Sailor Vyse says: “In the name of the moons, I will punish you!” — A look at Skies of Arcadia.
Skies of Arcadia is a game I had heard many rumblings about, but rarely more than just a name drop. Any and all details about the game completely eluded me until recently when I decided to give it a try. I had actually wanted to try it previously, even going as far as finding a [completely legitimate copy], but the [actual Gamecube system] had a number of issues running it at the time. It works perfectly fine now, so with the urging of a few twitter followers, I embarked on fantastical adventure in the skies… of Arcadia.
I actually appreciate going in completely blind, since it frees me of the oppressive shackles of nostalgia and preconceived expectations. The game opened with a large airship, commanded by an evil and pompous looking fellow, chasing and firing on a much smaller craft with a single, delicate-looking girl at the controls. The pompous commander has some dialogue mentioning an empire as they take the girl on board and then yet another ship, this time a pirate ship containing two of the main characters, shows up. Knowing this is a JRPG, my preconceived expectations of the genre kicked in and immediately made a prediction on the basic plot of the game.
The main character, Vyse, and his childhood friend, Aika, rescue a mysterious girl, Fina, from a Valuan warship and take her back to safety. Fina eventually reveals that she was tasked with finding the moon crystals — keys to ancient war machines called Gigas that could destroy the world. The evil Valuan Empire is searching for the crystals as well so that they can rule the world with the giant doomsday robots. Fina pleads with Vyse and Aika to help in her quest, and being JRPG protagonists, they agree and kick off a world-spanning adventure.
About three hours later, the plot took shape and, would you believe it, my predictions after 10 minutes were extremely close. Don’t take this as an inherently bad thing though. A predictable structure can be used as a tool to make a story more engaging by setting up expectations and subverting them periodically. The game tasks you with traveling the world to recover the 6 moon crystals to keep the Gigas out of the Valuan’s hands. Each crystal is held by a different civilization which represent the six magical moons that orbit the planet of Arcadia. You travel to each land in sequence to acquire their crystal, but there are some major twists and turns in that sequence.
After acquiring the green moonstone from the Ixa’taka region, the party (now joined by an old air captain named Drachma) is attacked on their journey to the next region, scattering the crew and kicking off a 4–5 hour long sequence as they try to get back together. I admit that I had no idea where the game was going for any part of this. First it split into two separate storylines, one with Vyse on a deserted island and another with Aika and Fina together trying to get to port and buy a ship to search for Vyse. They eventually meet up, but their moon crystals are stolen and they’re captured in a Valuan attack, leading to a wild prison escape that eventually involves robbing a train, stealing a prototype airship with the defecting Valuan prince and blasting your way out using a giant moon laser. It was a crazy, unexpected ride.
While some individual activities in this sequence are somewhat questionable and it never gives you an opportunity to restock, overall it was extremely memorable and quite fun, in part because of how hard it deviated from the normal flow. This sequence is the most prominent example, but there are definitely others that shook up the flow and kept things interesting. The anxiety-inducing dark void and its related parts come to mind. The ice ruins are another, but for the opposite reason — it adheres too closely to the formula. It’s determined a moon crystal is in the frozen ice kingdom, you fly over there, explore the kingdom, fight a boss, find the crystal and leave. It’s so bizarrely simple and smooth that it stands out, and I kind of appreciate that it’s subversive by being extremely non-subversive.
There are three main characters in Skies of Arcadia: Vyse, Aika and Fina. There are also three sub-main characters: Drachma, Gilder and Enrique. What do I mean by sub-main character? While Vyse, Aika and Fina are in the party for nearly the entire game, the other three rotate in and out as the plot demands. Each is present for roughly a third of the game, and not always contiguous thirds either. They each have a story arc that gets resolved by the final stretch of the game. Drachma reconciles with the arcwhale that killed his son. Enrique gains the confidence to return to Valua to usurp his tyrannical mother. Gilder… uh… I guess he doesn’t really have an arc with a satisfying conclusion, unless you count accepting his stalker’s love and coming to Vyse’s aid.
