RandomNPC – Video Game RPG Reviews, Editorials, and Features

Skies of Arcadia, a game originally released for Sega’s ill-fated Dreamcast system, found new purchase late in life with a port to the Gamecube. With a handful of new additions and a slight upgrade in graphics, a game that had been lauded as one of the finest on its original system became available to a new audience. On the whole, Skies of Arcadia Legends hasn’t aged particularly well, as ideas and story elements that were unoriginal even during its original release have slid into deep cliché. The combat system has fared a little better, though the lack of any real challenge to the game doesn’t help. In the end, Skies of Arcadia Legends is a reasonably solid, highly traditional turn-based RPG, but the lack of any real originality counts very strongly against it.

Skies of Arcadia tells a tale about a young boy growing up, leaving home, and discovering the world for himself. The main character, Vyse, is the son of a famous Blue Rogue, a group that plays Robin Hood to the Black Pirate’s Blackbeard in Skies of Arcadia. Vyse and his childhood friend Aika leave home on a journey of discovery after the abrupt arrival and sudden kidnapping of a mysterious young woman by the evil Valuan Empire, which wants to use her to conquer the world. If this sounds familiar, it’s with good reason. Skies of Arcadia Legends uses some of the oldest clichés in the book, from the eternally optimistic main character, to the empathic, compassionate love interest, to the highly technological Evil Empire, shrouded in a veil of smog. The story’s more interesting and imaginative parts are largely due to the setting. The world of Arcadia is without any real ground, the continents being made up of large landmasses that float freely between layers of furiously swirling clouds. No one knows what lies below or above these barriers, but there is an ancient prophecy (yes, they use this one, too) that details how an advanced ancient civilization brought about the apocalypse, which tore the continents from their moorings and created the world as it is now. Large swathes of the story have to do with the conflict between Vyse’s Blue Rogues and the evil empire of Valua as they fight over the weapons of mass destruction left behind by the Ancients. The overuse of these predictable and uninspired ideas ultimately undermines the overall message of the story. It talks a lot about the joy of exploration and the greatness of people who wonder what lies beyond the next horizon, but it takes a great deal of the edge off to discover that what in fact lies beyond that horizon is a land of stereotypes and predictability.

Other aspects of the story, such as the translation and character development, leave a great deal to be desired. Though Fina, the aforementioned Mysterious Stranger, receives a great deal of development, not very many of the other characters change in any real capacity at all. The other two main characters end the game in much the same state that they began, with their bizarrely superhuman optimism showing nary a scratch. The various support characters Vyse and company come into contact with during the course of the game actually receive a bit more development than the main cast, in some cases. Though the story has a worthwhile message, the two-dimensional cast and the fact that it stumbles over its own feet means that Skies of Arcadia Legends is far too clumsy and unoriginal to have much impact.

Combat bears a striking resemblance to some of the Grandia systems, at least superficially. Characters have a large open field to move around on, but the player does not have direct control of their movements. Instead, the moves a player selects determines how a given character will move. For example, defending characters will slowly back away from any and all enemies, while characters ordered to perform a basic attack will rush forward into the fray. Spells have areas of effect on the battlefield which vary from spell to spell; some move in lines, others cover a circular area, while a few are simple single target attacks. The system overall is a fairly solid example of a traditional turn-based combat system with a few extra elements thrown in. The biggest step Skies of Arcadia Legends takes away from the basic formula is the use of SP, or Spirit Points. Spirit Points are a sort of pool of MP which is shared amongst the party and which regenerates by a set amount every turn. Special attacks and magic both require the use of SP, and the game is balanced so that the player cannot expect to unleash each character’s strongest attacks every turn, forcing players to strike a balance between offense and defense. In the end, the combat system hangs its entire fortune on the creative use of Spirit Points, without which it would be just another basic turn-based system.

