Skies of Arcadia is the videogame I will more often compare to some of the best movies from Studio Ghibli.

It is an underrated classic which presents a world made of clouds, pirates and timeless charm, fulls of stunning landscapes and secret that makes the world feel alive.

A music that flawlessly accompany every moment of the game.
A story that feels pretty traditional, but makes you care for the protagonists and the characters you meet on your journey.

Some parts of the game, especially combats and some of the dungeons, can feel repetitive or can carry for far too long.
But in my opinion it is still worth proceeding, as the highs of this gem are able to easily outshine its lows.

The fact that SEGA hasn't released it or ported this fantastic experience blows my mind. ABsolute waste on their part.

If you have the chance, give it a shot. It will stuck in your mind for years.

Lovey self contained JRPG

Storyline is a pretty traditional “save the world” quest with a very unique environments and memorable locations

Ship combat was engaging and unique

Characters are very charming and likeable, although not super deep

Like watching a fun anime

Skies of Arcadia não é inovador ou a coisa mais bombástica já feita, mas é muito bom. A Sega não é tão conhecida pelos seus RPGs, já que a maioria deles não atingem a mesma fama de suas franquias mais conhecidas, o que é uma pena, pois ela tem vários RPGs de qualidade, e com Skies of Arcadia não é diferente. Em questão de história, é bem típica para JRPGs, mas está longe de ser ruim. Se prestar atenção ele pega bastante coisa de jogos da época (os mais notáveis sendo de FF7 e Ocarina), mas isso não significa que ele seja um plágio descarado, pois ele tem sua própria identidade e não repete cegamente os seus conceitos. Os personagens são bem escritos, com o trio principal de Vyse, Aika e Fina sendo bem carismáticos, e os secundários que os acompanham também tem o seu charme. RPGs desse tipo costumam ter muito problema de escalamento em suas narrativas, ao fazer com que cada conflito aumente cada vez mais o escopo de forma forçada, mas aqui a narrativa deixa a escala resetar e ser reconstruída nos arcos mais importantes, trazendo um fluxo menos truncado. Outra coisa que aprecio, é que ele não é superexpositivo e se importa mais em mostrar do que em contar, respeitando mais a inteligência dos jogadores. Em questões visuais, é fácil não dar bola nos dias de hoje em que os gráficos são cada vez mais avançados, mas ao considerar a época (2000), ele é bem caprichado, com personagens e ambientes mais vívidos do que qualquer outro jogo presente, também tendo uma cinematografia mais elaborada do que a geração passada (pelo menos nos padrões de cenas em tempo real e não de pré-renderizadas). A exploração é gostosa, com cada cidade e dungeon sendo legal de andar e navegar os céus é prazeroso. O problema é que as batalhas aleatórias atrapalham a diversão. A frequência é um tanto alta, mesmo não sendo tão exagerada quanto dizem, mas é que a demora das animações e por encorajar exploração, os problemas acabam sendo mais notáveis. E quanto ao combate, é bem de praxe de JRPGs, e apesar de decente sofre de problemas com balanceamento. Skies of Arcadia não inova e é simples, mas ele faz bem o que faz, e isso é o que importa.

God this game is so good. It's so God. Damn. GOOD. The visuals are aces, the pacing is pitch perfect, the character writing is top level and perfectly developed. The soundtrack is an orchestrated feast for the ears and it rocks socks.

Really this game is a solid 50-60 hour package with the chops that few JRPGs I feel even come CLOSE to getting right. I mean that seriously, I couldn't stop playing this for days just being gripped with flying through the sky and finding new discoveries, islands, and fighting some very bizarre enemies.

Sadly the only thing holding this back from a perfect score is just the VERY slow combat that (while strategic and honestly really gripping) just tends to drag out for a minute or two for a simple random encounter. And you get simple encounters. A lot. Frequently.

Ship battles fare much better as the larger movement paths they make keep the fights more visually interesting and also take their placement into consideration in a larger scope. The game honestly shines the most in these fights with a combo of strategy, timing, and outplaying your opponent. It feels as good as it (almost) looks.

A stellar game, honestly. A tried and true classic on the Dreamcast.

I missed out on this one back in the day, though it remained in the back of my mind, a constant nag that I need to sit down and play it. A couple years ago I finally did just that, and having now completed Skies of Arcadia, I do feel like I slept way too long on a classic, perhaps one of the better JRPGs of its era. Which is why it's a little surprising to me that there are so few reviews for it here. Maybe I'm overestimating how popular Skies of Arcadia is, or (more likely) the series has been dormant for so long that everyone has long since moved on from discussing it. I don't know.

