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.

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.

This is a game I have always wanted to play ever since I saw it on a shelf in one of my local video game shops, but I didn't own a GameCube so I couldn't get it for myself, but the concept was one I couldn't shake from my mind. JRPG style game involving ships, crews and ect!

Gameplay:
Much of the combat is your standard JRPG affair, however, you can switch between elements freely with your weapons so you don't have to drop a powerful weapon because it's aligned with fire and you're fighting someone who is resistant to fire or ect. You can change on the fly, but often the more difficult bosses will have enemies on their side who are strong against the element they're weak against. This is mostly for the combat with the characters on a battlefield or fighting enemies boarded on a ship or something.

The ship combat is done in a more interesting way where everyone has their own turns lined up and to unleash your special power, you need to not only have it charged, but also be certain that you are pointing the weapon directly at them! Depending on choices in combat, you can end up behind them or they may end up behind you, putting you on the defensive! Because of how these battles can go either way, there's no point in trying to just go in blindly fighting like in poorly designed JRPGs and every battle will require quite a bit of planning ahead.

A big bonus of this version over the original one on the Dreamcast, is it comes with the DLC stuff you could only get by going online. Really feels SEGA were a little too ahead of their time...

There's also a really cool discovery mechanic where you can find treasure and hidden locations through the world that you bring back and report to the cartographer's guild and get paid. However, if you weren't the first to find it, you only get a fraction of the payment as all you did was confirm it's existence, regardless of if it's some magical kingdom or a undiscovered creature or continent.

There is also a bounty hunter system where you can meet all kinds of interesting characters to battle and get rewarded with not only cash but also weapons and things looted from them too.

There are one or two others, including gathering up a crew to give your ship passive boosts to different functions and a few others that may require spoilers.

Story:
You play as Vyse, a Skypirate! Often known as Blue Pirates because they only attacked armed vessels and aim to not just kill and massacre people. They are still stealing loot at the end of the day, but unlike Black Pirates, they don't hunt down people who can't defend themselves nor do they aim to kill people outright.

Anyway, you start by fighting a group of soldiers who are heavily armed and Vyse is with his father on their raid of this military vessel, until they discover and rescue a mysterious girl (getting Laputa: Castle in the Sky vibes) who claims to be from somewhere that was said to exist only in myth.

Vyse, his childhood friend and this mysterious girl investigate a nearby ruin that was said to be tied to the girl's people and soon are on their own journey to uncover the mysteries of the ruins, the past and the empire's current plans for world domination.

I highly recommend this for any JRPG fan out there as many of the mechanics feel fresh and it's such a crime that they haven't been brought back in a similar form! A game that the industry should look back at and take some real interest in.

Gameplay + Stream

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.

Sega consoles were often noted as having fewer JRPG entries than their competitors, but among their smaller line up were a few great gems. Skies of Arcadia: Legends is a port of the Dreamcast game where you play as Vyse, a sky pirate who goes on a quest to travel the world and oppose the evil empire. This game is great fun, and the world they create is really vibrant and interesting. The main characters have great chemistry together and are all really likeable. There are some darker aspects to the game, but the tone remains pretty optimistic overall, which I think really works well. The villains are also well fleshed out, weaving in and out of the plot to the point where you feel well acquainted with them and their quirks. The combat of this game is okay. It's a pretty barebones system which reminds me of a very stripped down Chrono Cross. You have different elemental attributes to your weapons and spells, but as far as I can tell, the game doesn't inform you on which elements are strong against which, you just have to experiment. There is also ship-to-ship combat, which you would expect from a pirate game. It's similar to, but even more simplistic than, the normal combat, where you pick several moves at once then watch the battles play out. My biggest complaint about the game is that the combat is very, very slow. There are lots of flashy animations that you'll get to watch happen 100 times over, although you can skip some of your own. I'll admit I played this on an emulator, and if I hadn't I don't know if I would've ever made it past the final section simply due to how long you have to go between saving. Some boss fights can last close to an hour simply due to how slow the combat moves, and there are several sections where you have to beat multiple bosses before being able to save. The game also has a few moments of being a bit unfair; there are some enemies that put you into a stunlock loop immediately if you don't know to watch out for it. Overall, It's a bright and colorful experience, and one of the forgotten gems of the era.

"A young boy had a dream. A young girl has passion. A mysterious stranger had a mission. And the world will forever know their story. As long as there are dreamers who have the courage to pursue their dreams, the world will have heroes. And as long as there is a thirst to discover the unknown, there will be new stories to tell... and new adventures to be had."

