Awesome Music: Way too many instances to count. Tetsukazu Nakanishi (primarily in the first 4 games) and Keiki Kobayashi (primarily from 5 onwards) are some of the best composers in the industry, and they lead teams of equally talented musicians. Every level has a unique background track that will make audiophiles wet themselves. Please list examples on the Crowner Page.
Broken Base: The games' setting of Strangereal has been one of the more controversial aspects of the franchise for many reasons, with many claiming that the setting either scares off or turns off casual gamers while others say that it's the thing that makes the franchise unique, others feel that the setting is too vague and one needs to turn their suspension of disbelief while others feel that one just needs to pay more attention to the exposition given during briefings and gameplay.
No, the name of the planet the series takes place on isn't "Strangereal" - it's only the name of the series' universe, and is in fact Ascended Fanon, while the planet is always referred to in-universe as "Earth".
Everyone knows that Belka keeps starting wars to avenge its defeat in that one in 1995. The truth, as always, is more complicated: while it's true that the Grey Men, who started the Circum-Pacific War, were hardline Belkan nationalists, and Grunder Industries, which poured oil into the fire of both Circum-Pacific and Lighthouse (and presumablyEmmerian-Estovakian) wars, has Belkan roots, neither is confirmed to be part of or controlled by the current Belkan government (at least fully, some Belkan politicians could be part of Grey Men). In fact, Schroeder's comment in the seventh game about Belka being "dead" hints at its current government being highly uninfluential, meaning it's the job of vengeful expatriates of Belka across the world to start wars, not theirs. The confusion probably stems from Albert Genette's comment in the fifth game about how pitting Osea and Yuktobania was the best way for Belka, not Grey Men, to get revenge.
General Resource used to be Grunder Industries...except it didn't. Not only the former company is based in Usea and the latter in Osea, but Fires of Liberation and Skies Unknown made it crystal clear that the two coexisted in the same time period, the former by showing both companies' logos and the latter by featuring employees of both.
Ace Combat X: Skies of Deception:Diego Gaspar Navarro is the commanding officer of the Democratic Republic of Leasath. Eager to build a new attack aircraft and strengthen the country's military, Navarro stole the funds donated from Aurelia during a Leasathian civil war. He later persuaded Leasath into believing that Aurelia manipulated and took advantage of them during the civil war. When Leasath declared war on Aurelia, Navarro used all of the Leasathian military forces to annihilate most of the Aurelian forces, and even permitted them to attack civilian locations. After Aurelia gradually regains their independence and takes back their capital city, Navarro flees to a series of islands as Aurelian forces pursue him. He later launches the attack aircraft to destroy the Aurelian pursuers and broadcasts it to the public just to show off the aircraft's power.
Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown:Matias Torres is the Captain of the super-submarine Alicorn, a veteran of the Continental War and a survivor of battleship Tanager's sinking at the hands of Mobius 1, going rogue along with his crew during the events of the three DLC missions in order to seemingly put an end to the Lighthouse War with the nuclear massacre of a million lives, thus terrifying the world into putting down their weapons. That seemingly extreme-but-noble motive is eventually proven false when Torres, at the command of an absurdly powerful boat and a fanatically loyal crew, reveals that for all of his posturing, he actually revels in the "elegance" of hitting a difficult target—in this case, the million lives he's about to butcher from 5,000 kilometers—over 3,100 miles—away—and has an almost fetishistic obsession with death. In fact, he'll even violate wartime conventions by feigning surrender just to gain time to fire his nukes, and if he's successful, he'll keep laughing maniacally and describe the act as "beautiful". On all accounts, Torres is a narcissistic madman who strives to inflate his ego through mass murder, and won't hesitate to sacrifice his crew for it; the devil incarnate, as one character would put it.
Do Not Do This Cool Thing: The series insists, firmly and often, that War Is Hell. However, you play as an Ace Pilot, arguably the most glamorous combat role of all time, and frequent radio chatter indicates that your arrival on the battlefield singlehandedly restores friendly morale and causes enemies to panic. Also, as a Featureless Protagonist, you are spared the pathos-inducing family deaths that plague so many other characters. War is hell... for everyone else.
Strangereal, the name of The 'Verse where the series takes place, was simply appropriated from the 2000 teaser trailer for Shattered Skies, where the setting was called "This strange, real world, the another future." It became official only in 2015, 20 years after the franchise's birth and 15 after the term was first used, when announcing Ace Combat 7.
Beating a campaign with single plane, or in the case of Ace Combat 5, a plane family, is called One Plane Running, or in Ace Combat 5, One Family Running. It's taken further if a player uses the cover plane (Example: Wardog Squadron and the F-14), which a one-plane run is then called a Canon Run.
