Classic gaming: Skies of Arcadia

Where YJ revisits an old favourite

In 1999, Sega released the Dreamcast. The system had a good variety of games, most of which were arcade ports, but fans of the system were hoping for an RPG that could be the system’s own Final Fantasy. In the following year, gamers were blessed with this true gem of a game.

Skies of Arcadia was a refreshing breeze in a rather depressing era in terms of RPG settings. Final Fantasy 7 and 8 had given us some of the most emo main characters ever, with Cloud and Squall, who’d much rather be a douche than banging his hot 18 year old teaching carrying a bullwhip. So with much surprise when I booted this up, I found everything to be so…uplifting.

The setting alone was enough to make me want to play this game. Air Pirates? Huge galleons sailing through the skies? Yeah, I’ll take it! The introduction sequence is pretty epic too, reminiscent of Star Wars, with the Star Destroyer chasing the corvette.

From the characters, to the music, and setting, everything about this game gives you a good vibe. The main character, Vyse is so incredibly upbeat in the gloomiest scenarios. There are also some interesting non typical RPG characters, such as Drachma, the homage to Captain Ahab from Moby Dick.

A common theme throughout is the game is ‘achieving the impossible’ and ‘exploring the unknown’. The game world you are introduced into is huge, but relatively unexplored world story wise, with several environmental hazards sealing off access to various parts of the world.

As the story progresses, the game is constantly making the player achieve ‘world firsts’ to bypass these hazards and discover new frontiers, such as first person to cross the Mid Ocean, first person to enter the Dark Rift, or first person to escape the Imperial Grand Fortress. The plot is also well paced, with each obstacle to overcome seemingly more impossible than the last, and constantly giving you new things to discover. Replaying this recently, I’ve realised that in the first 7 hours of gameplay, I’ve felt I’ve accomplished so much in the game world compared to most RPGs…and this game took 60+ hours on my first go to finish.

The large overworld meant a lot of flying around, but unlike most RPGs, the map was meant to be explored, and not something you just walk through to get to the next area.

The game does have it’s fair share of problems though. The battle system is a turn based system that isn’t well implemented. For each turn, you choose all the actions that each of your four party members will do. Then the entire turn plays out. The problem is that you can’t see whatever order the characters will attack, so planning out attacks to take out dangerous enemies before they hit you is blind luck. This also makes guarding against powerful boss attacks extremely annoying.

There is also a Spirit Points (SP) system, which all actions except attacking and using items use. This gauge is shared across your party, and every turn you get X points based on the total Spirit attribute of your party. Because magic takes SP (and MP) and items don’t, magic in this game sucks balls and there’s no real reason for using it, especially later when you get items that can do the said magic spells. Instead, SP is and should be used for kick ass special moves unique to each character. Aika, Vyse’s support character has a special move “Lambda Burst” which hits all enemies at once for massive damage, once your party has enough spirit to use it on the first turn, it becomes an instant “I WIN” button for quite some time.

Later during the game, your party also gains the capability to do a special super move, by saving until maximum spirit points in a battle. This is a rather weird feature that is never mentioned anywhere in the game or manual and does not have any story relevance, so you’d only know about it by either finding it by accident or reading some FAQ. Not only does it heal you, it does massive damage to the enemy at the same time, and ends the current turn instantly, leaving no chance for retaliation. This makes later boss fights rather cheap as you can just guard until full points and unleash this attack, rinse and repeat until you win.

Unique to the game are ship battles which sees your ship vs whatever is unlucky enough to run into you. Works similar to normal battles, but you plot your attacks on a 4×4 grid representing your characters and turns. Each character can only be used once until the current round ends, whether it’s attacking, using an item, or guarding. Each sub-turn also has a colour, green, yellow or red associated with it, which is how damaging the enemy attack on that turn will be, and occasionally there’s a C! mark which means you’ll do extra damage to them on that turn. Then you get weapons that can shoot over several turns, torpedoes which you can choose which turn to hit in, and even super moves which can only be fired with certain conditions. This makes ship battles slightly more strategic, and quite epic, but some of the later battles can drag out to around 30 minutes, especially if you don’t know what you’re doing, but they are quite fun to play.

But despite it’s flaws, Skies of Arcadia remains of my favourite games and RPGs ever. I would rate it above even some of Square’s masterpieces like FF7 and FFX, because the overall experience it delivers makes you feel like you are part of the game world. It also offers something different and original to the rest of RPGs out there, even in the leagues of todays’ games.