There is little I can write about Skies of Arcadia that doesn't make it sound like a generic JRPG. Yet its excellence of execution makes it a quintessential RPG, and one of the best games of all time.

It took me around 35 hours to finish this game. Not for a single minute of that time was I bored, or in need of a break, or lacking enjoyment. Skies of Arcadia Legends has enough content in it for five games; I'm amazed they managed to fit it all on a single GameCube disc.

This game captures the joy of exploration in a way that many games attempt, but few succeed. The simple act of sailing through the skies, or climbing a ladder - seeing the beautiful JPEG skybox stretched out before you - or visiting a new town and seeing the designs and mannerisms of the characters there... it instilled me with such happiness. Skies of Arcadia owes a lot to its lovingly crafted world.

The characters and their motivations are hardly original, but they are so absorbing that it doesn't matter. The game also captures all that was good about anime in the 90s - there is humour, there is friendship, there is personal growth, there is love. The story takes inspiration from classic literature to imbue its characters with pathos and its environments with intrigue. We have a Captain Ahab parallel in Drachma, whose tale ends on possibly a more profound note than Moby Dick itself did; we have the mystique of the 'dark continent' portrayed in Ixa'taka; even Robinson Crusoe shows up at one point.

It's not exactly flawless: the random encounter rate is very high, and the battle animations drag on a bit. The ship battle animations are outright overlong. Some boss fights will take 40 minutes to an hour. But I didn't mind very much. Some games just have 'it' - maybe it's because the battle theme doesn't suck, but even when Skies of Arcadia shows its age and flaunts its dated aspects, it's fun to play.

Yet if I told you this was a turn-based JRPG where you explore the world to find six crystals to stop an evil empire, you'd think it's all been done before. Trust me, it's never been done this well. Skies of Arcadia feels fresh at every turn, and is a fulfilling adventure that should've already been remastered by now. All this game needs is a fast-forward button for the battle animations and widescreen support, and it'll be perfect for a new generation to discover its appeal. Go pester Sega about it.

Manages to be both a deeply unique idea, and a great distillation of classic JRPG mechanics. Sailing around the world never gets old and the ship battles are 10/10. I've only played the Legends version, not the Sega original, but the added bounty battles and Piastol subplot feel like they fit right in. It's true that late-game, you end up using the same couple abilities to either wipe out mobs of enemies or beat bosses (and prevent those bosses from just wiping you out in one move), but it's so much fun that I don't really care. The story isn't trying to be super dark and serious, which is honestly a breath of fresh air compared to some of its contemporaries. If they ever made a sequel, I would sell a kidney to own it, so it is sad to know that this series is almost certainly dead.

From a gameplay perspective SoA is excellent, if not ground-breaking. Take a normal JRPG, with its lengthily skill trees, clustered menu options, convoluted inventory system, and complicated battle numbers and distill that into a streamlined interface, you get SoA. The battle system is fun, fluid, and presented in such a simple style you want to master all the moves and tactics. Not to mention when you die in a boss battle in this game you go right back to the beginning of the battle (how has FF not figured this out yet?), there is also a very balanced difficulty curve in this game. The world map escalates way more than you’d think and ship battles are fun, the music in this games is also fantastic! Perhaps the only area where SoA feels empty is surprisingly the story and lore. The story (for the most part) is a straightforward ‘defeat the bad guy’ while the lore feels very copy-pasted for environments and overall underdeveloped, it feels like a lot more could have been done here to make the game feel more iconic. The characters are fun and even develop a little. I think the word I’ve used to describe this game would be FUN, and really at the end of the day that’s why this game is considered a classic.