Today, Bandai Namco revealed an extensive “opening cinematic trailer” of its upcoming flight shooting game Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve.
I used the quotation marks because it’s a bit more than just an opening cinematic. It’s basically the first 16 minutes of the game, including quite a few interactive moments.
It also provides a good introduction to the game’s main story point. The player is a pilot who finds himself playing the role of the Wings of Theve, a legendary ace whose achievements are a social media hoax manufactured to unite and give hope to the people of a nation on the brink of collapse.
Incidentally, if you’d like to see more story content, you can check out Episode 1, Episode 2, and Episode 3 of the Hour Zero prequel live-action series.
That being said, without further ado, I leave you with the new video.
Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve will release on October 2, 2026, for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S, following the announcement from a few months ago. If you want to see more, you can check out a developer diary, an action-packed trailer, an extensive gameplay reveal, the characters, plenty more gameplay, a look at some of the fighters included in the game, the multiplayer, and the story.
It’s the latest installment of the popular Ace Combat franchise, which culminated a few years ago with Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown, which has broken all sales records for the series by shipping over 7 million units, after a period in which it remained dormant.
If you’d like to read more flight simulation news (yes, we consider Ace Combat a flight simulator-lite here, and you can’t convince us otherwise), you can find plenty in our latest roundup article from yesterday.
If you want to go further back, we have a handy overview video of the major flight simulation news in the past week. You can watch it below. As usual, leaving a like and a comment and subscribing to our growing YouTube channel is extremely helpful.
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