Launched in Japan in 1999 as a “Three-Dimensional Dramatic Flight-Shooting Game,” Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere is the third entry in Namco’s flight-sim series for the PlayStation, spanning 2 discs with 52 action-packed missions, numerous real-time and animated cutscenes and 5 different endings.

The game is set in USEA (the United States of Euro-Asia) in the year 2040, a time where the government and the judiciary have been superseded by sheer economic power. There, the two largest multinational corporations in the world – General Resource and Neucom – are plunging into war after years of strained relations.

You begin as a fighter pilot for the UPEO (Universal Peace Enforcement Organization), tasked with suppressing this conflict, but as the war goes on, you discover that there’s more to it than it initially seems, putting your resolve and that of your wingmen to the test. Things complicate even further when a terrorist group with nefarious goals appears.

In 2000, Europe and North America both got a localized release, but only as a single-disc version without any characters, branching paths or world-building, plus some minor gameplay changes, resulting in a much lesser experience. Current series Brand Director Kazutoki Kono cited “budget constraints” as the reason for this downgrade.

Current version: 2.0 / Audio: Japanese / Subtitles: English*

• All missions, cut-scenes and some Search files translated; some menus, incidental radio chatter and credits untranslated.

These fan-translation patches are in xdelta format. A guide on how to patch the game can be found in the Readme.

Only the original release (SLPS-02020~1) is currently supported.

For more information, please visit https://projectnemo.net/ and http://useatoday.blogspot.com/.

• SLPS-02020
• Size: 716,287,488 bytes
• Size on disk: 716,288,000 bytes
• CRC32: CCDDA3B5
• MD5: 30F7DCE98B6901290CB26C9BAF27268F
• SHA-1: 8C6D58308EB389A7B18BC213A6D1E23D14FD3C10
• SHA-256: CFDEC8640CFB0FE5C1AD1AD8C76C958D756FBE75D73E1F449D468EBBAFB8D60F
• SLPS-02021
• Size: 723,813,888 bytes
• Size on disk: 723,816,448 bytes
• CRC32: B86E0F52
• MD5: 50760963AE8A26EA0188B165F05B33A1
• SHA-1: A23E046B1EB695E02D214D269FCA70DBE0A437F7
• SHA-256: CFD9CD36BA858AA81927306EC761A228C8E88BE48F1B1DB9AC9D7F2BDBE8C854