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NEWS: Bandai Namco Entertainment, ILCA Establish New Company Bandai Namco Aces

Haven’t really followed the Ace Combat series of any other series that predates the Namco-Bandai merger but this “treatment” can’t be any worse than the way other IPs from both company’s were treated.

BadNewsBlues wrote:

Haven’t really followed the Ace Combat series of any other series that predates the Namco-Bandai merger but this “treatment” can’t be any worse than the way other IPs from both company’s were treated.

I'm not really familiar with other big Nampo IPs, myself, though I did get Pac-Man 256 in a bundle last year and thought it was pretty great. I think King of Fighters is Nampo, too, and hasn't that been seeing some love recently?

Anyway, the Ace Combat was pretty popular back during the PS2 generation, but has been pretty poorly mishandled ever since. A (very brief) overview of the post-PS2 years:

Ace Combat 6 was the first HD Ace Combat game, and should have been a spectacular debut into "the next generation" -- and to an extent it was -- but Nampo-Bandai sold off (timed?) exclusivity rights to Microsoft, which meant it was relegated to the Xbox 360: a platform no one in Japan ever cared about, on which Ace Combat had no preexisting overseas fanbase. Most AC fans liked Japanese games, in general, and that meant buying Japanese consoles. And to add insult on top of injury, Microsoft was the first to really the embrace predatory microtransactions model, and Namco-Bandai followed hot on their heels. Resulting in a game riddled with offensively-priced DLC.

Ace Combat Assault Horizon was the "answer" the geniuses at Nampo-Bandai came up with to the question of why AC6 sold so poorly. The reason, they determined, was because "Westerners" (a euphemism I use in the intended manner) simply did not like Japanese games. So the answer was to strip out everything about Ace Combat that could be construed as "Japanese." So instead of a campy anti-war drama with ridiculous near-SF bombast, we got a Call of Duty spin off: a "grounded" story set in the real world, abandoning all of the prior continuity, embracing the jingoistic, racist claptrap that was especially popular in American AAA shooters at the time. The gameplay was also heavily scripted (on rails at points, even) and pretty rubbish overall. (Not that there weren't some good ideas here, but that's a topic for another time.)

Ace Combat Assault Horizon Legacy was the closest thin approaching a bright spot in this dismal era: a faithful remake of Ace Combat 2, on the Nintendo 3DS. It was pretty great. But the title made most people dismiss it as an Assault Horizon spin-off, so few bothered to play it.

Ace Combat Infinity was a hot mess: a free-to-play online game with the usual buffet of microtransactions and extraordinarily grind. Diehard Ace Combat fans embraced it because they didn't have much of a choice. Naturally the servers went offline after Namco-Bandai had milked the fan base dry and now it's gone forever.

Ace Combat 7 is the latest game and arguably a spectacular return to form (hence its self-evident success)... but it was also developed on a shoestring budget, and it shows. The story is messy as hell, there's an obscene amount of DLC, multiplayer is extremely limited. The game was only ever made in the first place because Namco-Bandai and Sony thought it would be a good way to market PSVR, back when corporate suits were still trying to make VR the next "big thing." It's a miracle AC7 is even half as good as it wound up being.

Beyond that there are also the PSP spin-off games to consider (which IIRC came out around the same time as AC6, so after the PS2 generation but prior to ACAH) which were moderately well-received... but the low-fidelity and lack of twin-stick controls made them a bit of a hard-sell to the fanbase.