Having at last finished the Sky trilogy with the completion of Sky the 3rd, I can confidently say this is the best entry in the series thus far, in spite of the baffling decision to turn the game into a dungeon crawler.
The writing here is a marked improvement over the writing in the first two games, and this is in large part thanks to the Doors. The Doors are technically optional, but you’re really missing out if you don’t do them, as they’re easily the best part of the game. I didn’t do all of them, but of the ones I saw, nearly all of them added something of note to the characters they focused on. It’s an impressive feat, considering how between the first two games, the writers already did a good job fleshing out everyone in the main party, and yet somehow, they managed to develop them here even more. There were even a couple of Doors that focused on NPCs from the past two games, and those also did a good job expanding on those characters, despite their relative unimportance to the overall narrative. Trails’ commitment to getting me to like characters I was indifferent towards or outright hated at first is astounding.
It’s not just the side content that saw an improvement though, I would say that the main narrative of Sky the 3rd, minimal as it is, still manages to reach for more adventurous heights than Second Chapter. I appreciated how they opted to go a somewhat darker route with the story and I also appreciated how they decided to include some honest-to-God plot twists in this one (the main one is a bit predictable, but there are some smaller ones that are more interesting).
For some final one-off positives, I thought it was really cool that they brought back every party member from the first two games and how party construction was overall a lot more freeform than in the first two games. I also appreciated the relative lack of Cassius Bright in this game. Sure, they still fill the annoying character quota here with Gilbert, a character who has way too much screentime considering how his whole schtick stopped being funny towards the end of Second Chapter, but I will take “overstayed his welcome” Gilbert over “walking deus ex machina” Cassius any day.
As previously stated though, the main problem with the game is the dungeon crawling structure it decided to adopt. From a writing perspective, while it technically manages to connect all the disparate elements of writing that make up this game, it doesn’t do them any favors either. It feels like Phantasma was the first idea they came up with and they just decided to roll with it without considering better alternatives. I understand that as an epilogue game, they didn’t want to go all-out with the world design, but the whole thing feels a bit slapdash for my liking.
In terms of gameplay, while seeing alternate versions of areas from the first two games was neat at first, it ended up becoming a bit of a drag to explore by the end. Chapter 6 in particular is such a slog; it took up 14 hours of my 55 hour playtime and mostly consisted of barely-modified dungeons copy-pasted from the first two games but now populated with overly tedious combat and boss encounters. The fact that the game is a straight-dungeon crawler also makes it so that you can’t fit the Doors nicely into a play session. Many Doors feature anywhere from 20-40 minutes of uninterrupted cutscene, and as there are few natural story breaks in the middle of any given chapter, there never really felt like there was a good time to casually pop into a Door and watch. For me, I usually had to sit down and commit to watching a few at a time.
Normally, I would say that the general structure of any given game feeling a bit iffy would count as a rather large flaw, but thankfully it’s my only real complaint with Sky the 3rd, and the writing largely makes up for it. To reiterate something I said earlier, it really felt like the writing was reaching a little higher than it did in the first two games, something I mentioned that I was hoping for at the end of my Second Chapter review. Now that the Sky arc has concluded, I’m really excited to try out the next two arcs, both for a chance at a stronger overarching narrative, and also because I’m a sucker for callbacks and returning characters.
The writing here is a marked improvement over the writing in the first two games, and this is in large part thanks to the Doors. The Doors are technically optional, but you’re really missing out if you don’t do them, as they’re easily the best part of the game. I didn’t do all of them, but of the ones I saw, nearly all of them added something of note to the characters they focused on. It’s an impressive feat, considering how between the first two games, the writers already did a good job fleshing out everyone in the main party, and yet somehow, they managed to develop them here even more. There were even a couple of Doors that focused on NPCs from the past two games, and those also did a good job expanding on those characters, despite their relative unimportance to the overall narrative. Trails’ commitment to getting me to like characters I was indifferent towards or outright hated at first is astounding.
It’s not just the side content that saw an improvement though, I would say that the main narrative of Sky the 3rd, minimal as it is, still manages to reach for more adventurous heights than Second Chapter. I appreciated how they opted to go a somewhat darker route with the story and I also appreciated how they decided to include some honest-to-God plot twists in this one (the main one is a bit predictable, but there are some smaller ones that are more interesting).
For some final one-off positives, I thought it was really cool that they brought back every party member from the first two games and how party construction was overall a lot more freeform than in the first two games. I also appreciated the relative lack of Cassius Bright in this game. Sure, they still fill the annoying character quota here with Gilbert, a character who has way too much screentime considering how his whole schtick stopped being funny towards the end of Second Chapter, but I will take “overstayed his welcome” Gilbert over “walking deus ex machina” Cassius any day.
As previously stated though, the main problem with the game is the dungeon crawling structure it decided to adopt. From a writing perspective, while it technically manages to connect all the disparate elements of writing that make up this game, it doesn’t do them any favors either. It feels like Phantasma was the first idea they came up with and they just decided to roll with it without considering better alternatives. I understand that as an epilogue game, they didn’t want to go all-out with the world design, but the whole thing feels a bit slapdash for my liking.
In terms of gameplay, while seeing alternate versions of areas from the first two games was neat at first, it ended up becoming a bit of a drag to explore by the end. Chapter 6 in particular is such a slog; it took up 14 hours of my 55 hour playtime and mostly consisted of barely-modified dungeons copy-pasted from the first two games but now populated with overly tedious combat and boss encounters. The fact that the game is a straight-dungeon crawler also makes it so that you can’t fit the Doors nicely into a play session. Many Doors feature anywhere from 20-40 minutes of uninterrupted cutscene, and as there are few natural story breaks in the middle of any given chapter, there never really felt like there was a good time to casually pop into a Door and watch. For me, I usually had to sit down and commit to watching a few at a time.
Normally, I would say that the general structure of any given game feeling a bit iffy would count as a rather large flaw, but thankfully it’s my only real complaint with Sky the 3rd, and the writing largely makes up for it. To reiterate something I said earlier, it really felt like the writing was reaching a little higher than it did in the first two games, something I mentioned that I was hoping for at the end of my Second Chapter review. Now that the Sky arc has concluded, I’m really excited to try out the next two arcs, both for a chance at a stronger overarching narrative, and also because I’m a sucker for callbacks and returning characters.