Sometimes you’ll be in close combat, sometimes in ship combat. Sometimes you’ll be flying your ship around the busy skyways.
Sometimes you’ll be walking around in third-person, interacting with people, climbing things, entering buildings, picking up objects, etc. The game play itself is diverse enough that you’re never doing just one thing for very long. You can’t alter the plot much – the next thing to do is always the next thing to do, and it’s almost always obvious, and you won’t be able to handle or even in some cases complete something if you skip ahead.
You can find Discoveries – natural features and man-made objects of legend – and claim a reward for your discovery you can hunt down other pirates and “sink” them you can search for crew members to add to your ship you can wander around having random encounters for cash and experience or you can head straight on to the next obvious segment of the plot. There are major points in the game where the world is opened up to you – like in Final Fantasy 7, when you finally leave the city – and you can start adventuring on your own. Occasionally, you get to make a decision as to what to say or do – some of these are a bit fatuous there are several points where your decision is either to do the heroic thing (sail on, rescue someone, escape) or give up and go home. The two games are very similar in play style – cut scenes of plot exposition intersperse with random “wandering monster” fights and scenes of interaction with other characters where mostly what you do is push the A button to keep the messages scrolling. What do I mean by “throwback CRPG”? When I first put in SoAL and got into playing it, I had an immediate impulse to fish out my old Playstation and fire up Final Fantasy 7. Along the way, Vyse and Aika meet up with various people who join and leave your party (mostly something you have no control over), from sailors and fellow pirates to belly dancers and refugees from ancient civilizations. The Valuan Empire has decided to conquer all the other lands of the skies, and it’s up to you to stop them. Vyse’s mostly-permanent companion is Aika, an anime-style girl with pigtails, an attitude, and a heart of gold. There are also Black Pirates, who are the more traditional kind and the sworn enemies of the goody-goody Blue Rogues. Blue Rogues are pirates who are dedicated to only robbing from people who deserve it and who help people in need. You play Vyse, an Air Pirate – specifically a “Blue Rogue”. Airships are propelled and held aloft by fan-style turbine steam engines, even though some have sails and even oars for decorative purposes.
There’s a heavy “age of piracy” influence on the fashions and styles of the various cultures, but there is also some steampunk-style technology. Skies of Arcadia: Legends takes place in a world of airships, islands floating in the ether, magic, and lost civilizations. I hadn’t even heard of the original Skies of Arcadia game on the Dreamcast, so this game is entirely new to me.
It’s too bad for SoAL that other, more up-to-date games like Summoner and Eternal Darkness beat it to market, or it might have been hailed for being the first CRPG for the GameCube. Produced by Overworks and distributed by Sega, Skies of Arcadia: Legends (SoAL) is one of the first true “throwback CRPGs” to come out for the Nintendo GameCube platform.
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