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More Trips to the Mall!

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Mike "JuMeSyn" Moehnke
FAN EDITORIALIST

In late 2000 there was a superb game released for the already-ailing Dreamcast called Skies of Arcadia. Those who have played it have little, if anything, bad to say about the title. The Dreamcast's death meant the game could have been stranded on an underappreciated system forever, but Overworks (a subdepartment of Sega) managed to bring the game to the RPG-deficient GameCube in early 2003 as Skies of Arcadia Legends. As the GameCube was the least-owned of the systems for the last hardware cycle, still not many people got to play the game. Maybe lots of Wii owners will explore it, and in doing so foment sufficient desire for a follow-up...

So, what makes Skies of Arcadia (Legends) so special? It doesn't really do anything we've never seen in the RPG world, after all. The whole of a game is rarely just the sum of its parts, however, and Skies of Arcadia proves this maxim. Certainly its music is superb, its graphics are quite distinctive (if a bit dated six years later), its story is nothing innovative but still well-told, and its cast of characters memorable in a positive way. The presence of random battles in copious numbers is the only real drag on the game, thanks to combat being fairly strategic and airship-to-airship battles being completely so. Simply describing it does not do the game justice, however, as playing Skies of Arcadia (either version) is a reminder of how beautiful a well-done RPG truly is.

As I have written a review of the game, posted on RPGamer, describing it further is somewhat redundant. The question becomes one of: "How did such a magnificent game fail to garner the proper acclaim for a sequel?" Overworks, the Sega development studio responsible for Skies of Arcadia, had many employees who had developed three of the four Phantasy Stars much earlier, along with Panzer Dragoon Saga. Yet in the past six years, aside from SoA Legends finding its way to the GameCube, Overworks (reformed into Sega WOW in 2004) has been remarkably inactive on the RPG front. What have these talented people been up to? Whatever it is, not making a follow-up to Skies of Arcadia is a horrible thing when so many other RPGs have sequels cranked out ad nauseum.

And as a result of a request by its webmaster, I am posting a direct link to Audio Atrocities, host of the beautiful voice-acting samples I linked to last week. The webmaster enjoyed the traffic I provided for the site, so feel free to partake of all the wonderful dialogue found there!