I played just enough Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces with Xseed to get a feel for the controls. Project Aces developed an innovative motion control system where the remote acts as a throttle and the nunchuck controls the direction of your plane. No, not the analog stick on the nunchuck. Tilting the nunchuck moves the plane.
It’s tempting to swing the nunchuck wildly when an enemy plane whizzes by. Instinctively, I wanted to do that, but Sky Crawlers isn’t designed for jerky movements. Ace pilots gently tilt the nunchuck and close in on their targets with somersaults. Once you’re near a mark a meter starts filling up. When it gets to level one or higher you can do a fancy maneuver to get behind an enemy plane and shoot it down.
I stuck with this strategy for a level and it worked pretty well.
Meanwhile my allies just flew around without a care in the world, but I suppose that makes sense in this universe. As a legendary pilot you can’t let computer controlled planes do all of the work.
In one animated cut scene a rival pilot sadly reminisced over battles since her skill wasn’t anywhere near the protagonist’s. She spoke in Japanese because the version I played was the Japanese build. Xseed is still working on localizing and dubbing Sky Crawlers with English voice acting. I asked if they were planning to keep the Japanese voice track in and that hasn’t been determined yet.
A representative from Xseed also assured me Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces will land in North America this holiday season even though they are working on a ton of other games.
