The moment you really fell in love with a game.

[retrolinkx]

(Would you recommend Skies of Arcadia? I know that 3 of Valkyria Chronicles's character come from it.)

Short Answer: Yes, it's my favourite game of all time for a reason, and if you can endure the long drawn out battles and the encounter rate, you've got yourself a 11/10 game. There are two versions, the Dreamcast and the Gamecube. Dreamcast version has better sound, Pinta's quest (a VMU minigame that can net you more items) and a few nifty VMU tricks that interact with the game in one way or another, while the Gamecube version has worse music, better graphics, an improved encounter rate and more things to do, but all the VMU stuff is gone. It's a great game and you should play it if you get time to. If you're going to emulate, you've got NullDC and Dolphin. I can help you with NullDC if you're going to play it emulated.

Long Answer: If you have the time to read my review of the game (yep, I reviewed it on another website) then it can possibly give you a better insight into the game than if I were to write several paragraphs now.

Spoiler

Originally when people would ask me what my favourite game was. I would say The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap. But I never truly felt it to be my favourite game. It took me 16 years to find my favourite game of all time, and when I swear it was destiny to find it for me.

My favourite game of all time is Skies of Arcadia. I discovered it in 2012, tucked away between CD cases in Oxfam. I flicked out the blue case and looked at it for a long while. The case was full of stickers which, sadly, saw it's price going down and down from £40 to £30 to £20. They were all from several different retailers, reminding me of the Dreamcast and it's demise along with the games. Currently it was priced at £10. I didn't have a lot of Dreamcast games and I guess buying it was a more a less just me thinking I need more Dreamcast games.

I had no idea what the game was about, The the front of the case displayed the logo, a ship in the background, some nice sky and three characters that my eye was constantly drawn to whenever I looked at the case. The back was no real help. I got the general gist of the game from the description and pushed the case up to my face to see the small screenshots of the game they gave me.

When I got home I washed the case and when it was clean and sticker free I popped it in the Dreamcast and loaded it up.

I was greeted to a very exciting intro of a ship floating in the sky, an array of characters and beautiful locations that I hoped I would be able to go to. The intro had me pumped for the game and I hadn't even started it yet.



The game started off with a cutscene of a girl dressed in white fleeing from another ship. They soon capture her and are about to get away until Vyse and Aika (the heroes of the game) board them and demand they give up everything on their ship, with a fight of course.

By the first fight I saw it was an Turn Based RPG, similar to Final Fantasy or Pokemon. I had a lot of things I could do to fight. I could slice them up with my sword or hit them with magic. I messed around a bit and eventually the battle was over. I was greeted to another cutscene where Vyse's father and captain told him to search the ship for anything while he takes care of the rest of the guards. I rush off and immediately find this games number one flaw and it's number two flaw. The Encounter Rate and The Slow Battles.

Oh boy, now. If you've ever played Skies of Arcadia you will spend around 20% of the game in these damn high random encounter battles. You cannot stop them, you cannot lower the rate all you can do is grit your teeth and hope that you can walk one step without a fight. It starts with the Dreamcast having to load in all the characters. Spinning around the battle area for 10 seconds before you all load in. You better hope you're fighting one person and not a whole bunch of enemies, since it takes around a minute for all the characters to do their actions and for it to be your turn again, sometimes longer if you both decide you're going to use magic attacks that have 20 second cutscenes to execute.

After what felt like an eternity fighting enemies I finally got around to saving the young girl in white, and had my first boss battle. After spending quite a while beating the boss, I got off the ship and went back to mine. Vyse and Aika discovered the young girl's name being Fina and let her rest. As we approached home, I was given command of the ship. The game allowed you to fly the ship to go from island to island. The encounter rate was still pretty much the same here (but it eventually improves about 65% into the game when you're given improved manoeuvrability and you can fly high into the sky to avoid battles) which wasn't that bad since at this point into the game, the battles hadn't gotten to me yet.

So I flew the ship back home, departed, explored my island and eventually went back to talk to Captain Dad. Fina told him that she had a quest that was given to her that she must complete it, she cannot disclose information about it, Vyse and Aika then said that they'd love to help this quest of hers.

I won't go into a lot more detail about the storyline since I don't really want to type the entire thing out with my mannerisms over it.

Skies of Arcadia is set in a "Jules Verne-inspired fantasy world" detailing the adventures of Blue Rouge's Vyse, Aika and the mysterious Fina. Three 17 year olds on a quest to save the world from destruction. I've already discussed the gameplay, but I'll discuss some more of it later on as well as the other parts of the game in as much detail as I can.

The game, to me, really felt like I was going on adventure. There were several continents that I had to explore, dozens of bosses and dungeons I had to defeat and 6 Moonstones I needed to collect to rid the world of the evil that would've destroyed it. It felt huge, while there were tons of obstacles in my way such as floating rocks and lines of clouds that I couldn't pass through, I still found the game to be huge. When I landed on my first island that wasn't the starting village it felt so different. It felt like going from a small rural town to a large city, and by the time I was going to the storyline islands. I felt like I was in the middle east. The locations of the game ranged from Cities built around Forests to Forgotten ruins encased in Ice. Overall there were probably only 20 islands to explore but it felt like there was a WHOLE WORLD to explore for me.

