When it comes to spiritual successors, seemingly seeing that Skies of Arcadia was getting one with Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire immediately piqued my interest. However, beyond the setting and some stylistic similarities, the game actually isn’t a spiritual successor at all. Although it releases next month, I got to take an early look at the game to see what it has in store for players. Of course, anyone looking to get their Skies of Arcadia fix most certainly won’t find it here.
Sky Oceans tells the story of Glenn, a young man living in a place called Blossom. He and his friends begin the game with a tutorial where they attempt to pass their pilot examination. This opening section is meant to familiarise players with the the game’s few different gameplay styles. When in towns, you control Glenn from a third-person perspective. You can walk around and talk to people, open chests, and frequent shops. However, there is no on-foot combat, which surprised me. The tutorial has you getting used to piloting an Airjet, which is just a regular fighter plane.
The plane is honestly quite difficult to steer, especially since it turns very slowly. You can fire the plane’s guns to get an advantage while attacking enemies, but then it transitions into turn-based combat. Here you can command any planes in your squad to attack, use special art attacks, evade enemy attacks, or flee. Strangely, each individual pilot must flee and the others will still remain in combat until the option is selected for them. The various pilot arts are mostly elemental. Glenn uses ice attacks, but his friend Ren uses fire ones. These also often lead to foes being afflicted with status effects.
One thing that struck me as odd is that, during the tutorial, the default difficulty saw enemies easily dispatching the two characters in my party. It feels more than a little overtuned in that regard. Aside from fighting, you’re also tasked with collecting ten beacons. Once you accomplish all of this, the game’s story kicks in. I’m not going to spoil the particulars, but Glenn and his friends end up starting a journey while being pursued by a dangerous enemy.
When the introduction is over, you get to visit a new town and then a large area where you fly around and the reins are removed. At this point, you have four characters in your party and each one grants access to a special ability. Glenn can detect treasure chests, Fio can make your Airjet boost, Ren has a destructive blast that can remove obstacles, etc. Due to all of the above, Sky Oceans simply doesn’t really resemble Skies of Arcadia at all.
I can’t deny that there’s still a lot of appeal to a turn-based RPG about flying and battling planes, though, regardless of whether or not it attempts to pay homage to a classic. As such, Sky Oceans is quite a unique game, even if it remains to be seen just how well it’ll fly once the game is completely off the ground.
