Hello everyone! First up, NamDai decided to release a new trailer for Ace Combat 7 at Gamescom. Why? Beats me. But they did. There isn't much new material in it, but it still provides some food for thought. We're not the kind of blog that does gameplay, plot, or visual analysis, but there's a few things about the localization that deserve clarification and discussion.

"Spare 8! Do not engage the enemy!"
It really pains me to say it, but all the wishful thinking in the world can't turn "spare" into "spear." Sorry.

It's the part of this line that sounds correct that's actually a bit weird. In the Japanese, they forbid Spare 8 from getting into a dogfight with the Flanker, rather than exhorting him not to engage. The result for Spare 8 is the same, but the nuance is different, since it implies that the reason AWACS doesn't want the Super Bug to engage is because the "experimental" Flanker is especially dangerous in a knife fight, and not for some other reason.

"…clearly an illegal and unforgivable violation of our nation's sovereignty."
Maybe there just wasn't enough space to put the whole line in subtitles, but that entire clause is gone. Japanese Cosette simply says that "the great power Osea encroaches on us from overseas, building a titanic orbital elevator within our sovereign territory." I guess we'll see whether it's a trailer-specific quirk or whether the localization team was bombastically ad-libbing again.

"Concentrate on him! Shoot him down!"
-was in Japanese "Get that guy! We can turn it around if we get that one plane!"

The English lines in this trailer aren't so bad, but they do seem to diverge in ways which are kinda important. So long as the final product is good, I think us fans can forgive a few liberties here and there, but as you'll see in just a second, Sunao Katabuchi's work isn't something to be lightly tampered with.

Sunao Katabuchi recently wrote and directed a wonderful film called In This Corner of the World. It's about the life of a young, newly wedded woman named Suzu Hojo (nee. Urano) in the town of Kure - a major Japanese military port in the Hiroshima prefecture - during the final days of World War Two. It's a simple story of a woman and her extended family told as realistically as possible, with no desire to shock or impress. No more, no less.

With realism as its main goal, it's also an honest examination of the effects the war had on the daily lives and attitudes of the people who lived then. Suzu takes a lot of pride in continuing to live her life as the American bombing campaign continues, seeing the surrender as "giving in to violence," even as the movie makes clear that the war is hopeless and brings only needless suffering. Earlier, Suzu takes cover with her father-in-law Entaro and her young niece Harumi during an American carrier strike against ships in the harbor. Entaro points to an N1K-J Shiden dogfighting an American plane, and expresses his pride in having worked to increase the output of the Nakajima Homare engine powering it to 2000hp. Young Harumi struggles to scream over the engine noise and explosions, "what about the American engines?" The noise consumes her question.

As you might guess, there's a certain thematic through-line between In This Corner of the World and Ace Combat 04, which IGN JP asked Katabuchi about in a November 2016 interview:

– What were the circumstances that led you to be involved with the Ace Combat series?
The people in Namco’s Ace Combat team knew Eiko Tanaka (representative of Studio 4ºC, which produced Princess Arete), and this led to talk of whether or not to have them make the in-game images. When Tanaka heard it was a fighter game, he decided to come and talk with them together, and I get the sense that's where they hammered things out. It was either after the first screening or when we were dubbing Arete, but the very next day I was off to go see a Japanese Navy airstrip in Yokosuka.

– I guess that was your disposition for painstaking research at play. What kind of tone does Ace Combat 04: Shattered Sky [sic] (released in 2001) have, being made in that manner?
Ace Combat 04 is a close up of an ace pilot in the jet age. I knew I wanted to make a story like those you find in military aviation history, so following from that he’d have to be like this, and like that, and when it all came together I figured I could make him the so-called “final boss.” And yet, I wanted to make him a sympathetic person in the highest degree. That’s not really something done in games. But it’s war, after all. Isn’t it a good thing for there to be life in the opponent you’re taking down, and to make the moment when you defeat the strongest foe a sad one for the player? That’s how I thought of it.

– It felt very fresh at the time.
Maybe it’s because I did it without knowing anything about games. Is it really okay to have an enemy pilot, create a neighborhood, have a young boy and girl protagonist become involved, and then have this person appear as the last boss to be taken out? I was torn, but I decided it’d be for the best. Hayao Miyazaki often draws people who fly, but Ace Combat 04 had a ground level perspective: a boy who lost his family when a destroyed plane crashed into his house. This boy can only look up at the sky. Suzu doesn’t fly herself in In This Corner of the World either. She’s the kind of person who doesn’t even fly in dreams or fantasies. The sky above her is where horrors come from. Maybe there’s a direct line from Ace Combat to this depiction. I think people who play Ace Combat will understand.