Unlike many RPGs, Skies of Arcadia is not about obtaining best-in-slot gear or about doing 9999 damage or about mastering your party composition. In many cases, a player that isn't on the game's wavelength will be tearing their hair out at the game's random encounter rate, especially because combat is frequently unsurprising. Most of the time, you'll find yourself buffing Vyse as much as possible so that he can use Pirates' Wrath or Rain of Swords over and over and over and over. But, again, while serviceable and impressively textured, combat isn't the purpose of Skies of Arcadia. It is always trying to pull something much more childlike and optimistic out of the player—wonderment and anticipation of what strange civilization or discovery lies just beyond those far off clouds. This is one of the only turn-based RPGs I've played that understands the anticipatory pull of what's around the corner in the way that something like Wizardry does. Every discovery gives way to Arcadia's immense scope, with generations of lost history brewing just beneath the fold. The game is riddled with distinct problems that don't weigh against the experience of playing it, of unfurling it, or of finding peace in it. Skies of Arcadia feels like home.

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.

Skies of Arcadia was the best game on the Dreamcast and one of the best JRPG's ever made, man. So a version of the game with more content and less random encounters just makes it even better. I already said my peace on the Dreamcast version of this game, but Skies of Arcadia is magical. Its' charisma and creativity really set it apart from a lot of its contemporaries in spite of its simple presentation. The story is a basic FF7-style adventure but the unique setpieces, unexpectedly striking cast, and strong pacing really irons out and strengthens the simple plot (the way the game's tone and overall scope steadily evolves from lighthearted adventure into grandiosity is actually pretty flawless), the boss battles are tough but consistently engaging, and the game's subtle magic-leveling system (level up magic spells by equipping that element onto your weapon), and especially the Discovery system are top-tier clever ideas. Also, being able to upgrade your ship to the point where you're able to soar through previously-inaccessible parts of the map and avoid random encounters altogether by flying up or down... that is beautiful horizontal progression. You love to see it.

Skies of Arcadia is the hidden gem. It's easy to see why the 10 or so people that have ever even played this game fell in love with it so much. The game's occasional pitfalls are irrelevant in the face of a consistently engaging, entertaining, and heartwarming experience. Love it. 5/5.

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.

Eu acho que recentemente jogar Dragon Quest 3 me fez entender uma coisa sobre JRPG e minha relação que eu tenho com eles; a história nem sempre precisa ter trocentas linhas de diálogos pra funcionar ou uma caracterização fodida pra cada personagem que aparece, ela pode simplesmente só existir, ou no caso de DQ3 e em Skies of Arcadia, ela pode sempre levar pra um único objetivo: ser uma aventura. Eu vejo muita gente reclamar de combate de turno, e por mais que eu tenha meus problemas com alguns jogos ou outros nesse estilo, esse é o único tipo de jogo que eu consigo jogar por 10 horas num sábado sem me preocupar com mais nada, porque eu nunca fico cansado de verdade quando eu exploro um mundo novo, vou atrás da história principal ou tô só fazendo um grind aqui e ali, e o fato de Skies of Arcadia ser um jogo sobre aventura nunca me fez cansar dele de verdade. Indo atrás mais um pouco pra poder entender de onde vem todo esse ar aventuresco de ir buscar o desconhecido, acabei descobrindo que a intenção dos desenvolvedores foi fazer um jogo onde o sentimento de jogar ele lembrasse às grandes navegações, e pra isso eles criaram uma história e uma jogabilidade onde tudo se baseia em navegar pelos mares em busca de um tesouro, de terras distantes, mas nesse caso é no céu, porque toda a jogabilidade dele se baseia em pilotar um navio voador, onde você pode escolher paulatinamente ir atrás de tesouros espalhados pelo mapa pra ganhar mais dinheiro ou só explorar mais ele e caçar piratas com recompensas. A exploração dele se baseia nisso além de uma side quest ou outra que você acha.