While I like Gilder as a character (he’s very charismatic and laid back), he doesn’t really have much relation to the story outside of his first appearance. Near the end of the game, after Enrique leaves to return to Valua, Gilder appears and joins Vyse again suddenly. Before long he’s riding on a ship to a space station and floating in a holodeck, none of which he would even know anything about. It felt to me like the developers wanted Gilder, Enrique and Drachma to have roughly equal screen time, so they swapped Gilder in at the end to even it out, even though it doesn’t make much sense for him to be there.
The main-main characters have their own set of character development oddities. Well, maybe just Vyse and Aika. I think Fina is handled very well, actually. She comes from a very insular culture, has no idea how the world works and was taught to expect the worst of all outsiders. It’s no surprise she’s quite timid at first. Over the course of the game, she noticeably becomes more comfortable with the world and learns, from Vyse and Aika’s friendship, that some people are actually good. This all comes to a head at the end when it’s revealed that her quest was actually to destroy the world with the moon crystals. She emphatically rejects her elders’ wishes because of how she’s grown over the game. It’s a pretty satisfying climax to her arc.
Vyse and Aika really aren’t that well developed at all, unfortunately. They’re surprisingly one-dimensional characters. The two are childhood friends that alternate between sincerely supporting and lightheartedly razzing each other. I can’t really describe both of them as anything other than sassy JRPG protagonists. Ostensibly, Vyse’s arc is supposed to be learning how to be a sky captain like his father, but there’s very little that actually demonstrates any sort of growth like that. Aika, while being very likeable, has even less than Vyse. Her entire character arc is just “support Vyse”. Combined with no backstory other than being childhood friends with Vyse, Aika has very little to her and that’s really disappointing because otherwise she’s my favorite character in the game.
I don’t have a good transition into talking about battle mechanics, so let’s just jump right in. Skies of Arcadia’s battle system is deeply rooted in typical JRPG style. Each character acts once per turn and can defend, do a basic attack, cast a spell, use a special ability, use an item or focus to recover extra SP. The most unique aspect is the SP meter. SP is used to cast spells and use super moves, but the twist is that everyone in the party shares the same pool of SP. Every turn, each character recovers a bit of SP for the party, giving the choice of either waiting to save up SP for stronger actions, or using what you have for immediate results. I actually like the idea of SP being shared for the party, since it demands some higher level planning as you manage a resource among multiple characters, rather than just each character’s own MP, for example. Unfortunately there are a few things that cause the system to break down.
Magic is a pretty major issue in the battle system. Each spell costs a certain amount of SP and exactly 1 MP. Every single spell in the game costs 1 MP. Early on, the MP cost is very punishing as your MP pool is very small. By the end of the game, your MP is about 5–6 times larger while the spells still cost the same, making the MP cost nearly trivial. The bigger issue with magic, however, is that most spells are just useless. Damaging spells do absolutely pathetic damage compared to super moves with a comparable SP cost. This leaves buffing and healing spells being the only consistently useful ones, but even then there are issues. What really breaks magic is items. There are items that cast most of the most common spells, like all of the healing, reviving and buffing spells, but using items uses no SP, your most imporant resource. Not using SP and generally being extremely cheap causes items to be absurdly overpowered. If you were to cast the spell Sacrum, which heals everyone in the party of 1000 hp, you would need to spend 6 SP and 1 MP. Through most of the game, you’ll be gaining 10 or less SP per turn. You could use the majority of the primary resource that turn, or you could use a Sacrum Crystal, which has the same effect, but costs only a small amount of money that could be recouped in one random battle.
If I were to fix magic in Skies of Arcadia, I would do a few things. First, I would shift the majority of the cost for magic onto MP. Make them all cost 1 SP and multiple MP, while boosting the MP pool size appropriately. Second, I would make magic scale a lot better (healing spells don’t scale at all) with stats and increase their damage across the board to make them competitive with super moves. Finally, I would give items a small SP cost (maybe just 1, like magic), just to make them not basically free.