​Alright, we've got another interview courtesy of 4gamer, and as far as interviews with Japanese press go this one is pretty interesting. It touches on a lot of the same material, but the interviewer does ask about some things that were never touched on elsewhere.

• The game takes place at the same period as ACX, but the two aren’t connected in any meaningful way. Kono is insistent that this game is a continuation of AC04, AC5, and AC6 (but never mentions ACZ).
• Kono says that it's better to use VR with a control stick because it helps with motion sickness. At first blush this might sound like “Hey, buy our control stick,” but this is actually a well understood facet of VR. It helps with discomfort to have the motions of your real hands and your VR hands be as similar as possible.
• Of course there will be superplanes, and according to Kono, they will have new "gimmicks.” Kono takes this moment to remind us how difficult making new models in high res is, which may be a very Japanese way of saying “Now don’t expect too many.” Or it could mean nothing.
• We already knew this, but post stall maneuvers are a thing, and they aren't just "press X to kulbit." You can enter post stall by entering stall conditions in level flight and raising the nose and throttle slightly at the same time. However, Kono says that there probably won't be any real applications to this besides just being cool.
• There will be multiplayer, but Kono is tight lipped about it. My guess is they're not planning much, but we'll see.
• There is plane customization, but surprisingly, it's only a new game plus thing. They were worried about players playing the same mission over and over again the first time through the campaign just to grind for parts
• Kono reiterates all the things he said about clouds before, and clarifies that weather won’t significantly affect gameplay. It would distract too much from the core pillar of flying around and shooting things.
• That said, another design goal is to make the landscape seem alive as well. His example is that in the demo, if you descend below the clouds, you can see squalls over the tropic jungle, and if you fly low enough, you’ll see startled flamingoes taking flight.
• Kono acknowledges the problems with getting new people into flight action games and says their marketing strategy is to - as in the E3 trailer - sell it as a “jet fighter game full of drama.”
• He goes on to say that there are two stages to training players on Ace Combat: how to control the plane, and combat. If you make the first stage too simplified, you chase away all the previous players.
• He reiterates previous interviews, stating that the player’s development as an ace pilot is an experience most associated with RPGs, going on to say that Japanese fans should appreciate that aspect in particular.
• Kono promises that there are actual reasons for the Kestrel II’s appearance. He says this idea developed after consulting with Katabuchi, which raises all kinds of questions about his involvement. He makes it sound like it was he who came up with the idea to include a “Kestrel II” and Katabuchi’s job to make sense of it.

It would be very nice to find an interview with Katabuchi or the nominal game director Yuta Hamanka, but Katabuchi is busy doing the circuit for In This Corner of the World, and at any rate Kono seems to have either been anointed or anointed himself as the face of the franchise. I did find one recent interview with Katabuchi that brings up AC04 though, which could be the subject of another post.

For now though, if you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment or check out the discord.

So to start off, we've summarized…an interview which BlackKite2128 over at r/acecombat has already summarized quite well! Auspicious. But we're sure not going to complain about more Japanese speakers active in Ace Combat circles. Here's the points that stuck out to us.