My usual bullshit of constantly checking my progress was thankfully averted with Arcadia. It's not that I don't give myself enough space to really enjoy a game, but especially with JRPGs (and other lengthy games) I start to feel the pressure to finish them as other games pile up in my backlog. I was far too comforted by Acadia's world to do this, and spent a lot of time just wandering around, exploring the various islands in the overworld and chatting it up with NPCs when I should've been tackling dungeons. Something about this game just puts me into a zone where I can't be bothered by anything else, and that's nice.

Of course, actually exploring dungeons and engaging in combat feels pretty good too. Arcadia isn't the most complex JRPG out there but it's as satisfying as it needs to be. I've seen some people say the game is very slow paced, but clearly that wasn't an issue for me, even if I think that's a valid point of criticism. Some battles can drag, but I was cool with it. I got to play as a sky pirate, what do I care if some of the sky battles are a little glacial when I'm caught up in the spectacle of it?

I've been meaning to play Skies of Arcadia Legends as well. Sure it's just a Gamecube port, but that means I can get it running on my CRT, and that's reason enough to go back and play this game. This is pretty much JRPG comfort food to me.

Once upon a time I'd have had more patience for this. It has a cute aesthetic, and the airship-centric world building is interesting. But wow is it slooooooowwww. Walking around, combat, airship combat especially. Everything takes forever, and from my experience the mechanics and story were mostly pretty standard fare. Not bad, but far from engaging enough for me to be interested in enduring the pacing. I can tell it's a fine game overall, so I won't give it a bad rating, but I'm just not that fond of it.

Very few games have given me the same sense of childlike wonder that I felt while exploring the world of Skies of Arcadia. From the very start, this game oozes with charm as you’re introduced to its unique setting- a world of fragmented floating islands in the sky. The game opens with its protagonist Vyse, a young and optimistic air pirate aboard his father’s ship. While raiding an imperial ship, Vyse along with his long time friend Aika, rescue a mysterious girl named Fina. It is soon found out that Fina belongs to an ancient civilization sent to collect crystals scattered across the land which possess the ability to summon world-destroying beasts.

In the game’s first several hours, I was pretty underwhelmed. Sure, the setting was unique but the overworld felt quite limited, with the airship unable to navigate through heavy clouds. My main concern was that the world would just be a straight line where navigation was limited to where the game wanted you to go. Along with that, the premise felt like standard jrpg fare. What kept me going were the characters and the hope that the world would eventually open up more. And boy am I glad I stuck with it.

Every town you come across in the game truly feels lived in. While most aren’t massive or offer too much in side quests, the vibrant characters and settings you come across in each town are more than enough to make each of them memorable. As the game progresses, more of the world opens up, with occasional ship upgrades allowing you to progress past previously blocked off areas. This newly found freedom was when the game’s appeal truly clicked for me. Each town contains a Sailor’s Guild branch, which listed off bounties and general locations of landmarks, which you can sell the locations to for some cash. These landmarks, scattered all across the overworld, reward you with a little journal entry, charming little nuggets of additional worldbuilding. While entirely optional, hunting down these landmarks and bounties was some of the most fun I had in the game, truly encouraging exploring every nook and cranny of the world. Without sounding too cliche, these little treasure hunts truly make the player feel like they’re an air pirate.

The characters you meet along the way are just as memorable as the settings. As the game progresses, different members will enter and leave your party, all with their own motives for joining your adventure. I found myself falling in love with each and every character in my crew and being devastated whenever anything bad happened to someone in my party. The main cast throughout the game, Vyse, Aika, and Fina have such a wonderful dynamic that made me thoroughly invested in their adventure even when things got rough.

