This week, we plan to talk about something peculiar. For the chosen few who are attracted to the franchise, they are nothing short of passionate about every aspect of it. Not being particularly familiar with the franchise myself, I need to seek out some opinions, since the music featured in this franchise is nothing short of amazing.
For a game that passionately depicts aerial combat in its strongest form, the feeling that you’ll likely get is similar to ones you’d feel when you are watching the Ghibli Film “Poco Rosso”. To those who are familiar with aircrafts, a certain perspective for planes are developed as one gets to know the topic better. Planes are elegant, stylish, and marvel of technology, yet their contribution to destroying things is something that one could never turn a blind eye on.
That is the exact feeling that comes with most of the tracks that is embedded within the Ace Combat series.
One can find many emotions within these tracks. The glorious liberty that one would feel when controlling an airplane, the tension that comes when you are actively trying to shake off an opponent, the triumphant rush when you take out an enemy craft, and the hopelessness when your craft is inevitably shot down.
The orchestration that is used to represent these emotions only further amplifies such emotions. One would often find a mix of orchestra and rock within the music, with a moving brass, an intense electric guitar, and occasionally the glorious grandeur of vocals, it’s something that perfectly puts such ideas and emotions into music, rather than words and art.
An unmatched embodiment of triumph, hope, struggle and despair.
In addition to the already glorious bravado that is present in most of the tracks, there are a couple of tracks that stand out like a special snowflake. With that, I highly recommend listening to “Zero” from the Ace Combat : Zero series, as it is one particular track that has a lot of personality to it. For those who have a liking towards Latin music, you’d find this track to be much more palatable. A stroke of classic Latin with all of it’s bravado, paired with orchestral grandeur that one would certainly find engaging, and especially excellent for the game’s context.
With that, I highly recommend anyone who has a stomach for orchestral music full of grime and grit to give the music from this particular series of games a listen. I’m sure there are going to be a couple of tracks that catch your attention.
Music of Ace combat
As an arcade flight sim, Ace combat is very well the forefather of this genre in terms of gameplay and soundtrack. For an arcade flight sim, (the farthest thing away from DCS in terms of realism) it is something that induces dopamine rush and excitement, and besides the dogfights doing it justice, the soundtracks do so as well.
What makes up an Ace Combat track? To that we can look to Comona, Magic Spear II and Contact ( ofc there’s more, I just didn’t include it or else we will be here all day listing them down ). These tracks are high pace blood pumping adrenaline inducing songs that will really get you into the ‘zone’ of ace combat, while listening to them it feels normal that you are doing 28 consecutive high g turns all while going at Mach 2 speed and carrying 100+ missiles on a f-14 tomcat, if this isn’t peak video game logic of a dogfight game I don’t know what is.
The orchestral music in this game hits and it hits hard. There might be a lot of orchestral music from games, movies or tv series, but the ones in Ace Combat, they will cement themselves into your brain and you will like it, or at least I do. Megalith for example, its composition is perfect, with the opening vocals paired with how the scene is shot, the build up in the vocals leading to the build up of the camera shot. The silence in between, before a loud and powerful chorus starts the last mission, www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGVoehiWngY (the link to the last mission of ac4). Then there’s Ace combat Zero’s OST Zero, a final boss theme that is composed mainly of Spanish guitar, the lyrics of this song (in latin btw) might be singing about something entirely different than the events of ac zero, but heck does that Spanish guitar pack a bloody punch, you can feel the gravity of the situation, the emotions that your pilot and the enemy is feeling through the OST, once again leave it to Keiki Kobayashi to compose an Ace Combat track, and he will deliver, more so than we asked for.