Skies of Arcadia, however, felt like a true labor of love. Meaning, that the driving force behind their development is to make money. Clearly, some games are labors of financial profit. The was filled with meticulous details on its visuals, every town, area, and dungeon felt and looked different. Given the leap in power that the Dreamcast offered over the Nintendo 64, Skies of Arcadia’s characters, NPCs, textures and effects looked better than those in Ocarina of Time, and in my opinion even its contemporary rival Grandia II’s. You could really appreciate the towns, and dungeons in all their polygonal glory, and the game relied heavily on real-time in engine cutscenes to showcase key plot moments (just like Ocarina). SoA was fully 3-D, with a controllable camera (not a fixed view like Grandia II, and not fixed angles like FFX). In some ways, Skies of Arcadia was a natural evolution of Ocarina’s visual presentation. Therefore, my earlier statement on Skies of Arcadia is not to be taken lightly. Readers familiar with my work, are likely to know that I still see Ocarina as the greatest game ever made at the time of its release. Skies of Arcadia, was quite simply the most impressive game that I had played at that point (Late 2000) after The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. It beat out Final Fantasy X, XII, and Dragon Quest VIII among others to earn its place.Ĭlearly, a game like Skies of Arcadia deserved better than the paltry sales that it got, and certainly better than Sega’s perpetual indifference towards the IP. With a Metacritic rating of 93, Skies of Arcadia comes at #2 behind Final Fantasy IX (also released in the year 2000) as the greatest J-RPG in the 2000s decade. By this metric, Skies of Arcadia is one of the greatest Japanese Role-Playing games ever. That’s why tools like Metacritic are useful in judging certain games, as a wide gamut of views are taken into account before tallying a final score. My truth is likely to be different than someone else’s truth. Game rankings are largely a matter of opinion. Skies of Arcadia has a Rightful Claim for being the Greatest J-RPG of the New Millennium With no known plans for a Skies of Arcadia ‘remaster’, we are forced to remember the classic title for what it was nearly 21 years ago on the Dreamcast. Even Game Arts’ Grandia II received a remaster on Switch, but Skies of Arcadia remains tied to 20-year-old machines. I find it tragical that the game’s confinement to the Sega Dreamcast, and later to the GameCube, doomed it to oblivion.Īs of today, Sega has left the property behind. To me, Skies of Arcadia is every bit as good as Final Fantasy X, and consequently any of the top PlayStation 2 RPGs of the era. Skies of Arcadia is a Tragically Great JRPG Very few games looked as good as Skies of Arcadia did 20 years ago. This is particularly damning when the game in the 10 th spot of that list only sold 360,000 copies. In fact, no JRPG made it to the system’s lifetime top ten sellers list. JRPG fans did not flock to the Dreamcast. Grandia 2 did not sell well, and Skies of Arcadia (arguably the superior game) sold even less. This fact did not bode well for the Dreamcast’s JRPG prospects. However, in 1999-2000 it was common for gamers of the era to purchase a PS2 just because they wanted to keep playing future installments of the Final Fantasy series. Square Enix has lost some influence today, as very gamers fans say: “I need to get a PS5 just to play Final Fantasy XVI!”. The reality of the Dreamcast’s situation was that for JRPG fans (most who probably purchased Final Fantasy VIII for their old trusty PS1, instead of a DC console) only the PlayStation 2 guaranteed their future JRPG prospects. The Dreamcast – Squaresoft = No Choice but to buy a PlayStation 2 Final Fantasy X (and Square Enix) was a large reason why JRPG fans flocked to the PS2 (as opposed to competing systems). For JRPG fans, however, the Dreamcast was an attractive machine on the strength of two titles: Grandia II, and Sega’s own Skies of Arcadia. Still, Dreamcast adopters were mind-blown by Sonic Adventure, Soul Calibur and a few other titles that were truly “next-gen” in terms of visuals when compared to previous generation gaming efforts. The Dreamcast needed to be massive sales success in order to keep struggling Sega afloat, but unfortunately, it failed in that (impossible) task. () in the midst of late gen N64 software (which looked pretty good), and the beginnings of a massive PlayStation 2 hype campaign. The Dreamcast was a weird little system, not because there was anything wrong with it, but because it launched in the U.S.
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