Eu confesso que fui sem saber nada do jogo, e quando comecei a jogar me senti um pouco deslocado na história, mas numa pesquisa bem rápida descobri que ela é simples e direta ao ponto e foi onde eu comecei aos poucos a entender o que Skies of Arcadia é. Obviamente que, existem pontos mais sérios na história e personagens um pouco bem mais trabalhados que outros, mas num geral ela funciona muito bem sendo simples, porque o trio principal dos personagens tem uma relação que te compra muito rápido, sem contar que o Vyse (personagem principal do jogo) é um ótimo protagonista. Os gráficos dele são meio datados, mas tem seu charme principalmente pela expressividade dos personagens e de como ele faz funcionar a história através disso. A OST desse jogo é muito QUENTE com muita trilha memorável, especialmente o battle theme, é um dos melhores que eu já escutei. O ponto que ele menos se destaca pra mim é o combate, porque ele tenta ser um pouco Final Fantasy 7 no sentido de ser cinemático demais, mas na maior parte das vezes se você só spammar o ataque normal nos encontros aleatórios, eles não demoram mais de 2 turnos, o problema são alguns chefes que demoram mais do que deveriam, e vai tomar no cu dessas batalhas navais, elas demoram muito e cada ataque demora aproximadamente o que uma velha demoraria pra atravessar a rua. O sistema de magia dele me lembra muito Trails, só que muito mais simples, mas é charmoso do seu jeito. Mas ainda sim, mesmo com esses problemas eu adorei ter experimentado Skies of Arcadia, e genuinamente fiquei triste quando o jogo acabou por ter que me despedir daquele mundo. É um puta de um jogo pra quem tá buscando uma aventura mais pé no chão em meio de trocentos jogos com histórias pretensiosas pra caralho.

"A young boy had a dream. A young girl has passion. A mysterious stranger had a mission. And the world will forever know their story."

"If you lose sight of one dream, replace it with another."

Skies of Arcadia is all about how no suffering lasts forever and how we all have the strength to adapt and overcome anything as long as we're capable of finding it within ourselves - and it is so real for it.

It's rare for a game to focus so heavily on realizing there's more to life than being stuck in your old ways, but the amount of perspectives it uses to make that hit home combined with Vyse's optimism makes for such an uplifting journey.

Of course, it's not perfect - being a relatively old school JRPG means it has the issues you'd come to expect from them, in this case mainly a ludicrous encounter rate and some incredibly slow combat pacing due to it's wide variety of special move animations that can last pretty long.
The combat's relatively barebones and a bit confusing to get into, but despite turns taking a while it's relatively fast-paced in how long battles last once you've got the hang of it, so it's nothing too bad in my opinion. Random encounters last two turns at best, and bosses are creative enough to keep you on your toes so there's still a lot of fun to be had there.

But the cast is what really makes this game, as I've mentioned - beyond Vyse just being a fantastic protagonist, the main trio as a whole is a blast and the other party members that tag along during different parts of the game are all real fun too.

And not only that, the setting is one of a kind. There's this genuine childlike joy at sailing through the clouds with the crew and discovering all there is to its world, and I'm amazed I've never seen anything like it since.

All in all, just an incredibly whimsical and unique experience if you're capable of putting up with the usual classic JRPG struggles. Trust me, it's absolutely worth it.

I'd been looking forward to playing this game ever since I heard the remix in All-Stars Racing Transformed back when that game was new. I was not ever once disappointed. This game is packed full of charm with fun characters, a great sense of humor, lots to see and do, actively fun combat systems, and a living breathing world to explore. My only wish for this game is that it someday gets QoL features put in via modding efforts or a rerelease. I played with a patch that let me hold B to skip random battles, and that was a major help. You owe it to yourself to play this game. Download Dolphin, mod a Wii, do what ya gotta do.

I've had an interest in playing this game ever since I was a kid grinding Sonic All Stars Racing Transformed where I used Vyse non-stop and now, years later, I've finally played it to completion.

The first thing that jumped out at me was just how expressive the characters are, it's really impressive and that goes for the graphics too. Despite all of it taking place in the skies every area looks distinct and colourful and the same can be said for the combat in which the super and magic moves all really sell the impact of how powerful they're meant to be. The game's music is also great, it's varied but it maintains this feeling of going on an epic adventure and is a joy to listen to.

The gameplay is pretty standard RPG stuff, though I do like the magic system in this game and how you can have certain characters specialize in a specific attribute of magic which makes them feel more distinct from eachother but you can also go out of your way to grind so every character has every spell so no one feels less useful.

The standard elements of an RPG are all there and the main thing the game does to help it stand out are the ship battles. They look really great for their time...and that's where my praise for them end because they are absolutely dreadful. Near the start, they all boil down to you guarding and occasionally healing until you use the Harpoon Cannon, rinse and repeat and it gets really boring and it's made worse by them taking fucking forever. A single turn in ship battles takes almost a minute and from a gameplay perspective, they just feel like drawn out random enemy encounters. Other times they're just confusing, sometimes the game tells you to fire away to knock the enemy off balance, so I select all attacking options and I still get hit and lose. They get slightly better once your ship powers up later in the game but I still rolled my eyes anytime one of the ship battles was about to happen.

