Dengeki Online Interview Summary

We've decided that doing summaries of interviews instead of complete translations is more efficient - both for you the reader and for us. It means we can get information out more quickly and you don't have to rely on google as much.

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.