Fanon Discontinuity: While it does has its share of fanbases within the AC community, not to mention how it came to innovate future titles, any Ace Combat title that's not set in Strangereal were, to put it very bluntly, regarded as either a "bad game" at best or "that game that nearly killed Ace Combat" at worst, and that's without acknowledging the good stuff each of these games has to offer. Nowadays, Joint Assault and Infinity were fondly remembered by those who took the time to play them, being solid Ace Combat games in their own right in spite of the divisive reception from the vocal part of the fanbase, unlike Assault Horizon which is widely hated for pandering too much into the Western audience by leaning into the Call of Duty route, color palette, narrative tone and all.
Friendly Fandoms: With Polandball, due to most of the Ace Combat entries taking place in a Fictional Earth populated by various parallels to real-life countries, the latter which the webcomic portrays as anthropomorphized "countryballs". It is common to find fanart and fan comics that give the nations of Strangereal the countryball treatment, with certain ones often (and appropiately) being depicted as expies of specific Polandball characters. (Such as Osea and the United States of America, Belka and Germany, etc.)
With the Macross, Area 88 and Yukikaze fandoms, naturally, due to the fact all four franchises feature cool fighters shooting stuff at each other.
There is basically complete overlap between the Ace Combat and Project Wingman fandoms. Project Wingman is an Ace Combat style game made by Ace Combat fans at a time where the future of Ace Combat was uncertain (they started development before Ace Combat 7 was announced, even though it only released after Skies Unknown). Most Ace Combat fans consider the game an honorary Ace Combat title; most Project Wingman fans were Ace Combat fans looking for more Ace Combat.
Germans Love David Hasselhoff: While the franchise is fairly popular in Japan, most of the Ace Combat fandom is predominantly Western, especially in the United States, where a lot of Americans that are into flight games love the series. It helps that the series is considered by many fans as a case of Superlative Dubbing, having a lot of great English dubs to the point where even the Japanese like to listen to the English voices. It also helps that almost every Ace Combat protagonist flies American planes like the F-22 or the F-15, the American Memetic Badasses of the plane world, and even the protagonists like Scarface One, who originally canonically flew a Su-35 got retconned to flying an F-22, and the one other Ace Combat protagonist that swears by a different plane flies the F-14, which adds even more awesome points for Americans due to it being the Naval Top Gun plane.
Goddamned Bats: Normal mook planes and SAMs when fighting aces at the same time. The ballistic missiles in Ace Combat 04 are just really annoying to shoot down. If you watch the flight path replay at the debriefing, you'll notice they go side to side and up and down in a sawtooth pattern. Even the Game-Breaker QAAM missiles have a hard time with this one.
The drones (and later UAVs) in 6 deserve mention for being ridiculously difficult to get a good missile launch on unless you're in a high maneuverability jet like the Su-33. The UAV's are worse in that they're only there to make the fight with Pasternak seem more hectic.
Most AA Guns aren't a huge threat. In certain cases, however, they're far more accurate than the standard ones and make it a challenge to destroy them without taking some damage yourself. Notable examples are the guns on the Hrimfaxi, on Chandlier, and pretty much all AA Guns in Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies, likely due to the lock-on range of standard missiles being a bit shorter than future installments. AA guns in Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown are much more accurate than previous games, but only do Scratch Damage and are barely a threat. They only serve the purpose of killing your No-Damage Run.
More Popular Spin-Off: The Ace Combat series as it's known actually stems from Air Combat arcade games, with the PS1Air Combat being a reformulation with completely original content in an effort to entice PlayStation owners to buy it. The rest is history, and now only the most well-versed of arcade game fans even remember that the original Air Combat and Air Combat 22 exist.
Sacred Cow: The informally-dubbed "PS2 trilogy" (Shattered Skies, The Unsung War, and The Belkan War) has come to be held above criticism by the series' fans over the years, thanks to a combination of nostalgia and various unpopular decisions in the design and writing of pretty much every Ace Combat since. While opinions on the "best installment ever" vary wildly, it is generally agreed that the PS2 titles collectively define the series as a whole.
Superlative Dubbing: The games are praised for their high-quality English dubs, to the point where even Japanese players like to listen to the English version of the games.
They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Many hardcore AC fans were declaring that the series is dead upon finding out that Assault Horizon and Joint Assault take place in the real world instead of Strangereal.
A lot of fans also complained about the new Close Range Assault gameplay mechanic, despite the developers' claim that the "classic" AC gameplay is still intact and the new features are optional. To be fair, they weren't actually optional - even mooks would just drop chaff and throw off your missiles if you dared try to fight them normally. Infinity basically sold itself on the fact that Close Range Assault wasn't coming back.
What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: Once the story became developed and the characters start ruminating about war and politics it's obvious that kids isn't the target demographic. Yet CERO sees fit to gave most of the games A (All Ages) rating due to no direct human-to-human combat depicted.