Yet another issue with magic, though in a different vein, is the animations. Magic animations can’t be skipped for whatever reason. Animations for super moves are another issue. Skies of Arcadia was made in the late 90s/early 2000s ear of JRPGs. This period of the genre had games that focused heavily on extravagant cinematic sequences (see: Final Fantasy 7–9) and SoA is no different. Every super move has a very long, absurd animation that plays every time it’s used. The first time you see them, they’re actually pretty impressive and silly and fun, but that gets old very quickly. A significant mercy, however, is that you can skip your super move animations by pressing start (it took me longer than I care to admit to find this). Your enemies’ special abilities, however, can never be skipped and it’s infuriating when you’re sitting through Ramirez’s minute-long anime-as-hell sword slashing thing for the 10th time that fight.
While there are problems with a lot of the battles, the only part I actively hated was the interface. It seems like they were going for a minimalist design because there’s no way to view the entire party’s status at once. If you want to see a party member’s health, you need to select a single-target item or spell that can target them and hover the cursor over them. There’s also a serious issue of not knowing what a spell or item does while in combat. It took me a very long time to learn what all of the items where by their name alone, because it only gives descriptions in the out-of-combat menu. While earlier Final Fantasies have a similar problem, its spells and items tend to have more descriptive names and have a long lineage to establish their functions. With the limits of the Dreamcast, there’s really no technical reason to not have descriptions on the battle screen. Lastly, I despise the camera in battle. Every time it swings out to get a look at the battlefield, the angle changes. Select attack and it zooms out so you can select the target, cancel, and select it again and the camera will be in a completely different place each time. It’s cinematic I guess.
The normal battle system of Skies of Arcadia definitely has some issues, but would you believe there’s not one, but two battle systems? That’s right, you also take part in dramatic 1v1 airship battles. Airship battles are also based on a shared SP meter, but actions are assigned quite differently. Each round of an airship battle has 4 time units where one character can do one action per time unit. Interestingly, you can choose which character takes which action in which time unit, explicitly choosing the order of events, as opposed to the normal, chaotic speed-based turned order. Each time period can have several properties, such as allowing you to use your ship’s super weapon, being able to deal more damage or being under bigger threat from the enemy. Periodically, you can choose certain maneuvers that will change the properties of the time units in the next turn. Sometimes the results of these choices are pretty clear, but more often they feel random. It took me a while to get a good feel for how all of this works, but it does make sense, though there are a few annoyances.
Just about every problem associated with magic and items in normal battles also applies to ship battles. Items might even be more overpowered in ship battles, since there are items that fully heal your ship, stack to 99, cost pocket change and need only 1 time unit to use. The uniquely awful aspect of ship battle is how excruciatingly slow they are. Your time in ship battles is typically split as: 20% choosing your actions, 20% watching the ships take those actions and 60% watching the combatants fly around repeatedly, doing nothing. More than anywhere else, I leaned on that turbo button constantly during airship battles. What they do have going for them is that they’re often heavily scripted, making them feel a bit more like interactive cutscenes with puzzles to figure out. Honestly, if the dead time in ship battles were removed, I think I might actually enjoy them.
There are plenty of odd things in Skies of Arcadia, like Cupil (Fina’s cute blob friend and weapon) and its food, the bird thing that eats moon fish, bounties, discoveries, Crescent Island, crew recruiting and more, but covering all of those would take another 2000 words that would bog down this writeup. At the end of the day, Skies of Arcadia is a fun, but flawed game with many cute, silly, fun or irritating aspects. It has a certain whimsy about it, with swashbuckling air pirates, cool floating continents and a cast of exaggerated characters. Even though I only finished the game very recently, I can tell that it’s going to be more memorable than your average JRPG. I’m definitely glad I played it and I can see why it’s considered a classic.
P.S. Aika x Fina OTP
