I’ve been trying to power through the game since last week. To be completely honest I’m not having a great time with this one (key word being “great” here).

It’s fun at times and a good game from a production standpoint but I end up playing in pretty short session because it can’t keep me interested otherwise. It’s a stark contrast to Project Wingman, where I pretty much binged through the whole thing twice (including DLC) and still want more. I’m slowly progressing but man, it’s night and day between the two games.

I more or less got my input settings to what I’m used to (sans deadzone and sensitivity settings but it’s still better than nothing) and got over most of my issues with how it plays so things are a bit better now.

Concepts for the missions are interesting and varied so far which is great, I’m a bit mixed on the execution though as there’s not a single mission that didn’t have something annoying in it. I have a similar sentiment towards ship upgrade tree - a neat idea, alright execution. I don’t hate any of this at least.

Story is… fine. The constant waffling about “sins” and how “you’re all expendable”/“you can die for all I care”/“you have my permission to crash” (that’s why we put you into extremely expensive machines armed to the teeth) mixed with the pretty common Japanese way of writing dialogues (person 1 say X, person 2 repeats it) got grating pretty quickly. At least it’s not a permanent focus of the game so there’s that.
There might be something a bit more interesting lurking in the background but I’ll have to see how things play out first to be convinced.

On the “good” good side of things I really liked the thunderstorm mission gimmick, where getting hit by lightning is not only possible but it also affects gameplay in a significant way (disrupting the HUD and temporarily cutting off your controls). In general, the way they treat clouds as part of gameplay is actually pretty cool (targeting wise, not the icing). They also look pretty great.
Besides the already mentioned mission variety, I also liked the callback to AC04 - it was a nice surprise as initially I didn’t realise both games are connected (it’s been a few years since my playthrough of 04 and even then my familiarity with AC franchise is pretty limited).

All in all, the game constantly edges on the brink of clicking with me, only to pull something annoying that brings it right back to making me feel mixed about it. I want to like it more, I really do but alas, so far it wasn’t meant to be.

Not much to write about today as I mostly focused on AC7 and only did some light grinding to get all current party members to the same level. I’ll most likely switch full time to Persona once I’m done with the fly-boy campaign but for a few more days it’ll have to wait.

I hopped in to unlock all the gear and achievements (all except for “Speed runner” since I can’t be bothered with downgrading the game just to unlock it). Went pretty fast since levels are small and requirements simple but it was fun nonetheless.

I’ll have to jump back in to do some proper photos of the DLC stages but that’ll have to wait a bit.

Progressing pretty slowly with this one as I treat it like a “play before bed” type of game. I really like Kotone and enjoy the new events written for her, hopefully they keep their quality throughout. Social links seem to have the same problem as the original ones for the most part (agree with people to make them like you) but whatever.

There’s one thing that’s bothering me and that’s lack of audio settings - the sound effects (especially crit hits) during combat tend to be slightly louder than everything else and quickly become rather grating to hear.

All in all, it’s pretty fun so far. While I don’t expect much differences in terms of the main story I’m curious where the rest of the writing ends up.

I’ve decided to take another stab at playing this thing in VR. My initial attempt was a bit weird as even though my PC is close to being bare minimum to run the thing in VR it didn’t seem to use all of the available resources during gameplay. After some searching I found multiple claims that VR performance got kinda wrecked with the release of patch 2.0 so I decided to give the old version a shot. Boy was it worth it! Well, kind of.

Both performance and hardware utilisation are definitely better, giving the speed and smoothness I didn’t see during my previous session. It’s super fun to play and gives me hope I might be able to finish the campaign before I finally manage to upgrade my PC. It’s also has a functional menu controls in VR unlike the 2.0 version.
It’s really fun and being able to look around makes planning your moves way easier (I should look into non-VR head tracking for my normal playthrough).

At the same time, 1.0 is 1.0. The anniversary update brought with it various improvements, including: better control of cloud settings, visual improvements to stages and updated HUD. It’s also the only version of the game you can play the DLC with which is unfortunate since I really want to play the “Express Lane” in VR.

It’s an acceptable compromise overall but far from ideal way to experience the game. Oh well…

I honestly didn’t expect to play this game any time soon due to price but it’s currently 90% off (or 84% directly on Steam) so I decided to take this opportunity and compare it with Project Wingman while it’s still fresh in my mind.

I haven’t played much yet (only 5 missions so far) so I’ll stick to first impressions, with more thought out writeup probably next week. Here are the things that stood out the most so far:

• Not being able to rebind HOTAS controls in game is a terrible choice and whoever decided on that should feel bad. It can be done by editing an ini file but that shouldn’t be necessary in this day and age. Also, no mouse support for menus - seriously?
• Speed control doesn’t feel right yet, I’m sure I’ll get used to it though.
• Flares are so limited you might as well not have them. Not that they’re as necessary as in PW but still.
• Not yet sold on voice acting, prefer Project Wingman on that front so far. It feels a bit too… clinical (or slightly less natural), I guess?
• I have similar feelings towards writing in general. It feels a bit too sterile, corporate and unnatural, with lots of “lordumpy” narration. Not the worst thing ever but it’s definitely noticeable.
• Game looks great, more dynamic elements in the cockpit are always a plus.
• The idea of music fading out when flying through clouds is cool but gets annoying really fast. Decent way to push people away from flying into them, I guess.
• I’m playing on hard but it’s not particularly challenging so far. I hope things pick up or there’s an unlockable higher difficulty after completing the game.