• Kono says the decision to return to the numbered titles came because of the confluence of the release of next gen consoles and the 10th anniversary of the release of the last numbered title.
• The decision to go ahead with AC7 came before Infinity entered production, planning beginning some three years before launch. The idea to make clouds a feature comes from that period.
• Kono claims that there are lots of ideas in AC7 which weren’t practical on last gen consoles.
• Infinity was made first because that’s just what resources the team had available to them to make. Kono also says he wanted to give fans a kind of rallying point. A “place” as he puts it.
• At first they didn’t anticipate doing VR, but when they learned it was an option, they jumped at the chance. Apparently getting to the point where it didn’t cause VR sickness was extraordinarily difficult.
• Kono admits this is a bit of a post-hoc justification, but he says the demo includes a Tomcat and Super Bug because the Tomcat is famous and the Super Bug is a real life workhorse. They’re naval planes because they wanted to have the demo show off carrier ops.
• They intend to include about 30 real world aircraft. He doesn’t specify that they’re playable, but it seems implied? If they had repurposed old assets from the start they could probably increase that number, but Kono says that’s not what they’re doing.
• Not specifically Ace Combat, but Kono says they aimed to model each individual rivet, which is verbatim one of the talking points in the Famitsu writeup. Japanese game journalism!
• Apparently the art team is particularly occupied with getting all the panel lines right.
• Keiki Kobayashi was the first person Kono called when the project started up, but as BlackKite pointed out, he also mentions bringing other people who worked on Ace Combat onboard. An "all star cast" if you will.
• Just in case this was somehow a question, Kono makes it clear that even though you can’t kill the Arsenal Bird in the demo, this is just the first encounter. You're supposed to get a sense of how the UAVs fight (read: they throw themselves in front of your missiles).
• Kono sells the story in 04 as Katabuchi’s and doesn’t mention his own involvement, which is odd given how firm his own agenda seems. Is it really Katabuchi in the driver’s seat, or is he just selling us a game written by the director of In This Corner of the World, AC04, and AC5?
• ”We chose Osea and Erusea because we figured fans would be intrigued - we hadn’t depicted any enmity between them before.”
• The interviewer asks which country the player comes from, and Kono replies that he wants to reveal more details slowly, giving people the chance to think about the two countries. This is an oddly specific yet spontaneous question with an oddly coherent answer.
• Kono goes on to say that the conflict isn’t just between two nations, but between manned and unmanned aircraft, new and old generation, and other stuff. It’s not a simple story, he says.
• Kono says in a bit of a roundabout way that one of Ace Combat’s selling points is that it’s one of the last holdouts of the arcade flight combat genre.
• ”Anyway, I couldn’t understand a thing since the demo was in English, but since your wingmen talk so much, I could get an idea of the situation even though the missile attacks right before the Arsenal Bird appears confused me, and I never felt like I was out of the loop. I enjoyed it.”

Anyway, if you have any questions, hit us up on the discord or in the comments section.

Since part of the reason this site exists is as a repository for Japanese language Ace Combat material, Zaku’s letting me use the blog to post translation-related stuff about AC7.

​First up, a translation of the interview segment of this Famitsu article. The writeup on the first page is pretty much just a walkthrough of the demo, which we’ve all seen for ourselves, and will eventually get to experience for ourselves anyway. The interview with Kazutoki “key man” Kono following it is much more revealing.

We are lucky that Kono is the kind of guy that rambles off on his own without the interviewer prompting him. He doesn’t have the kind of immunity from his superiors a famous auteur like Hideo Kojima has, but the degree to which he’ll talk about production problems and philosophy is greater than you usually see from a Japanese developer giving a promotional interview.

Anyway, there are a few lines in the E3 2017 trailer which have sparked discussion. I’m not about to go casting aspersions on the localization team, but I think it’s safe to say some elements of the localization are…curious…and deserve clarification.

 “…and the Kestrel II warship.”
From 00:33 in the trailer, a news anchor says that the Oseans launched an attack from “their aircraft carrier and the Kestrel II warship.” Or maybe they say “in the Kestrel II warship.” Either way, it’s a strange line. In their version of the trailer, the Japanese subtitles read “Naval aircraft from the Osean Navy carrier Kestrel II have commenced attacks against the capital city Farbanti.” If I had to speculate, I would say that this was a voice actor ad-libbing to fit the lip synch, but that would presume things about the state of the production which we can’t know.

 "…remorsefully injured…”
Princess Cosette tells us in English that the Osean attacks have “remorsefully injured countless innocents,” but regrettably, the Japanese speaking Oseans feel no such remorse. The Japanese subtitles for that line (00:52) read “This is Princess Rosa Cosette d’Elisse. The Osean attacks have indiscriminately brought harm to many civilians.” I leave it to the reader to decide whether this is an esoteric but canonical use of the word “remorseful,” or whether the voice actor simply stumbled over their line and they kept it.

 “Who cares?”
​At 01:01, a man says “who cares” about who started the conflict. This is a fair sentiment, but his Japanese counterpart is more reserved, merely stating that “it’s unclear.” We may not know who this character is, but the localization is already changing his personality.
​
 There are a few other more nitpicky items - “Erusean forces” are occupying the space elevator, not specifically the air force - but those are chaff. These are the three lines someone looking askance at the localization should care about.

We'll see how all this bears out as the game matures. If we learn anything else, you'll read about it here.