A great thing about going to college is you get to befriend people from wildly different backgrounds than you came from. Religious beliefs, economic classes, and political ideologies are the boring examples, but for me it was my friend Steve, who was a Sega kid growing up. He had a Sega Saturn along with ten controllers so we could all play Saturn Bomberman at the same time! He also had a Dreamcast, we played tons of Power Stone and Giga Wing, and he introduced me to Shenmue, a series I genuinely love.
He also shared with me Skies of Arcadia, which I played a few hours on the Dreamcast and then instantly bought the Gamecube remaster. A few years later I got around to playing its first hour which I wasn’t super fond of. Almost twenty years later and I’ve finally finished the game thanks to my Ayn Thor, 2x speed, and cheats to skip random battles! Let’s explore the Skies on the Dreamcast’s anniversary.
I’m not really sure what drew me to Skies of Arcadia again after all these years, I don’t think there’s even been a rumor of a modern port, let alone a full remake. But the charm of the game has always stuck with me, and my initial impression on the Dreamcast was so strong I think I finally wanted to close that loop. But as alluded to, this game is tough to play in 2026 without any modifications! I think I made it about twenty minutes before turning on double speed in the Dolphin emulator; at that rate it finally felt like a semi-modern experience.
The gameplay is very slowly paced: there are some ladders that literally take a full minute to traverse up and down, ship battles are 95% watching them circle each other, and of course random battles, the bane of the first two decades of JRPGs. You wouldn’t believe it, but these battles also play out at a snail’s pace! I’m not going to pretend that Final Fantasy VIII or Chrono Cross had speedy battle systems, but they played out a helluva lot faster than this slog. Somehow I made it almost two-thirds of the way through the game before I dived into Dolphin’s cheat menu and disabled random battles once and for all.
Sanding off the game’s rough edges allows the charm of Skies of Arcadia to really shine through. No longer do the dungeons feel like frustrating labyrinths, without random battles I can appreciate the art and effort that went into designing them. But it’s the characters that really feel special when the cruft is wiped away. I was able to focus on our heroes as they take steps to become sky pirates but also into maturity.
Vyse, Aika, and Fina feel obviously modeled after Cloud, Tifa, and Aerith from Final Fantasy VII, but some of that is definitely colored by the recent Remake series that overhauled Tifa and Aerith’s friendship into something quite beautiful that isn’t anchored by Cloud. Skies of Arcadia’s Aika and Fina feel like they did it first, the pair become quick friends and don’t rely on Vyse to even be around to form their bonds. There’s a lot of cute antics in the cutscenes between them, and I think it helps even more that there’s no love triangle with Vyse. The charm from this trio really brought this game home for me.
I think a modernized remake of the game would have to rebuild both combat systems from the ground up to be successful. There’s a color based weapon system that allows you to change the affinity of your weapon to try to maximize damage against a particular enemy; while smart, it’s very difficult to tell if you were successful or not as there’s no indication other than a damage amount. It took me about 20 hours into the game to realize it showed an enemy’s color in the upper right hand corner, I guess I should have re-read the manual. Ship battles could also use streamlining, planning out a turn ahead of time is interesting, but the resulting action is just long and boring to watch.
The remaining bones of the game are strong enough, the world of Skies of Arcadia is huge and takes literal minutes to cross on your airship, this isn’t Final Fantasy VI where you can whip around the world in seconds flat. It also has a bit of a Metroidvania feel to it where you need to progress the story and unlock ship capabilities to explore the next area. If only there weren’t random battles every few seconds, though a late game upgrade does allow you to bypass them in the air.
The story is basic enough, but who doesn’t love a pirate, let alone a sky pirate? The cast of characters is huge and colorful, and they all pretty much have their own ship that exaggerates one of their personality traits. Dungeon design is varied, with the first half featuring some fun puzzles but the second half mostly split between a straight hallway or a maze. I preferred the puzzles!
It’s hard to recommend Skies of Arcadia these days without enabling a few cheats, there’s not much grinding necessary in the traditional JRPG sense, but the game just plays out in a grind in the I’m a grown-ass adult sense. But still, it’s impossible not to love Vyse, Aika, and Fina.