Matching up nicely with its pirate theme, Skies of Arcadia Legends features a second combat system for ship-to-ship combat. In this system, the player puts in a series of commands all at once, selects the order in which they will be executed, and then watches them play out over the four turns that make up one combat round. The ship is treated as a sort of character in its own right, with its own equipment, basic stats, and SP meter, relying on crew members for special moves and magic. The best parts of this system come in the occasional interludes during which Vyse is called on to make a command decision – close in on the enemy and risk heavier fire, or hang back and protect the ship? Try to outmaneuver the enemy, or just go in all guns blazing? It’s not always clear which command would work best, so the player is often left trying to out-think the enemy, which adds a great deal to the experience. Ship-to-ship combat is an interesting, if somewhat slow combat system, but it would have been a great deal more fun without the existence of superweapons. To explain; early on, the player gains access to a devastating special weapon, which follows the player in one form or another throughout the rest of the game. The effect of this weapon, translated into gameplay terms, is more or less “You win the battle.” The game tries to limit the effectiveness of the superweapon by allowing it to be used only on specifically marked turns, but the weapon is so powerful that in many cases all the player need do is survive until that turn comes around to win the fight. The weapon’s effectiveness drops slightly as the game goes on, but even late in the game, it will be the primary method by which all major battles are ended.

The game’s menus are set up a bit strangely. Rather than having options such as Item, Magic, Status immediately available, the player is prompted to select a character first, and then given the option to have that character use an item, cast magic, and so forth. Each character’s status report is actually spread over two different screens. At the main menu, the player can hit right or left on the D-pad to see a character’s stats and equipment, but must select a character to see magic level, accumulated EXP, and various other minor status elements. On the whole, the menu setup is a great deal more complicated than it really needs to be, and can take a while to get used to. Control on the field and in combat is actually a great deal more solid, with the only real issue being the somewhat clumsy camera. The overall translation is more or less free of errors, though it does come off as a bit stiff at times, with even very informal characters speaking in a somewhat stilted, formal tone.

While most of Skies of Arcadia Legends has a sound that hovers somewhere on the edge of Noriyuki Iwadare’s upbeat style, the game has a number of tracks which make little or no sense in the overall scheme of things. For example, the title screen theme is closer to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons than anything else, while a few of the early dungeon themes sound more like they came out of Motoi Sakuraba’s catalogue. This mishmash makes it hard for the soundtrack to leave a particularly strong impression one way or the other, with the lack of a strong musical theme leaving a lot of the sound feeling aimless.

Skies of Arcadia Legends uses a bit of limited voice acting, with a few key phrases being used to suit a given situation – a shy “Uh-huh,” for example, to accompany a nod and a blush from Fina. There are enough different phrases for each character that the voice acting doesn’t become repetitious, but the overall quality of the acting is fairly low, which limits the impact the voice clips have. Characters come off as excessively stiff largely due to the robotic quality of the acting, and are nearly unintelligible in combat due to the ill-advised use of an echo filter that renders phrases down to mere mumbles. Taken as a whole, the game’s sound is more aimless than actually bad.

Visually, Skies of Arcadia Legends has joined that group of late-PSOne era titles whose visuals have passed their sell-by date, a fact that the lack of a strong overarching visual style does nothing to mitigate. Still, the game’s visuals were solid for the time, and some parts of it still stand out. The wide variety of facial expressions, for example, go a long way towards humanizing the otherwise fairly stiff cast, and the stylized character designs still stand out as being very solid, particularly the exaggerated faces. On the whole, the visuals don’t show a particularly strong pirate influence, aside from the occasional eyepatch or funny hat. The airship design, on the other hand, is one of the game’s stronger points, with most of the ships showing a great deal of creativity and uniqueness, although the ship that Vyse and his crew eventually end up with isn’t exactly strong pirate material. In the end, although time hasn’t exactly been kind to the game’s visuals, it retains enough charm to be adequate, even with the lack of a cohesive style to hold it together.

Between the ease of leveling and the aforementioned ship-to-ship superweapons, Skies of Arcadia Legends shouldn’t provide too much resistance to anyone who pays a bit of attention to keeping their armor and weapons up to date. Aside from a fairly long main quest, there are a decent number of sidequests to explore, some of which add bits of backstory and plot. Between the two of them, Skies of Arcadia Legends eventually comes out at around fifty to sixty hours to complete.

For the era of its release, the original Skies of Arcadia would have been a fairly solid title, and fit well into the general atmosphere of the time. But by the time Skies of Arcadia Legends came out in 2003, these ideas were already well past their prime. With a self-defeating story, aimless visuals and music, and a cast that doesn’t develop much at all, Skies of Arcadia simply has not aged well. On the whole, the game provides an interesting window to early 3D RPGs, and it should provide some enjoyment for those who are looking for a lengthy, easy RPG, but for people without a nostalgic link to the game, it just doesn’t have the originality or depth to carry itself.