The story was also disappointing but there are some good things. The main cast is very likeable and seeing Vyse progress from an unknown kid wanting to see the world to a Legend of the Skies was cool to see and the stuff with Drachma and Rhaknam was excellent. My main issue with the story are the villains. They're evil, want power and that's all there is to any of them besides maybe Belleza. They're all interchangeable and completely forgettable. Also, about 80% of the scenes in this game boil down to a character saying how Valua is evil and how they've been wronged by them and by the 50th time, it gets old.

People call this game a classic so I had very high expectations, I went out of my way to get every crew member and collected every moonfish and did almost every bounty hunt in the game so I clearly enjoyed my time with the game overall. But outside of the complaints I've already mentioned there are other things that bother me. Enemies run away all the time in this game, sometimes before you even kill any of them and it just wastes time, the enemy encounter rate is a bit high and the Legends version lowers it so I can only imagine how unbearable the original is. The game feels slow overall but when I tried running from enemy encounters to hopefully speed it up, I found out the game punishes you for it by lowering your swashbuckler rating. I can keep going but you get my point. To sum up, while I did enjoy the game, I can't help but feel like the game is dated in many areas and I'm left ultimately disappointed.

As one of the last games on the Dreamcast, which was SEGA’s last real contribution to the console market before they just gave up in general, Skies of Arcadia is certainly a lost gem in its own regard.

For a game like this you sorta have to wonder how this even managed to string up a cult following when it was pretty much set to fade into history around the time real JRPG heavy hitters started rolling around the corner. And on a surface level, Skies of Arcadia really doesn’t have much to offer against the lot in terms of doing something really “unique” or “boundary pushing”, especially in terms of its story. Many of its plot points were obviously taken right from Final Fantasy 7; Valua is a dead ringer for Midgar, Fina and Ramirez are akin to Aerith and Sephiroth, you fight kaiju-sized personified weapons tied to an ancient civilization in this world, and Moon Stones might as well have just been called Materia.

It might even be a stretch to call a JRPG taking inspiration from the biggest game changer in the genre of the time a mere “rip-off” when in reality it’s taking these elements to provide a sort of alternative to what was available. In that sense, it’s almost like a response to FF7 and the impact it would leave on JRPGs trying to recapture or play into its existential and melodramatic pathos. Skies of Arcadia stands firmly against this wave of JRPGs by just being a simple, soul filled adventurous experience of a straightforwardly charming good dude who just wants to do good as a pirate.

While the Legends port (remaster?) fixes and adds a bunch of things to make the game feel more expansive and “complete”, I still think there needs to be more ironing out for the gameplay. Like many turn-based RPGs Skies of Arcadia falls into the unfortunate archaic trappings of battles feeling too slow which isn’t helped by the random encounters. The real culprit here comes with the ship battles, which while really fun on paper, definitely feels too sluggish and drawn out to really feel engaging after a while. You just hold out against your enemy long enough until you see the option to just blast your special cannon which usually instakills everything. There’s no real tension in combat up until the last stretch where the game really tries to get you on your toes. The actual mechanics for regular combat are a bit lopsided in how they’re designed, like adding an entire new layer to combat on enemies having elemental color weaknesses and changing your weapon’s color to abuse that is weird, but when it works it becomes worthwhile. I also like how Magic is still its own system with its own energy to use independently from Special Moves which only requires a shared meter that the entire party charges and uses to perform what’s basically just Limit Breaks.

But I think the real appeal that the developers intended for this game is the exploration. A lot of it feels condensed by modern day standards but for a DreamCast/Gamecube title the world design for flying your ship in is still great. It really drives home the grand sense of adventure as throughout the course of the game you upgrade your ship to get pass areas you weren’t able to before, creating shortcuts from one part of the map to the other, and even completely negate random encounters by flying high on top of the map or below it.

Gotta give props to the music tho. Gamecube port basically butchers the audio through decompression but it’s not enough to flush out how great the sound can still be, especially during boss battles where the boss theme dynamically changes rhythm and melody depending if you’re close to winning or losing the fight. It’s a really simple thing to do but it’s so damn effective especially during times when you finally prevail against the heavy hitters.

While this game would realistically never get a sequel I still liked to see it getting a new modernized port on something like the Switch with all the QoL features emulation helped provide to make this a smoother experience. Ideally, a remake would be better for overhauling the gameplay to re-balance the combat and maybe even fix up the over-world more. Other than that, unless you can fork over 100 dollars for a physical copy for your Gamecube, this is stuck in Emulation Hell.