![]() Since it’s set in the near future, Ace Combat 3 eschews real aircraft in favour of fictional, futuristic ones. Handling of the planes is very arcadey, allowing for some ridiculously implausible manoeuvres to be performed with ease, and the absurdly enormous loadout of missiles each one carries allows for dramatic volleys of warheads to be unloaded on each and every target you come across. ![]() If you’ve played one of the more recent Ace Combat games, Ace Combat 3 will be immediately familiar, since fundamentally the series hasn’t changed all that much since its very first installment. So that fan translation is your best bet for now - even if it is incomplete in some non-critical places.īut on to the game itself - and for the purposes of today, assume we’re talking about the Japanese original. The game was still positively received from a critical perspective - but it’s still a bit of a sore point for fans, and many are still clamouring for a remake, though despite press and public alike badgering Namco since 2006, there has been no sign of this coming - and indeed in 2014, Kazutoki Kono of Project Aces noted that the size of the team working on the Ace Combat project was too small to support the massive localisation effort Ace Combat 3 required. And that’s why it’s great - and so disappointing we never got the chance to experience the full thing back in the day. And although it might not be apparent from the cover art to the game, Ace Combat 3 is extremely anime - it’s essentially a mecha anime with giant robots replaced by futuristic planes. It’s also possible that Ace Combat 3’s strongly anime-inspired nature put Namco’s western divisions off somewhat in the late ’90s and early 2000s, anime-style games were still seen as a somewhat risky prospect, since the medium was still quite new to non-Japanese audiences. Indeed, Namco had been advertising the game’s complex storyline outside of Japan before taking the decision to strip back the localisation, leading to some backlash from series fans who were looking forward to the most narrative-heavy Ace Combat to date. Of course, one can argue that those worldwide sales may well have been a lot better if they’d brought the full experience over to English speakers. ![]() Indeed, ultimately the 1.1 million total worldwide sales of Ace Combat 3 ended up being closer to those of Ace Combat 2 than Air Combat, which could have cause Namco to look on the game as a commercial failure - and their budget-cutting measures to be the right decision. Some conjecture that the relatively poor commercial performance of Ace Combat 2 in comparison to its predecessor Air Combat (1 million copies compared to Air Combat’s 2.2 million) led Namco to believe that the extensive localisation required to provide the full Ace Combat 3 experience in English simply wasn’t financially viable. Speaking with Hardcore Gaming 101 in 2012, translator Agness Kaku recalled that she worked on some translated demo scenes, but the localisation project was canned soon afterwards as Namco drastically cut the budget for the international release. Namco has never given an official explanation as to why the international release of Ace Combat 3 was so significantly cut back from the original. Shipping on a single CD, featuring no branching narrative paths and only 36 out of the 52 missions of the original game, it’s still a decent experience from a gameplay perspective - but if you have the opportunity to experience the Japanese original, which is now possible thanks to a fan translation, you should absolutely take it. The English version, meanwhile, was significantly cut back. And this was a significant part of the original 1999 Japanese release: coming on two CDs, the game featured extensive cutscenes and fully voiced dialogue sequences between missions, plus the aforementioned ability to branch off to one of five different endings. One interesting thing about Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere is that despite it being such a narrative-heavy game, Namco made a disappointing decision when they localised it for English-speaking territories back in 2000: they cut pretty much all of the narrative content. Unfolding in the near future, the game features a series of recognisable aircraft, but with a bit of futuristic “oomph” under the hood, allowing all of them to quite comfortably reach astonishingly high speeds with minimal effort, among other things. ![]() Okay, it’s a bit more complicated than that - a series of decision points throughout Ace Combat 3 allows you to reach one of five different endings - but that is at least the initial setup for things.
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