Ace Combat 8 gets a live-action prequel, Hour Zero

Bandai Namco has released the first episode of Hour Zero, a four-part live-action prequel to Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve, the next entry in its long-running flight-combat series. Episode one went up on the official Bandai Namco Entertainment America YouTube channel on 15 September and runs just under six minutes.

A prequel told backwards

It is a first for the studio: a short-film series built to lay the story under the game rather than trail it in the usual two-minute format. Hour Zero follows three strangers who survive the opening days of the Republic of Sotoa's invasion of the Federation of Central Usea — Josh Holloway as a pilot with nowhere to land, Brandon Routh as a doctor who saved his enemy, and Tamlyn Tomita as a news anchor silenced for telling the truth. The four episodes are told in reverse, counting down to the moment each of their ordinary lives was broken by the war.

The game opens in July 2029, with the federation overrun and its navy shattered. You are a downed pilot pulled from a lifeboat aboard the ageing carrier Endurance and handed a name to fly under: Wings of Theve, a legend that was invented to keep morale alive and was never true. Bandai Namco Aces is developing, with the series' original PROJECT ACES team behind it, and the official site lists a 2 October 2026 release for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC. Pre-orders are already open.

Our opinion

Live-action tie-ins are usually a sign that a publisher has run out of things to say about the game itself, so it is worth being precise about what Bandai Namco has built here: a four-part story that fills in the weeks before the campaign rather than a glossy advert with a release date tacked on the end. That is a harder sell than a trailer, because it only pays off if the game's story is worth the groundwork — and Ace Combat's appeal has always been the fantasy of the cockpit more than the politics around it. Still, after the long wait since Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown, giving players a reason to care about the world before they climb into it is a more interesting bet than another two minutes of dogfighting set to orchestral strings.