Speaking of rough, I guess I should talk about the combat. Overall, the turn based combat in this game is by far my least favorite part of the game. Fights in this game come in two flavors: the party-based ground combat and the larger scale ship battles. Most battles take place in the form of the prior and they’re…fine? The combat system is a slight variation of the tried and true turn based jrpg, selecting each character’s actions and waiting your turn as the enemy does their thing. The one major difference is each character’s set of S. moves, a set of actions separate from individual MP that relies on a skill meter shared by the entire party. Individual party members can use up their turn to focus, adding to this meter. While this mechanic is an interesting addition to combat, by late game certain S. moves are so powerful that almost all of my battles consisted of party members spamming focus until I had enough points to use this move and decimate enemies. At its best, the party combat is slightly above average. However, the ridiculously high encounter rate of the Dreamcast version, along with the slow animations of just about each action make fights feel more like an annoyance than anything. The only times I’ve died in this game were from careless mistakes while I shut my brain off in random encounters. The ship battles, occurring only in scripted story events, offered a little variety to combat but were even more of a slog. In these battles, the enemy’s actions are shown during your turn, boiling down to a turn based red light green light of attacking when it’s safe and blocking when it’s dangerous. I can certainly see the combat of this game being a major turn off to some, as it certainly was for me. However, it never got frustrating enough to the point that I wanted to quit. Additionally, the Gamecube port of this game lowers the encounter rate, which I can imagine would drastically reduce the frustration I had with fights. Unfortunately, the dungeons in this game are also pretty lackluster. Although many are visually appealing, their layouts often completely forgettable. The high encounter rates did not help here, as I found myself wanting to get through each dungeon as fast as possible without exploring much. While many are necessary for carrying on the plot, the dungeons often feel like a screeching halt in the pacing of the adventure.

With that negativity out of the way, I need to talk about this game’s presentation. The visuals in this game are gorgeous, even in 2021. Colors in this game’s world are extremely vibrant and lively, truly capturing the light-hearted adventurous tone. Released in an era where studios wanted their games to look as realistic as possible, Skies presents its characters in a more cartoonish anime style, reminiscent of the Mega Man Legends series. This approach allowed for much more expressive faces in each of the characters than if they went with lifeless higher-poly models. I also need to mention this game’s soundtrack. THE SOUNDTRACK. Nearly every track in this game fits its setting perfectly. From the uplifting orchestral arrangement of the overworld theme to the urgency in the string/synth/breakbeat combination of the random encounter theme, this game’s score does not miss once.

I can’t say Skies of Arcadia is a perfect game. It’s flaws are made abundantly clear through it’s dated combat and mediocre dungeons. It’s certainly not a game for everyone and really takes some time to get going. Despite all of this, the game’s lovable cast and lovely world to explore make it a standout experience in a class of its own. If you can put up with some dated jrpg jank, I cannot recommend this game enough.

Influenced by many works of art like Studio Ghibli’s Castle in the Sky, Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island” as well as Daniel Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe,” Skies of Arcadia embodies a sense of adventure unlike any other. There is a great sense of freedom in this game. At a time where JRPGs were defined by convoluted lore, characters/themes dealing with moral ambiguity, and dark, harrowing settings, Arcadia would go back to the old JRPG roots and make its own mark on the genre. It doesn’t have heavy interpersonal drama or delve deep into the character’s psyche, but the simple joy of adventure. The game's sky-bound world serves as a backdrop for one's dreams and its enchanting soundtrack enhances the experience. Sometimes a game doesn’t need to be the most complex work ever created. Skies of Arcadia is a celebration for fans that adore JRPGs. There's a delight in playing this magical game yet if you delve deeper you'll find underlying complexity.

Granted, the game isn’t flawless; its random encounter rate in both the Dreamcast and Gamecube version is very high, and the combat is very slow, with lengthy animations. But, what the game sets out to do, its missteps are easily forgiven.

A game that brings out the inner child in me is truly priceless to me. I felt a tinge of sadness when the adventure in this game came to an end. The journey I experienced will always hold a place in my memories. Basically, this is a game that I'll definitely share with my children.

fuckin AIR PIRATE RPG BABY LETS GO!!! The random encounter is a bit cracked up, though part of the experience is hearing the dreamcast laser clunk about right before a random encounter drops, giving you a half second to pull up the menu and heal. While the plot might be a bit of a standard mcguffin hunt with some piratey anti-establishmenty vibes thrown in, the vibes are immaculate. Soaring the sky seas is a lot of fun, you get to amass a pirate crew of uniquely designed and written characters, and you get to be a mfin explorer circumnavigating the earth proving all those flat-skyworlders wrong. This game is fantastic and its a crime that sega hasn't rereleased this outside of one gamecube port. PLAY IT

A Nostalgia Review
I will forever be deeply bummed out that Skies of Arcadia never exploded in popularity. How is it I live in a world where, since the release of Skies of Arcadia in 2000, the Ys series has had 9 entries, the Tales series has had 14, and the Atelier series has had … 21?!? Are you kidding me???

