Aero Fighters

About Aero Fighters

Aero Fighters (1992), Sonic Wings in Japan, is Video System's vertical arcade shooter with an unusually large cast of national pilots, the first in its series and the game that accidentally named the Vlogbrothers' Nerdfighters.

Aero Fighters in Depth

Button one fires the main weapon, upgraded by P items or the rarer F items, though the top power level has a hidden ammunition count, after which the ship drops back a level. Button two launches a powerful special attack, limited by the number of B items collected, with two at the start of each life. Some ground enemies drop score items in the currency of the chosen pilot's nation. Players start with three lives and earn another at 200,000 points.

Its large cast of characters was unheard of in 1992, with pairs of pilots representing four nations; in two-player games only one nation can be chosen, and each side has four pilots to pick from. There are seven stages: the first three are drawn at random from four, one per nation, though pilots never visit their own nation's stage, and the last four are fixed. After the seventh, the player sees the pilot's ending and then plays much harder versions of the stages before the game truly ends. On the SNES, a code lets players fly the ship from Rabio Lepus.

Making Aero Fighters

Video System developed Aero Fighters and Tecmo published it in arcades in 1992, and RePlay also reported it as the second most popular arcade game at the time. A solid game, it had little to set it apart in a crowded field; one critic called it "a thoroughly solid game" that "is also a game that is easy to forget". An SNES version followed in 1993 in Japan and 1994 in North America, which GamePro disliked for its slowdown, mediocre graphics and "monotonous" music. Main designer Shin Nakamura disliked Video System's plan to move to the Neo Geo, since vertical games were hard to make on its horizontal monitors, and left with like-minded staff to found Psikyo, whose first game was the similar Samurai Aces. The remaining team made Aero Fighters 2 and 3 for the Neo Geo, Sonic Wings Special and Limited, and Aero Fighters Assault, and a new game, Sonic Wings Reunion, launched in Japan in May 2025. Hamster added the original to Arcade Archives in 2023.