Skies of Arcadia is your favorite JRPG? Care to share why? When people I like/respect are really into something I don't know anything about, I enjoy letting them sell me on it. My knowledge of the JRPG canon is pretty limited, so it's not surprising that a lot of classics slip me by.
Oh man, I am more than happy to talk about Skies of Arcadia. That game is something really special. Buckle up @discovergames and everyone else who doesn’t know about this fantastic game because I could go on all day.
So Skies of Arcadia is a game about being an air pirate, flying around in your airship and finding treasures and stuff, and building your pirate reputation. Yeah, sure, there’s an evil empire to fight and stuff, but that’s all part and parcel to this type of story. Just being a sky pirate is really what makes the game stand out, as you ride the clouds between floating land masses.
Your main character Vyse is a Blue Rogue, the Robin Hoods of the skyways, as part of a pirate crew, until eventually he gets his own ship and his own crew, and even builds his own pirate base. All the side quests are related to various privateer activities from the classic swashbuckling tales, but adapted to airships and the three-dimensional movement this gives you since you can rise up and down through the skies, and eventually further upgrades extend your ship’s range even further.
There’s a log book to fill out that has discoveries you can find - everything from the discovery that the world is round to long-lost civilizations to legendary monsters that you can take back to the Explorer’s Guild and sell information about for cash - assuming you beat the competition to the discovery, of course, because there’s a rival adventurer who’s trying to find all these things too.
There’s buried treasure to find, wanted criminals to hunt, dungeons to explore, crew to recruit, a base to build, ships to fight.
The game has a separate battle mode for ship combat, where Vyse and each of your officers can make various actions like evasive maneuvers, fire the cannons, and so forth, where you have to space out your total allotment of actions through the entire crew because you can’t just have everyone stand there and attack all the time - you only get so many action points per round and you need to avoid taking heavy fire of your own. It’s not an overwhelming tactical system or anything but it’s got enough variety from the standard combat to make those fights stand out, and upgrading your ships - and getting new ships - through the game has a satisfaction that most side quests don’t give me. Getting to see your crew growing when you walk through the decks of your ship or returning to your base to see the latest construction efforts made things feel a lot more satisfying than just getting some random rare item or whatever does. Later on you can even use some ship special moves like having your entire crew do an all-out attack for massive damage, complete with a separate little animation for each crew member you have.
There are of course regular battles too, where Vyse and his officers leave the ship to head into your traditional dungeons or get into hand-to-hand combat on the deck of the ships. It’s a pretty straightforward turn-based affair, but even back when I first played it it immediately stood out how much more alive the fights felt, simply because you can watch them fight. Even when it’s not their turn, characters on both sides with do attacks to each other, and the characters will dodge out of the way, so it looks like the fight is still going and your turns are just the attacks that happen to hit rather than the action completely freezing every time it’s your turn like in most turn-based games. Not to mention, characters actually physically run across the battlefield to attack. There’s no grid for movement like in a tactical RPG - If you tell Vyse to attack a monster on the other side of the deck, on his turn he just runs over there, and he will stay until you tell him to attack someone else that requires him to move again. The net effect just makes the combat feel alive, at least to me.
Vyse also has a title that you can see once he becomes a captain, telling you of the reputation he has in the world. For the most part it’s cosmetic and doesn’t mean much, but some characters treat you differently and some side quests open up based on how famous Vyse is in the world, including a bit of an impact on the endgame sequences. I admit this won’t appeal to everyone, but between the reputation improvements you get for completing tasks and the feeling of being the first to discover something in the world - which isn’t diminished since you can be beaten to them as previously mentioned - made this one of the only games I’ve ever strived for 100% completion on. I wanted to be a legendary pirate of the skies, not because the game gave me mechanical rewards, but because this all made me feel accomplished. Despite the advancement of open-world games today, where you have this giant wide-open sandbox to explore, Skies of Arcadia is hands-down the most satisfying exploration of any game I remember playing. It really made me feel like an actual explorer of this bizarre world in the clouds.
There’s even a sidequest once you get famous enough with some imposters trying to mooch off your reputation.
That’s not to say the game is flawless, of course - what game is? There’s too much combat in the original release, with random encounters tuned way too high. The magic system also feels pretty useless compared to the characters’ personal special abilities, which is disappointing. The actual main plot is servicable but not nearly as engaging as getting to just fly around and being a sky pirate for the side quests.
But it’s absolutely, whole-heartedly a recommendation from me, especially if you play the re-release. It came out on the Dreamcast originally, and it’s still a fantastic game, but the re-release on the Gamecube dramatically improved the problems and added even more content, including a whole new sidequest chain involving a bounty hunter after Vyse and crew.
It also has the distinction of being one of the only games I’ve purchased multiple times to give out to my friends back when it came out, along with owning a copy of both the Dreamcast and Gamecube versions myself to this day, because this is the game that convinced me that RPGs were truly my favorite genre.
I’m going to stop here but only for the sake of everyone’s sanity because I could go on so much more.
