Sky Oceans: Wings For Hire
PC/XBOX/PS/SWITCH
10/10/24
Octeto Studios/PQube
Released in 2000, Skies of Arcadia is a game that often comes up in conversations when discussing beloved JRPGS. Originally developed by Overworks and published by Sega, players were placed into the shoes or err…boots… of the pirate Vyse and his gang of swashbuckling freebooters. Battling against an evil empire, the game featured charming visuals for the time, some wonderful turn-based combat, and placed a heavy emphasis on exploration via airship travel. While many have fond memories of this release, it was not a massive success. Despite this, Skies of Arcadia gained a cult following, and managed to get re-released on the GameCube as Skies of Arcadia Legends, a director's cut that came out in 2002.
The reason I bring up Skies of Arcadia, is because today we are discussing a new release that is very clearly inspired by the Dreamcast classic. This, ladies and gentlemen, is Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire. But does Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire soar above the competition? Or is it stuck in the year 2000? Let’s find out in our full review!
The Dreamcast was a capable system for its time that could push out seriously impressive 3D visuals. It hosted a library full of wonderful looking releases such as Soul Calibur, Shenmue, and Resident Evil: Code Veronica. I have very distinct memories of being blown away by the console's visual prowess back when I imported it from Japan.
But It's 2024 now, and Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire, despite its best efforts, somehow fails to match the visual fidelity of games that were released 24 years prior on Sega’s doomed console. Sure, this game can run at a much higher resolution than the games of yonder, but that doesn’t do it any favors. Just to confirm I wasn’t going crazy or misremembering things, I went back and looked at footage of Skies of Arcadia, a game that I simply can’t NOT reference when discussing this release, and was shocked at how its blocky, bulbous characters and gritty worlds still had a charm to them all of these years later.
In contrast, Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire looks like a cheap imitation Dreamcast knock-off with emulator filters running. I’m not saying that a game can’t have a look of its own, but if that’s the case here, I will simply state that I do not care for the visuals of this game. Its skies and villages are drab and lifeless, with character models featuring faces that can’t even muster expressions past dopey disturbing smiles.
The creepy looks on your party's faces are highlighted further during cataclysmic story events throughout the narrative. Despite the chaos that can be occurring such as a village being on fire or somebody dying, everyone continues to showcase creepy grins akin to masochists. If you’ve ever seen the horror movie Smile, the character models in Wings for Hire will trigger memories of the events throughout that film. I’m not sure what vat of chemicals everyone fell into that left them looking like the Joker, but it’s an odd choice to say the least.
Bad character models aside, everything within this world feels completely dead. There is no life or vibrancy throughout the different worlds that you’ll explore, NPCs have little to nothing to offer to you outside of the occasional fetch quest, the dungeons lack personality, and serious pop-in issues with characters suddenly vanishing throughout villages occur frequently. All of this works together to kill any hopes of becoming immersed in this world, not helped by a painfully dull script. It’s a shame, because the high-definition anime character portrait art alongside the occasional cutscene look fantastic. Equally impressive are airborne turn-based combat segments, where the presentation feels a bit livelier. Across these battles your jets swarm wildly, firing off bullets, while character portrait art judders back and forth. It’s exciting at first, until you realize just how dull everything else about the combat engine is.
The game starts out promising enough, with a lovely opening anime cutscene, followed by the introduction of Glenn and Fio, the two lead characters of our adventure. Through a dream sequence the two spot a flying aircraft out across the horizon, expecting it to be a familiar figure, and quickly realize it is instead a merchant ship. From this massive vessel comes a smaller AirJet, piloted by Glenn’s mother. She bears bad news as Glenn’s father has seemingly been killed, a revelation that will haunt Glenn throughout his many adventures.
Following that ill-fated day, Glenn and Fio joined forces with pilots Mica and Ren. They’ve been a unit for some time now, but the beginning of this game is to mark their final mission together as a group. Without giving too much away, tragedy strikes once again, setting off our greater story. The setup to the game is decent if not a bit generic, held back by the lackluster script.
The Dialogue in Sky Oceans: Wings For Hire lacks personality like much of the game. The writing is very dry and concise, and, because of this, character's personalities never get a chance to shine. There are tragic events throughout, but the emotionless text has less flavor than a block of tofu or bowl of Shark Fin Soup– it’s just hard to care. Plus, as I mentioned, everyone is constantly smiling in this game, so I guess that’s what I should do, smile and act like the world isn’t ending.
I think back to classic JRPGs like Suikoden, or even the more recent Eiyuden Chronicle Hundred Heroes, and recall well over 100 characters all feeling distinct, personable, and carrying their own burdens. By comparison Sky Oceans doesn’t make its cast of diverse heroes and villains compelling enough to care about. As an example, Glenn’s primary personality trait is that his dad died, and he will remind you every few minutes.