All in all, I think PW is a better game for me at the moment - not because AC7 is bad, but rather because it’s a bit more “safe” in comparison. I still like it and hope to warm up to it as I play but so far it kinda makes me want to go back to PW, not gonna lie.

I haven’t played much of P3D before so now that I have some fresh experience with both it and P4D I can safely say the latter is a better game - whether in terms of gameplay, beatmaps or soundtrack, P3D feels a bit less “inspired”, I guess. It’s kinda unfortunate as P3 is my favourite game in the series (I haven’t played 1 or 2 yet) but whatever, the important part is to have fun.

I’m slowly getting back in the groove. No full perfects yet but full combos are back on the menu and that’s exactly what I aim for.

Playing both dancing games made me go back to my unfinished pink playthrough of P3P. I haven’t touched it since… last year (I think?) due to mind goblins messing with my focus when playing RPGs at the time but I still want to see how things play out from the alternative perspective.

I don’t have much to write about this one at the moment as I’m still in the early parts (just got Akihiko a few in-game days prior) but I have to drop a hot take nonetheless - I really wish these games had no time limit. I understand why it’s there and that it’s important from the narrative perspective but it’s a mechanic I never really enjoyed in games (Persona or otherwise). Now that I got to experience a Persona title without one (P5X gacha), it made these feelings even stronger.

At least I’m playing on the easy mode (NG+) so I can skip most of the grind and focus on what I’m interested in (social elements). I’m really curious about the new stuff.

I’m almost done with the second playthrough, still having a ton of fun even if it’s not perfect. While I really like Prez, limiting your plane choices to two-seaters can feel really rough in certain missions and I probably won’t be doing that again in the future. It’s unfortunate that all the late-game planes are solo only as stat and load-out differences can make things way easier (or at least more fun).

I also took the time to read through all the lore documents available in the game and it only made me more interested in a direct sequel. We have new conflicts against the Federation flaring up around the world, a bunch of global players we haven’t seen yet (Periphery countries, West African Concordat, the European alliance). We could have Federation megacities as mission backdrops in contrast to the more natural and modern environments from this game.
There are some many interesting things they could do with all this world building, it would be a waste to stop here.

I’ve decided to finally set up PS Vita emulation on my Steam Deck and what’s better for that than Persona dancing games? Not like I have many other Vita games but still.
I had to change the graphics API to OpenGL as for some reason both games crashed with Vulkan (didn’t have such problems when testing on desktop), other than that they work great.

It’s been years since I last played one of those and boy am I rusty - even basic songs on normal feel overwhelming at times! I just started and should be able to get back into the rhythm soon enough but man, seeing how much I suck now was a bit of a surprise.

Finally got to it and after all this time I feel a bit mixed - both on the DLC and the game overall. I’m still mulling things over so here are the highlights:

• DLC keeps the atmosphere of the base game nicely. It’s cool to see how things were before the original stages.
• Music is once again pretty great if a little too bombastic compared to what’s happening on the screen. I don’t particularly care for the edgy dolphin in the club stage though.
• At times things feel like they were done in an afternoon (not literally but still):
  • There are once again objects without collisions and plenty of places where you can randomly phase through when walking.
  • I found a few spots where you can get stuck, sometimes in the open.
  • Lighting in the club stage feels messed up (everything is super dark except for blown out “lights” that don’t give any… well, light).
  • The skybox of the first stage looks completely misaligned (maybe this one was intentional, I don’t know - still doesn’t look great).

As much as I like this title it kinda depresses me. I’m someone who takes pride in their work and spends a lot of time on even the smallest details so seeing something with this many simple and easily fixable issues being released as a finished product (and a paid one at that!) pains me on a personal level.
I realise this game is intended to exude the grungy “I don’t care” and “everything is screwed” energy but that should not spill into the technical aspects in my opinion. There should be SOME bar of quality there.

I’m still glad it was created and had fun with both base game and DLC but man…

I finished the campaign, bought the DLC, finished it and started another playthrough using two-seater planes (WSO is an actual character and you don’t get to enjoy her when flying solo). I absolutely love this game and I’m happily planting it on my list of favourites from now on.

It has action, drama, surprises and challenge - all tied together into a neat little package. The story actually goes a bit harder then expected and served as an interesting mirror to Ace Combat campaigns. It went in a very different direction than I thought it would.

Mission design is pretty simple - fly to the AO and kill everything. There’s no time limits or special objectives for the most part. They do at least make up for it with varied map design and weather conditions. There’s also a healthy mix of air, land and water targets (sometimes at the same time) to keep things interesting.
I wish they’d make more use of take-off and landing sequences as they show up like 2-3 times throughout the campaign and once in the DLC (this one even includes a full taxi sequence from the hangar!). It’s a simple addition that most people would probably skip but I still love for a bit of additional immersion. Does anyone know if there’s a non-sim flight combat game that utilises these sections in a more regular way?

Is it a perfect game? Considering the price and size of the development team I’d say it’s pretty close to being as perfect as it can be given the circumstances. There are some issues like the missile spam and number of enemies at times but over all none of these are serious enough to dampen my excitement about this title.
Oh! Both final bosses, as in from the main and DLC campaigns, can be a bit much in terms of “spectacle”. We go from relatively grounded challenges to enemies that belong in Gundam rather than contemporary military game. It’s a bit of a whiplash compared to the rest of the playthrough.

It’s a fantastic title that will become a mainstay on my hard drive for a long while. I really hope these guys make a sequel some day. Direct, spiritual - doesn’t matter. I need more flight combat games from this studio.