Glazing Ace Combat 04 is the reason this heart still beats!

If Yellow 13 had survived the Continental War, he would've become a famous chef in Strangereal on a show called Hell's Kitchen.

I think deep down this is why so many people have AC4 as their favorite game. Not just because it was their first, but so many moments feel tender yet emotionally charged, and every small cutscene has heart and care in it.

I truly do think AC4 was a happy accident in some capacity. AC4s story and gameplay is good on its own, but then it’s promotional material as well as AC2 severly flesh out the antagonist force of Erusea, making both sides feel like actual nations with seperate but well defined goals.

While this is a video on 4, I need to give credit to AC2 for all it established. It established Usea in a grounded way and did so without introducing anything that AC4 would have to work around (unlike 5)

Truly a masterpiece of a game. There’s nothing like it anywhere else. Even though I personally find 3s story better in multiple ways…There’s just nothing on this scale for me with this type of story.

Its kinda funny how the older map makes more sense for the Ulysses asteroids to hit Anea

I miss you mom, thanks for buying that plane game at the action pawn

My first Ace Combat. Still the best.

my first Ace Combat ever. such a good classic.

I only recently noticed the general faster feeling of five and zero after replaying them back to back.

I genuinely thought my emulator was running at higher clock rate or something when I booted up five.

This video brought a tear to my eye. Such a magnificent appreciation video for such a magnificent game.

It's so refreshing hearing your opinions outside of 7, I hope we see other videos from the rest of the franchise. :)

If they make a small show for each Ace Combat game like they are doing for 8 (Ace Combat Zero Hour), they should have Ryan Gosling as Yellow 13.

My first introduction to the series was Ace Combat 7 on release. I would play 6 and PW after, but then I remember first starting out the holy trilogy not knowing what to expect and started with 04. Even after finishing the three, 04 left the best impression on me and I have replayed that game a lot. I also have the same sentiment that the series will never go back to something like 04 (even though god i wish they would) and have hated 5 some time later after my first run with it.
The gameplay dialogue is one I really love. Most of the lines are usually the same, but they sound cool because they're uniform and therefore sounds like you're part of a real military, and the deliveries are good. So whenever the game tries to tell you something that's new, it sticks out more from the "uniform" lines and therefore guides the player with that information. With the later installments, they yap so much exposition or unneeded dialogue that you just sort of filter it out, but in turn might make you filter out critical mission information. There's also not a lot of glazing over you as the player, which means there's little to no dialogue that makes me physically recoil, unlike 5.
The music imo is very special in 04 because I feel like there's no one real song that "defines" it, in a good way. Example, when i think of the music, 7 has Daredevil, 5 has Unsung War, 6 has Liberation of Gracemeria, and so on. But in 04, I can't really say the same and it's always multiple songs in mind immediately like Comona, Blockade, Sitting Duck, Stonehenge, Blue Skies, rather than one song, and all of them are very distinct from one another.
04 is my number 1

Very good summary, I feel much of the same way about 4, especially the flight model.  When I first played it last year I was genuinely taken aback that just regular enemy fighters had solid AI and you had to actually do a little bit of BFM to get a kill, and I really didn't get a feeling like that elsewhere from the franchise outside of the ace squadrons in Zero.  Limited weapons and the genuine necessity for the return line made for very interesting dynamics, and the smaller maps with slower speeds made this work.  I really hope 8 moves away from enemies on rails like Mihaly and souped up planes you can't catch like Strigon and goes back to just darn tough AI you actually can fight.

6 still has my heart for its scale and iterating on some great setpiece moments from Zero, but I'm not blind to its faults.  AC4 is just perfection.

My first Ace Combat game was 7, and that was in 2023 too, very late to the party but after greatly enjoying and finishing that game I wanted to try out one of its predecessors, which led me to Ace Combat 4. After figuring out how to use an emulator and booted the game for the first time, the experience I gained from 7 helped me to honestly breeze through most of the missions fairly easily despite the flight model being much more different than how it is in 7. But man was it still one hell of a blast to play Ace Combat 4, I loved everything from the missions and all the way to even the briefing music, I still keep getting shivers and goosebumps anytime I listen back to 4's OST (I love Blockade). And when I finished 4, I felt a great sense of nostalgia as if I were a kid playing this on an old tv monitor sitting on the floor feeling accomplished, but the funny thing is that I never even got to experience this game during its time because I was born in 2005 years after this great game and console were already out and yet despite just emulating that experience, I was still able to feel it and it honestly just felt life changing. And because of that, to this day 4 still remains my most favourite Ace Combat game.

Also can't wait to get to try out Ace Combat 8!

Love this game so much that I have 3 original copy of it, 3 exactly identical pal AC4 in perfect condition, and last sunday i've just completed probably the  200th campaign run since I first played it in 2002, still on my fat ps2.
I think I will take this game with me till the grave ❤

You had me insane when you talked about some lemotiff's of AC04 being used in other AC games! AC04 sure is a gem. The last one I got to play from the PS2 trilogy back in the day!

10:45 100% true facts...😎

My First Delving into this most excellent franchise, I have the Trilogy on my PS2 still, and am eagerly waiting for 8's drop later this month, let us never forget this game, without it, we would not be here!

AC4 rocks so much. My dad, brothers and I would sit in front of an old CRT TV at night taking turns playing through the missions. It was such an amazing memory and I still adore the game to this day. I like 5 too, the story isn’t as good and neither is the soundtrack or the aesthetics, but it still a good time. 7 is like that as well. But 4 is just immaculate. I go back to it over and over. The believable storylines, the gorgeous look, and the most memorable missions. I hope 8 can hit some of those highs

I literally have the starting 4 symbol tattooed on me. This game is my all time fave for a very damn good reason