Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies (2001)
Project Aces' PS2 Flight-Action Masterpiece Uniting Mobius 1's Dogfights With Anti-War Intimacy
Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies (released in Europe as Ace Combat: Distant Thunder) is a 2001 arcade-style combat flight game developed by Namco's Project Aces team for the PlayStation 2. Pairing exhilarating 60fps aerial warfare as silent ace Mobius 1 with anime director Sunao Katabuchi's illustrated civilian war memoir and Keiki Kobayashi's Latin choral finale, it inaugurated the series' revered PS2 trilogy.
Mobius 1, Stonehenge, and Large-Scale PS2 Aerial Warfare
Regrouping as 'Project Aces' after the ambitious but commercially divisive anime cyber-fiction of Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere, Namco anchored Shattered Skies in tangible modern jet fighter spectacle across its alternate-earth Strangereal setting. Flying licensed aircraft from the F-4E Phantom II to the F-22A Raptor and experimental X-02 Wyvern at a crisp 60 frames per second with shimmering Emotion Engine heat exhaust, silent ISAF pilot 'Mobius 1' turns the tide against Erusea across eighteen vast score-attack and strike missions—silencing the asteroid-hunting Stonehenge railgun battery before diving inside the missile silos of coastal fortress Megalith.
Sunao Katabuchi's Illustrated Memoir and Yellow 13's Humanity
What elevated Shattered Skies into enduring art was the contrast between thunderous radio chatter in the cockpit and hushed, watercolor-toned intermission stills written and directed by anime filmmaker Sunao Katabuchi. Spoken as a reflective postwar letter addressed to Mobius 1, a war-orphaned boy in occupied San Salvacion recounts watching enemy Erusean ace 'Yellow 13' drink quietly at a local tavern and mourn fallen wingmen—turning the player's deadliest rival into a sympathetic human being without a word of melodrama. Crowned by Keiki Kobayashi's choral 'Megalith -Agnus Dei-,' the game sold over 2.6 million copies worldwide.