swanton00's Full Review: Skies Of Arcadia Legends for GameCube
Way back when I was just a little bitty boy living in a box under the stairs in the corner of the basement of the house half a block down the street from Jerry's Bait shop. You know the place. Well, anyway back then everything was going swell and life was just peachy. Except, of course, for the undeniable fact that I was a boy with a Dreamcast living in a Playstation 2 world. No one in school played little ol'd DC anymore, they just bragged about their shinney new PS2s. Well, I was living proud with my DC and one of the games that kept me to it was Skies of Arcadia. Im a big fan of RPGs and this really did it for me. Now fast forwards Matts life a few years into the future and bam! You got myself playing the NEW Skies of Arcadia Legends for Gamecube!
Whats It About?
Civilization exists on islands floating high above the clouds, the skies of Arcadia! People travel around on flying boats known as airships. Exploration is a big part of certain peoples lifes. for the most part these people are air pirates. The air pirates are split into two groups. The black pirates who steal from and attack unarmed ships and the blue rogues, who help others and only steal from armed ships. You are Vyse, a young Blue Rogue part of his fathers Air Pirate crew. The Valuan Empire is ruthlessly trying to conquer all the lands of Arcadia. Vyse will part from his fathers teachings and raise his own crew. You and your comrades now travel the skies finding new lands and at the same time fighting off against Valua.
Play Like This
You travel the world in your air ship, whichever one it may be at the time. You view your airship in a third person view. Your able to control the altitude of your ship and all. Now when traveling the skies your not just going from a to b, your also exploring the sky for new discoveries. While their not mandatory, they are cool to find. Discoveries can be anything, as long as its not marked in the books of the Sailors Guild. You can ancient cities, floating rocks, old ships, new lands and so much more. They can be anywhere.When flying, if your compass in the corner of the screen starts to spin rapidly, you've just stumbled upon a discovery! Next time you go to town, be sure to stop by the sailors guild to let them know about your new find.
There consists of two types of battling in SOA (Skies of Arcadia). The classic turn based on foot battling, and the innovative ship battles. Character battles can happen at any time when traveling the skies or walking around in a dungeon. You have your party of upto four against a group of enemies. Who performs their actions first is whom who has the higher Quick. At the start of battle your given a certain amount of Spirit points (SP). This is determined by how much sp each of your characters has. If youve got four characters and each of those characters have 2 SPs then your party sp will be 8. How much you can do during a turn depends upon how much sp you have. SP is needed to perform magic and special attacks. Each will take a certain amount. You recover the same amount of SP you started the fight with at the end of each turn. So say you start with 8 points and you use 6 during your first turn. You regain another 8 at turns end and thus you have 14 for your next turn. regular attacks do not require SP to perform so these are of course, essential since magic and special attacks use lots of sp usually. Say during battle your planning on going all out and releasing major attacks with all your characters on an enemy, your going to need lots of SP. So to help gain sp faster you can use the focus command which will boost your current sp by whatever the characters sp level is.
Spirit Point levels can be increased on a character every once and a while from a character level up. Character leveling up is they key is raising your party and making characters stronger. To raise levels, you need experience points. Experience points are gained after every completed fight. Once the character reaches a certain amount of points, their level will rise which will increase their stats therefore making them stronger. The amount of experience needed will increase as you get to higher levels. Once again, battles are turn based. Whoever has the highes speed will attack first, even if that means the whole enemy party attacks you first. You attack your enemies using your weapons or magic. Magic consumes Magic points and spirit points so take heed. Each characters weapon takes on an element of magic for the fight. In all there are six different magical elements. Each are controlled by the elemental Moons which give Arcadia power in many ways. By simply pressing the Y button in battle you change the element of your weapon, which al;so changes the color. Your enemies have elements to. So figuring out which elements work best on which ones is very important. Besides raising levels, equiping new weapons and armor is important to improving your characters. You receive gold from fighting to purchase items and weapons at shops. There is also something called Magic Experience which you get from battles. Magic experience allows each characters elemental power to level up, gaining them a new magic for that element. Your last source of combat is special attack which consume sp. Each character has a few of them and they are learned from eating something called Moonberries. The more special moves a character has, the more moonberries it will take.
