The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces Playthrough - Tutorials

This is part 1 of my capture of me playing through The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces for the Wii. This was recorded directly from my Wii (not the Wii U). I'm playing on normal difficulty.

I picked up The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces on its release date in January of 2010 because I had an itch for an aerial combat game and I thought this one looked good. I had played a little bit of Flight Simulator on the PC as a kid and had briefly played Aero Fighters Assault on the Nintendo 64, but other than that, I didn’t really have much experience with the genre.

Innocent Aces ended up being a really fun game, and it actually released for $30 brand new, which I thought was an excellent price for a new Wii game. Aside from the fairly impressive graphics, Innocent Aces did a pretty good job of making me feel like a badass fighter pilot. The whistling-style soundtrack also reminded me of Metroid Prime, which is my favorite GameCube game.

Innocent Aces is apparently connected to a Sky Crawlers anime movie released in 2008, though I’ve never seen the movie and don’t know much about it. There are some anime cutscenes included between certain missions in this game that probably tie into the movie somehow, but I really just care about the flying and shooting.

Although this game isn’t very long, there is an upgrade system that allows you to improve your plane by unlocking new parts through destroying specific enemies and obtaining certain ranks at the end of each mission. There are also quite a few achievements to earn.

At the end of each mission you get ratings in three different categories (Kills, TMC Kills, and overall Grade) based on how well you perform. The highest rating for each category is S, and the higher ratings provide more points, which in turn means more unlocked parts. I will be trying to earn an overall S Grade on each mission, but I may fall short of that in other categories such as TMC Kills. The S Grade requirements for each mission vary.

This game includes an unusual default control scheme where the nunchuck’s tilt functionality acts as the steering controls while the Wii Remote is tilted to control aircraft speed. It’s a weird but interesting control setup that I used when I first beat the game, and I will be using it again here, although I have to admit the tilt controls are less responsive than they should be.

In this first part I started a new save file and completed all of the tutorials. The tutorials beyond the first one are optional.

Recorded with the Hauppauge HD PVR and the Wii's component cables. I'm using a Wii Remote and nunchuck.