My ardent love for Skies of Arcadia is, without a doubt, wrapped up in nostalgia and the inevitable endearment one feels after spending dozens of hours with a game’s characters. But, that being said, SoA still has a strong cult following (at the time of this writing) 22 years after its release, despite there being no sequels or other media supporting it, and that doesn’t happen solely because of rose-tinted glasses (or eye patches).

Even by today’s standards, Skies of Arcadia has an impressive amount of depth and care put into a range of mechanics and narrative elements. One great example being the recruitable crew members you can find throughout the game: Narratively, these characters act as brief windows into the world and history of SoA and, once recruited, they appear in your base and ship and occasionally chime in on your actions and story events. Mechanically, the crew members modify or add to your available skills, ranging from making collectibles easier to find, increasing your ships stats for airship battles, and adding strength to a special attack you can use in regular combat.

Again, that’s a single example of Skies of Arcadia’s layered depth. The game approaches many of its other mechanics and side quests in similarly complex and interesting ways — character battles use different sub-mechanics than airship battles, collectibles act as world building and weapon powerups in addition to quest objectives, and optional boss fights contribute to character titles that feel like a proto-achievement system.

Despite the concession that spending a JRPG’s length of time with the world and characters of Skies of Arcadia makes me a bit biased, I still feel compelled to praise it. At a time where many games were projecting maturity by being grim and cynical, and JRPGs in particular had melancholy antiheroes and reluctant messiahs for their protagonists, SoA and its core heroes of Vyse, Aika, and Fina were unabashedly heroic and optimistic. The closest analogy in current media I can think of would be One Piece and the Strawhat crew. It felt refreshing then and, though we aren’t starved for that kind of energy in games now, I would certainly welcome more of the Blue Rogues hopeful positivity and heroism in the world today.

What I love(d) about Skies of Arcadia
• There are very short voice acting clips during dialog, like laughter and “Yeah!”, and combat, where the characters shout the name of their special attack like a shonen anime, and they’re all SO good. By which I mean they’re perfectly campy. I love them so much.
• SoA maintained a consistent sense of adventure and discovery from start to finish. Areas of its world open up to you steadily and they’re all distinct and feel lived in, and as you travel between destinations there are discoveries to make and airships to be fought.
• I buried the lead here, but, a repeated plot thread of SoA is battling kaiju with your sky pirate airships. If you don’t recognize that sentence as being fundamentally awesome, I don’t understand how you got this far into this review.
• SoA has a top notch soundtrack. Similar to scores by Hans Zimmer, John Williams, and Nobuo Uematsu, the composers for SoA (Yutaka Minobe and Tatsuyuki Maeda) repeatedly tap into ur-orchestrations of heroism and adventure.
• The protagonist trio, Vyse, Aika, and Fina, are just the bees knees. SoA plays at a love triangle, but the characterization never felt like it got further than depicting three friends that care deeply and fiercely for one another. (That said, I can certainly see a reading where the heroes are in a wholesome thruple.)

Why you might want to skip Skies of Arcadia
• The most consistent criticism of SoA in most reviews and retrospectives is its excessive random encounters. The criticism is well deserved, especially in the Dreamcast version, but it certainly doesn’t make either version of the game unplayable.
• SoA hasn’t been rereleased since the Gamecube port. The only way you can play it officially is finding a copy for Dreamcast or Gamecube. I’m not advocating emulation/piracy, but I am saying it’s the only way you can access the game easily.

I don't finish JRPGs, and I happily finished Skies of Arcadia. Twice, in fact. It's impossible for me to be biased towards this game because Skies is THE hidden-gem masterpiece. It's not just any hidden gem, it's THE hidden gem.

Is Skies perfect? No, of course not. I'd argue it's not even all that great, objectively speaking. Random encounters are an issue, especially on the Dreamcast version - although you can upgrade your ship to the point where you can essentially avoid random encounters altogether, you'll still be spending a lot of time dealing with them all the same. One of the first major dungeons in the game has this awful difficulty spike with this boss that can turn you to stone, and then it's followed by the first and most difficult ship-vs-ship battle in the entire game (the desert arc is ROUGH). Movement's on the slow side, it can be easy to get lost from time to time, and there's these racist Chinese dudes that like... nah, they're pretty racist-looking, can't excuse that at all.

