On June 30, 2026, Bandai Namco Entertainment released the complete 48-track original soundtrack of Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies on major music services worldwide, including Apple Music and Spotify. The score for this 2001 PlayStation 2 classic had long been a "phantom masterpiece," available only on CD. Now, with the same track list and masters as the CD edition, it can be streamed from your phone. For game music fans — and for those of us who follow the culture of dramatic scoring — this is an event.
The Score That Turned Dogfights into Drama
Ace Combat 04 is still beloved today, and not only for its excellence as a flight shooter. Amid a war, the perspectives of an enemy ace squadron and a young boy intersect; voices crackle over the radio; and the music binds it all together, letting players live through what feels like a single war film. The score was composed by four writers: Hiroshi Okubo, Keiki Kobayashi, Tetsukazu Nakanishi, and Katsuro Tajima. The way they wove everything from propulsive battle tracks to sweeping orchestral pieces, carefully engineering the emotional arc of each mission, is precisely the craft of film and TV scoring.
Unlike film or anime scores, game music has no fixed running time. No one knows when a player will down the last enemy or complete a mission. Yet the music here folds tension and release into its loops, so the drama holds together no matter when the battle ends. As an approach to dramatic scoring in an interactive medium, it presented something close to a definitive answer — twenty-five years ago.
The Origin Point of Keiki Kobayashi
What deserves special attention in this release is Keiki Kobayashi, who joined the series with this very title. He would go on to become the musical backbone of Ace Combat 5, ZERO, and 7 — and 04 is where it all began. The final-mission piece "Megalith -Agnus Dei-" was the first track in the series to employ a Latin chorus. Setting a requiem-like, solemn choir against the last assault on the superweapon Megalith was extraordinarily theatrical for game music of its era. The series' signature tradition of "final boss meets choral music" starts here.
Elsewhere, "Blockade" carves out the tension of punching through a blockade line, and the ending theme "Blue Skies" plays after all the fighting is done — tracks whose stories rise up even when heard on their own. The piercing brightness of "Blue Skies" hits hardest precisely because it arrives after the game has depicted the tragedy of war in full. Few examples demonstrate so vividly that a score can be a device for reliving the work itself.
Thirty-One Years of the Series, and On to '8'
The release date, June 30, also marks the 31st anniversary of the original Ace Combat. This release is part of a soundtrack streaming initiative commemorating the series' 30th anniversary, which has been steadily unlocking music from across the franchise on major services. And on October 2, 2026, the next numbered installment, ACE COMBAT 8: WINGS OF THEVE, arrives.
Tuning your ears with a quarter-century-old masterpiece before taking off into the new game's skies — such a luxurious warm-up is possible only now, as legacy game scores open up to streaming one after another. The thought that a generation without CD players will encounter the chorus of "Megalith -Agnus Dei-" for the first time this summer is quietly moving. Start with "Blue Skies," and revisit that blue sky.