The core gameplay mechanics include basic town exploration, traversing the skies via your airship, and taking down dungeons as a group riding in your AirJets. Let’s start with those towns. I’ve already mentioned how dull each location looks, but astonishingly, they are even more uninteresting to explore than they are to gaze upon. For starters, many of the villages are full of houses that you simply can’t enter. One might argue, “Finally! A JRPG where you can’t just stroll into random houses!” And yet, it feels odd in Sky Oceans. Entering homes in other games of this genre would often lead to interesting conversations, or hidden treasures, but here, no such luck. Instead, while towns do have a treasure or two scattered across them, they mostly serve as bland hubs that have no story of their own and exist only to progress the main story arc. There are no fascinating NPCs, a small pool of boring side quests, and only one or two shops to purchase items and AirJet upgrades from.
The game is broken up into islands, and in order to explore certain areas of these islands you’ll need an airship that can withstand strong gusts of wind, separate from your air jets. Whether you are controlling AirJets or the larger airship, neither feels particularly great. Thankfully, you’ll have 2 different control options and eventually I was able to get the hang of things. Typically speaking, the Airship will be used on the main overworld map after several hours of gameplay, and the air jets are used to explore dungeons. Regardless of which craft you are flying, both can be upgraded, and both will encounter airborne enemies.
Let’s talk a bit about the dungeons. They are, to put it nicely, less than thrilling. You and a selected party will traverse these labyrinths with the goal typically being to follow a waypoint to the appropriate destination. Battling a few enemies along the way and perhaps solving a puzzle or two (I use the term puzzle lightly here) will eventually lead to a boss encounter. Defeat that boss and the dungeon will come to an end. From there, it’s on to the next town, rinse and repeat.
As I alluded to earlier, the dungeons feel incredibly lifeless. Bland textures, bad flight controls, and exhausting enemy encounters made the vast majority of these locations feel like a chore. The game does try to spice exploration up a bit by allowing players to cycle between party members’ AirJets. Some pilots have unique abilities such as being able to shoot down weaker enemies to avoid a full-blown random encounter. This is not a bad concept in theory, but i would have preferred to see it executed a bit better. This leads me to combat, which, for as exciting as it can appear the first few times you encounter it, quickly becomes a tedious tiring exercise in frustration. Battles are turn-based, a style that I usually love, and involve selecting between standard attacks or a variety of arts. Using basic attacks feels rather pointless as they do very little damage and often miss entirely. Unfortunately, while your arts will deal out more attack damage, they too frequently miss the target regardless of the success rate presented on screen.
The best recipe for getting through these long tedious slogs is blasting enemies before you encounter them across the world map or dungeon areas. This will give you a slight advantage in battle, but I do mean slight. Despite the ability to speed up the combat, it feels slow and takes forever to win. Even worse, enemy AI is a complete mess. There were encounters where I didn’t stand a chance, and then suddenly after gaining a single level, my party dominated every vessel we came across. This often meant going through the long process of a battle without having to put much thought into it. Sky Oceans: Wings For Hire has some serious balancing issues in its combat engine that hold it back and make it extremely boring. For the most part I always had plenty of health and AP points, meaning that I simply had to go through the motions without any real strategy involved.
Airship battles also exist, and they, too, feel completely pointless. My airship was so powerful even without doing upgrades, that I was easily taking down enemies that attacked. I can appreciate the game trying to shake things up a bit, but outside of the fact that you are battling from an airship as opposed to your AirJet, these battles mostly played out the same way.
Sound design is also an issue throughout Sky Oceans. While the musical compositions are respectable, none stand out all that much outside of some excellent boss battle themes. The rest of the soundtrack felt relatively generic, though inoffensive. Unfortunately, sound would sometimes drop out entirely during combat making for some very awkward moments. This also meant that some of the quips that characters would shout, or explosive rockets would be lost in a void of uncomfortable silence.
That’s not the only bug I encountered while playing. A near game breaking issue occurred when I was quite literally unable to complete a mission, forced to repeat it over and over again. While I thought this would be an early game over for this review as I couldn’t progress the story, a patch mercifully released that allowed me to continue. Despite this, sound drops continued, and the game’s camera continued to work against me at times, particularly while aboard the airship. I also encountered a very unusual issue, which I suppose you could call a bug? One villager with the exact same face, clothing, and name was appearing in two locations within the same town. Maybe he has a twin brother with the same name? Otherwise, this guy really gets around!
I could continue on about the weak leveling system that doesn’t allow for much customization, the bizarre leadership points and party relationship system, flickering scenes and disappearing polygons, the middling maps, poor animations, strange load times and transitions, my game starting out in Spanish? and weird character interactions, but what’s the point? Sky Oceans: Wings For Hire isn’t a good game, and you have better options. In fact, I will list a few. In the indie scene alone, we have Rise of the Third Power, Eiyuden Chronicle Hundred Heroes, Sea of Stars, Bug Fables, Undertale, the list goes on. And if you really need the whole airship meets pirate thing in your life, just play Skies of Arcadia again or for the first time. Sky Oceans: Wings For Hire is one of the bigger disappointments of 2024, and that’s a damn shame.
Score: MEDIOCRE
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