Besides ground battles, your party can engage in ship battles which are quite different from any other sorts of battling in an RPG. They only happen at certain parts in the story though, they aren't random. These are one on one, your ship against another ship or some really big creature, big enough to use a ship. In each turn, both ships get four commands. You'll perform one action, then the enemy or vise versa depending on speed. Ship battles also use SP. That continues for four commands until a new turn arises. The turn is displayed on a 4X4 grid which shows your characters and what there doing. The top row is your main character. lets say your goanna have him fire the main cannon. You can choose which one of the four actions it will be fired in. Vyse is the first character you will give a command to, but if your put his action in the 4th slot, then his action will be performed last. Youy can do this with all four characters. Your ship can be equipped with different types of armors and such, but you get alot of different ways to attack. Ships dont only use cannons. Theres also torpedoes and subcannons, plus each ship has its own special attack wich uses alot of sp. Torpedoes and sub cannons work differently then main cannons. A torpedo will take two action slots for its use. The first slot if firing the torpedo, you can choose which slot it will hit the target in. You can fire it in the first slot and have it hit in the last, how far it can go depends on its range. However, the slot it hits in you can also place a second option to happen there since it cost a slot to fire. Since sub cannons work the same way except you can have them consecutivly fire over multiple slot, you can have about three attacks opccur in one slot for some big damage.
Vyse is a Blue Rogue so being a good guy and getting his name out is important to him. Depending on your actions, Vyse will become more popular with the people and everyone will know your name. Winning lots of battles and making the right decisions will raise your swashbuckler rating. During conversations often you will asked what you should do for a situation. When answering you must remember to be adventursome and brave but at the same time remember your duties as a leader. Eventually you become the captain of your own ship and get your own crew. When traveling the skies you can take a break from the wheel and walk around your ship. All your crew will be all over for you talk to them. Recruiting crew members is a really cool part that I find to be alot of fun. There is alot of people that will join your crew and provide many things for you, some of them wont join easily though and may ask a certain something. When getting members they can alot for you. Some people raise your ships cannons, some people be cooks, some allow you to find rarer items easier and so on. The crew members can also help you in ship battles. each character will do something different when used.
What Makes Legends So...Legendary?
Legends adds some stuff to Skies of Arcadia to pimp out the already great game. Theres the new Wanted battles. Outlaws get listed in the sailors guilds and if you find them and beat them, you will be paid. You gots the usual new weapons and characters and such. I think theres also new discoveries. The case also says there hours of new gameplay, but I dont really remember the Dreamcast version by heart so I dont know what to say about that. You also got something new called Moonfish. There flying colored thing that you catch with a cannon. you find them chillin usually in cities and some dungeons. When you catch them your supposed to give them to some little girls fat bird on some medical ship. The bird spits items out at you for feeding it. I believe thats about all for the newness.
Appearance
When talking about the graphics you've gotta keep in mind that this is a port of a few year old Dreamcast game.Im not even sure if they spiced up the graphics or not. Well anyway, the graphics are out dated but by all means they arent bad. Graphics dont matter to me anyway. The games a fully 3D world full of bright and colorful lands, ship, whatever. The characters are pretty detailed and look cool. During talks theior faces even change expressions reacting to what their saying! OMG! Building are cluttered with plants and chairs and carpets. it all pretty detailed. The magics are generally pretty well done. The screen will all turn different color with effects and such. Not really anything amazing but some of the special moves look pretty cool. Think a Final Fantasy summon for some stronger specials.
Yeah...
Skies of Arcadia does have too much for talking. The dialouge is mostly all in text. But at some parts a character will blurt out a line, usually like thank you or a laugh or something. Voice acting pretty good, er with the exception of Aika's YEAHHHHH!!!!!! she screams sometimes. That gets on my nerves. The music is pretty setting. Nothing to epic but there are a few cool tracks. The battle music does get stuck in your head and if your like me, you will be tapping the beat on your control while watching your attacks performed.
Wanna Turn Up The Heat?
If you gots a Gamecube and you like RPGs, there should be nothing keeping you from getting Skies of Arcadia....unless you got no money, or all the copies in the world blow up, or you blow up.
Release: January 27th, 2003
Developer: Overworks
Console: Gamecube
Genre: Role Playing
1 Player
Experience a full 3D world with a highly imaginative storyline, including new plot details and improved character graphics. Use over 70 weapons and 36...More at Amazon Marketplace
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