So, some of you may have been curious about the game Skies of Arcadia (Eternal Arcadia in Japan) since I mentioned it in my little history lesson a month ago. Well, since I’ve got nothing better to do right now, I guess I’ll go into one of the few RPGs that I’ve played but don’t own. This game came out for the Dreamcast originally, but when that system died, it was ported to the Gamecube under the name Skies of Arcadia: Legends. What’s the difference? Well, Legends has some optional bosses, a few more things to discover, and some sidequests. It’s also got a lower random encounter rate, and removes one of the minigames from the original version. I have played both versions, but the Gamecube version is the only one I’ve beaten, so this review is for all intents and purposes about that game.
This game has pretty much the most stereotypical beginning ever. Princess Lei… I mean Fina is flying a small ship, then gets captured by the evil empire. Then a bold group of air pirates, including main character Vyse, save her. Then you get to help Fina with her task, which involves finding mystical artifacts, conveniently color-coded to correspond with the element they represent. Along the way, you’ll end up running into the empire frequently, since they’re bent on world domination. Pretty much standard fare. The world’s kinda cool, but also suffers from the need to mirror real world geography. There’s a Europe-land, an America-land, an Asia-land, and an Arabia-land. Since everything is located on islands floating in the air, airships are a must for navigation, and the game does a good job of making navigation interesting and fun. Since airships are not limited by being on a single plane, they can move in three dimensions, which allows you to get to all sorts of interesting places. It’s not too hard to find where you’re supposed to go, eventually. Even when you get lost though, you can still find discoveries, which are essentially curious sites with a little blurb written about them. These offer some inconsequential but still interesting background to the world.
The characters in this game are charming enough, but they’re no great literary protagonists. I’ve already covered Vyse, so I think I’ll mention Gilder, who’s an experienced air pirate with tons of tricks up his sleeve. He’s not cynical, like a lot of characters who play a similar role would be, which is refreshing, even though it means that there really isn’t much in the way of realistic (as opposed to idealistic) characterization in this game. Fina is pretty boring, being your typical quiet and compassionate healer chick. In stark contrast, Aika is a fireball tomboy, who has a high level of energy that makes more compelling as a female lead. The villains are mostly mediocre, falling into the typical array. The smart one, the honorable one, the dumb one, and the female one. Seriously, that’s about it. They play their parts to a T at least. The main villain is suitably scheming, and so is basically adequate. In the end, the characters are not sophisticated, but they serve their purpose quite well, and make for characters that you like, if not for any particularly compelling reason.
There’s nothing amazingly innovative about the normal combat system in Skies of Arcadia. The encounters, they are random. You enter commands, and then they are carried out in order of the speed of the characters involved. You do have the spirit point gauge, which recharges every turn by a set amount, and serves as the party’s power source for special moves. Also, you can change weapons’ element attributes at will. The elemental affinities don’t do much in battle, but they influence how you learn spells. When you finish a battle, each character is awarded experience points to each of the elements proportional to the number of weapons there were of that element when the battle ended. So, if there are two red weapons, a silver weapon, and a yellow weapon, you would get double red experience, silver experience, yellow experience, but no green experience. After a certain amount of experience, you learn the next spell of an element.
There are also ship battles, which follow some of the basic rules of normal combat. There’s still a form of the spirit gauge, which limits what actions you can take. Each character can be assigned to a specific time slot with a specific action, like evasive maneuvers or firing one of the cannons. The enemy ship does likewise, and so you tend to end up with a rock-paper-scissors arrangement, trying to figure out what your enemy is going to do, and using the obvious counter method. There are certain actions that can only be performed at specific times, like firing the harpoon cannon. Getting these situations to pop up requires you to choose the correct response when a strategy dialogue occurs. And since the amount of damage that you deal with the super weapon du jour is so high, ship battles boil down to waiting to fire the big one.
For replay value, I got nothing. No real customization options, no new game plus, no unlockable extras. Maybe if you missed something the first time around, but this game isn’t particularly unforgiving about when you get things done. So, this is what I’d rate as a “nothing more to see here, move along,” game for replays.
Well, what more can I say? No one aspect shines, and yet it’s a comfortable game to play. It’s easy some of the time, and quite hard at other points. The story is engaging, even though you look back on it and think “Wow, that sounds like a lot of pointless running around.” Frankly, I think this game is greater than the sum of its parts, which is why I give it a 8.7 out of 10. It’s got a large number of sidequests and optional bosses, and a number of fun characters.
How I Broke Game: So, for one of the optional bosses, the guy with the cat robot, I found an AI glitch for his minions. One of the two types has a healing move which it will use when an ally is at low health. I found that if there were two of the healing type and one of the other type, and both healers were wounded, they would accidentally heal the non-healer, so long as he was between the two. It was silly, and allowed me to beat the boss without using the super move that uses the entire spirit gauge.
Quick Tip: When you get silver magic, make sure to work on improving it quickly. The first resurrection spell you get from this progression doesn’t work 100% of the time, so you really need to get the better version ASAP.
If you enjoyed this game, you might have fun with one of these games. Tales of Symphonia is an all-around fun game, and shares a lot of the light-hearted appeal of this game. Grandia is another game which is all about exploring the world and adventure, without any of this silly angst that you see in other RPGs. Final Fantasy VII’s materia
system is about the closest thing to the magic system in Skies of Arcadia, so if you liked that aspect of the game it might be worth a shot.