The characters in the game were you generic hero-like characters. You had Vyse. The head strong but young leader, his childhood "friend" Aika who was a bit more mature and Fina the clueless third wheel who wished to fulfil her quest. Along the way we met Dracma, a grizzled old Sea Capt'n who helps along the way, Gilder the cool cat who's been in the skies for longer than Vyse's been born, and knows everything about everything, and Enrique the young prince of the Valuan Empire, a Totalitarian state that rules over the land. (Also, the main baddies) who grows sick of the way Valua treats the world and joins the Blue Rouges to change it.

I'm not going to lie, I was never good at English or going over whether a character is good or bad, but I never once hated any of the characters in Skies of Arcadia. I did hear arguments that they were all generic shouen characters and had very little value in terms of characters, as well as the fact they hardly developed I had no problem with this. I can't really evaluate them now since it's been a year and half since I've finished the game, but overall I did enjoy the characters and I did not feel like they were badly written or just bad in general.

The music of the game was amazing. I'm listening to the entire OST as I type this out. The game has that adventurous and happy feel to it that I love, as well as depressing, tense and humourous themes to go with it. Some of my favourites include

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKmJ8graeH0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62FnIVqGbOg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eG_Bh4ZlTe0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Za1KkR8oDxg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvHd7y08eXk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gbcHvbirko
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjqoi5S7m6A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KZxldHzYss
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TamVM5MhVU4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzr5g0lcj_4

One of my favourite things about the game is that they really did do a lot to distinguish the different places you could go to by giving them great unique soundtracks for each section.

I also enjoyed the fact the boss battle music changed as you came close to beating them, from a scary depressing tone to a cheerful "we can do this" tone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAGg_2vLeYk

The only complaint I have with the music is that it was butchered on the Gamecube version to fit the whole game on one disc.

Anyhow, time for the look at the gameplay again, which is still the biggest flaw of Skies of Arcadia.

The encounter rate is very very high. I finished Skies of Arcadia in 66 hours I believe. If I removed the scripted battles about 10 of those hours where the random encounters, they were also very very long. Especially if they'd do an insta kill move on one of your members and you'd have to waste time reviving them which made battles EVEN LONGER. The characters moved slow during the fights, and you couldn't speed this up, a lot of the random encounters were just enemies that dodged all your moves and then escaped several turns in wasting a lot of your time, and if you did want to kill them in one turn you'd need to use your big magic move which wasted around 20 seconds anyway since you'd have to watch the damn cutscene play out while you did the move.

Although, my least favourite part of the game was the ship battles. Oh boy, the ship battles. A pirate game wouldn't be complete with ship battles right? Long, confusing, tedious ship battles.



Now, I'm going to assume the video gave you the general gist of the ship battles. I'll give the short version. They were very long, the animations took around a minute to play out, if you died you had to restart FROM THE BEGINNING. So if you needed one more hit to take out the boat and you died, you'd have to do it ALL OVER AGAIN FROM THE BEGINNING. In the end, I found the boss battles to be easier than the ship battle since you'd really need to think in these ship battles, and they always took several tries to get right. I probably spent 10 hours in the damn ship battles.

Moving on from that, I guess I could talk about the story. I believe I've stated it twice but if you didn't hear. Skies of Arcadia is a game about three teenagers who save the world from the Vaula empire. The quest involves finding 6 gems called "Moonstones" and bringing them back with Fina so that they will be safe and won't fall into the hands of Vaula who want to use them for evil.

I can't really say much to the story. It's by no means bad, but it's not winning any awards for it's story. If you're ever going to play this game for it's story (as in, expecting an amazing story) you're not going to like it. I don't personally see the story as something bad or a flaw in the game.

The game looks nice, especially in 1080p if you emulate it. The art style is really well done, and beautiful in some light. Here are some pictures that I took off an emulator a few years back.

Skies of Arcadia

And some in 1080p

Skies of Arcadia 1080p

The game does look old and has that distinct "Dreamcast" look but I never judge games by how they look. (unless it's a game that released today and looks like a game that was released in 2005 and the budget of said game is around a 10 million) I don't have any real complains about the look of the game, my only complaint I do have is that as a PAL user, I can't use VGA cables to get the best look out of the console. Actually, there's a huge flaw.

Skies of Arcadia's PAL release is terrible. It runs at 50hz, which is 17% slower than NTSC. The music is still the same but everything else is slower, and you know how LONG battles can be, well imagine how long they were for me. I had to deal with the SLOWEST version of Skies of Arcadia. I mean, Dreamcast was one of the first consoles to have 60hz option for PAL gamers, and Skies of Arcadia just DIDN'T have that option. I'm not even sure if Skies of Arcadia: Legends had a 60hz option.

In conclusion. Skies of Arcadia is a great game. It has flaws but I can overlook them. The charm this game has always sticks with me. The game truly feels like an adventure, something no other game aside from Pokemon has made me feel. The characters are great and I loved them, the humour between them is also quite entertaining. The gameplay, while very bad is not unplayable. It may feel long but in the end you'll miss playing Skies of Arcadia for those little things like that.

I really hope you read all this man. I spend 2 hours on it.