Dreamcast
Skies of Arcadia
| Graphics: Sound: Gameplay: Overall: |
8.82 8.80 8.79 8.83 |
| Votes: | 98 |
| Reviews: | 1 |
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| Reviewer: hippohams | Date: May 10, 2026 |
| Skies of Arcadia is a strange beast. I do fondly remember playing it, yet at every step there's something about it that nags at me. Maybe it's having the rose-tinted glasses yanked off my head by the passage of time, but it certainly seems like much of the game was rushed to completion at a time before such issues could be "resolved" through patches and tacked-on DLC.
Graphics: 8 Honestly the graphics haven't aged well for many Dreamcast games, and Skies of Arcadia is among them. There's polygons in this game sharp enough to cut yourself on, and the character facial animations are extremely static. Certainly games like GTA Vice City and Halo 2 hadn't come around yet, but even some games on the Dreamcast were better-looking graphically (although usually nowhere near as long, which may have been a contributing factor). The art style, however, is top-notch; vibrant anime-styled 3D, many, many backgrounds with unique patterns, interesting ship and enemy designs, all contribute to making the game world come alive, more than compensating for the underwhelming graphical presentation. Sound: 8 I was originally going to lambast Skies of Arcadia for having horrible sound compression, but it seems that really only affected the in-game music. Thankfully the main tracks come off quite well and sound great; the sound effects, on the other hand... Oh boy, I hope you like crunchy SFX because in SoA that's almost every other sound that isn't on the OST! Despite GD-ROM discs having a whopping whole gigabyte per disc, each SoA "half" requires two despite them taking up less than a whole disc's worth combined! There certainly seems like there should be room for sound effects to be run uncompressed, but maybe that's wishful thinking. Gameplay: 7 Repetitive, but it pulls you in after an hour or two. And with the frequency of battles it darn well better; seems like every five seconds outside of towns a new battle starts! Pretty basic turn-based RPG mechanics hold back an interesting rock-paper-scissors-style elemental system, and while most fights are easy to turn your brain off to, every once in a while something will force you to use your head again. Not the worst system by a long shot, but definitely needed refining in a sequel we never got. Ship combat is a different beast. It has its moments but a lot of it is figuring out where to fire from and then getting there before the enemy figures out your movement. Overall: 8 If the game overall is so mediocre, why does SoA still hit so hard? Because the story & characters hold up a LOT of the game and overcome many of its flaws. Plot-wise none of it is particularly earth-shattering - much of it is basic "save the world" stuff copy-pasted from those that came before, and the characters range the gambit of stock character archetypes - but its presentation is unique in that we may never see its like again. It also had one of the best mini-games for the VMUs, which netted not only more items for the game, but also tied in well into the main game rather than being something entirely separate to deal with, making it much more useful than most others I've seen. Sadly, Skies of Arcadia is held back by dated graphics, awful sound compression, and repetitive gameplay that shoves the player into battle far too often. Unfortunately the Dreamcast had a dearth of RPGs outside of SoA, Grandia 2, and PSO (if you had broadband), so we put up with a lot. I would love to see the game decompiled and rebuilt on a modern engine ala how Super Mario 64 was ported to the Unreal engine, which would allow the sound to be decompressed properly and possibly dial in the combat to a better pace; the graphics are a mixed bag, as despite being primitive from a polygon count standpoint there's a lot that would be lost if they were completely redone by modern techniques. Maybe the VMU portion could be done as an app, but that would also take away a lot of its uniqueness as well. Skies of Arcadia is not an awful game by any stretch, but fans often over-hype it out of eagerness; with tempered expectations it can be a fun time, as long as one keeps in mind its limitations. |
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