But Skies of Arcadia gets a 5/5 because it's fucking MAGICAL. It is scientifically impossible not to have a smile on your face while playing this. Skies of Arcadia's adventures and setpieces are incredible - something interesting and wondrous is always happening, and it keeps the plot moving at a brisk pace, so brisk that the 40-60 hours you'll spend playing it feel like a breeze. The characters are full of personality and life, some of them even having some unexpected depth (shoutout to Fina, Drachma, Belleza, Ramirez, and Enrique), and Vyse is the charismatic glue that holds them all together. The NPCs are shockingly fun to talk to, especially once you get a crew together and you walk around the Delphinus talking to everyone. The late-game story beats are surprisingly impactful. A seemingly dreadful-section where Vyse, Aika, and Fina get separated winds up being one of the best segments in the game. And that feeling of when you finally get to pass through this impenetrable wall of storms and gust and explore the rest of the world that's waiting for you beyond the rift... untouchable, man.

The coolest thing about Skies is how it always provides these little twists to classic 90's JRPG tropes. The combat is pretty standard, but the magic-leveling system where you can assign an element to ANY weapon to make that element level up faster is utterly genius (it cuts down on grinding considerably and unlocks better spells). The ship combat is surprisingly nuanced due to the different abilities of each crew member on board. You can turn Cupil - Fina's cute little silver pet dude - from the weakest melee weapon in the game to possibly the strongest by collecting these Cham things that the VMU will beep at whenever you get close to them.

And then there's this awesome exploration system that's basically a rat-race against this rival adventurer called Domingo, where you're encouraged to explore the world as thoroughly and quickly as possible in order to map out locations before he does. You get extra $$$ for doing this, and if you utterly stomp Domingo at the art of geomapping, he'll actually concede defeat and offer to join your crew like a champ and FUCK THIS GAME FUCKIN ROCKS MAN

In spite of its intermittent frustrations, Skies of Arcadia is entertaining, engaging, surprisingly intricate at parts, and most of all: charming and full of wonder. It's the perfect JRPG, a focused and finely-tuned experience that's stood the test of time so well that even its' fandom of, like, 10 people at most, is passionate and vocal enough in their love for this perfect game to have Skies included in Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing. The soundtrack also fucking slaps. 5/5. Gaming peaked at the turn of the century with Skies of Arcadia.

Skies of Arcadia is a game I returned to at the beginning of the year for a second playthrough. Originally, I played the game as a kid on the Dreamcast and remembered liking it a good amount. But replaying it has made me realize that so many memories I attributed to other games actually came from Skies of Arcadia.

The premise is rather simple. Vyse and Aika are Blue Rogues—sky pirates that seek out and plunder from evil pirates known simply as Black Pirates. After freeing a captive from the Silvite Nation, the two get tangled up in a massive battle for the world against the Empire of Valua.

The sense of adventure in Skies of Arcadia is unparalleled to me in a JRPG. With your airship, you can travel the skies and uncover loads of hidden treasures, historical landmarks forgotten by time, enemy sky pirates, mythical beasts, and ancient civilizations. It keeps you wanting to come back and explore every inch of the map.

There are two battle systems in Skies of Arcadia. The first is traditional JRPG combat where characters take turns following the player's commands and ship battles. In regular battles, characters share Spirit Points for special moves and casting magic. This creates a secondary system of managing your SP while remaining on the attack and can make for some stressful but fun situations. Ship combat is also turn-based but relies upon the parts you have used in making your ship. These battles are more about anticipating enemy movements and countering them accordingly with some risky decision making.

The characters are a highlight for me in Skies of Arcadia. As you might suspect them to be rather one-note from early impressions, Vyse, Aika, and Fina make a great trio of characters. Their dynamic begins fairly average, but evolves into a true friendship that feels believable and engaging. In addition to them are temporary party members that change as the story progresses, but each of the fourth characters are well-rounded and entertaining. This is not a Final Fantasy II situation with your fourth party members.

The graphics might be dated to many, but to me, I cherish this artstyle. Characters are fun and expressive with unique designs and the occasional line of voice acting. The music is what you'd expect from a SEGA game—fantastic. The light moments are exciting and fun and while the darker moments are amplified by somber pieces. It breathes life into the adventure and makes pivotal moments stand out.

Skies of Arcadia is one of my favorite RPGS and one of my favorite video games period. It has so much character and a strong sense of adventure with a story that has its surprisingly heavy moments. You will cherish the time you spend with the Blue Rogues and look back on it fondly for years to come. The best Dreamcast game, the best pirate game, and a great time to be had.