Obiwanshinobi wrote:Speaking of starting and landing, I suppose Ace Combat games have some fairly cinematic mission opening scenes, but there's something counter-intuitive about missions beginning mid-air. Just look at all those take-off or at least "swoosh" sequences in countless shmups. A beauty. Even Chelnov hatches that container thing right before becoming controllable (hatching is arguably the single most powerful motif to ever open up a game; see MGS1&3). Cars warm up their engines in anticipation before the signal to go. The "you wake up operating a fighter jet" premise strikes me as odd.
Well, in the games I've played so far (most of them?) there is always a handful of missions that starts off with you having to manually take off form the runway/carrier but these are quite simple (reach decent speed -> pull stick back -> reach altitude) and can be skipped by hitting the start button. Landings are a bit more engaging and required more work, because they're landings but they're pretty similar. No flipping switches, no checklists. I get what you mean and it would be nice, sometimes.
There are some dramatic take offs/landings featured in the cutscenes however, but I'm not sure they count? None of the games have that "Right, I'm about to go on an adventure" that Sky Odyssey does but they're ultimately very different games. Sky Odyssey's good though, one of the first games I bought when I got a used PS2.