFF network, crippling communications and causing widespread chaos.
• You Can't Thwart Stage One: In the first DLC mission, your mission is to help your allies capture the submarine Alicorn, and destroying it (which is the objective of the third DLC mission) results in a mission failure. Brigadier General Clemens justifies this by citing local reports of the submarine containing weapons of mass destruction, and that capture will give leverage in post-war negotiations. But he later turns out to be The Mole.
• You Shouldn't Know This Already:
  • During the penultimate mission, a plane with 8AAMs and a few attack upgrades can take out all of the Arsenal Bird's propellers during the moments its shield drops to deploy more drones. All this achieves is triggering the dialogue about this not working sooner than normal; the actual targets don't even have hitboxes until the mission script says they do.
  • Lampshaded by the "Clairvoyant" medal that's awarded for destroying all missile silos in the Bunker Buster mission within five minutes, which is virtually impossible to do unless you know exactly which of the eight targets are the actual silos hiding among the decoys, something rather difficult as their locations are almost entirely randomized once loaded in.
• Zerg Rush: Every time an Arsenal Bird shows up, it deploys dozens upon dozens of drones to overwhelm the opposition with sheer numbers.

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"Adios, you damn fool."