"I'm Already Learning To Talk Like A Pirate"

Just beat Skies of Arcadia: Legends for the Gamecube. Excellent game, despite the fact that the graphics are a little below average for a game on the current consoles. But when I remember it's a port of a Dreamcast game, the graphics make more sense.

And really, the graphics aren't that bad, really. They're decent three-dimensional characters and backgrounds, special effects are excellent, and the ability of each character to express his or herself is impressive to say the least. Everyone has very vivid and detailed facial expressions, character designs are unique and fun, and the gameplay is fairly straight forward. My only real quibble with the game (aside from the entirely too short a list of playable characters and the lack of really good magic spells) is just how often you run into random encounters. There are times when you have a battle every two or three steps, and this gets very frustrating very quickly, especially when the battles don't take more than a round to complete (one of your characters has this special move that does decent damage to all enemies, and once your level is high enough that your party spirit is adequate to do that special move first turn every time, battles become tedious).

But random encounters aside, it's a great game. The characters are detailed, both in terms of visuals and character depth. Characters actually have developmental arcs, they grow and change. The story is engaging and entertaining, with moments of nailbiting excitement, amusing levity, and tear-jerking sorrow liberally mixed throughout.

One of the neatest aspects of gameplay is ship battling. In most RPG videogames, your group of heroes battles a group of enemies/monsters/bizzare creatures. There's plenty of that, but the developers remembered that the heroes of this story are sky pirates, and thus there are lots of ship battles as well. The ship battles are turn-based, and you have several different cannons and attacks you can use (assuming you've saved up enough spirit points. The spirit system was really kind of a neat way to do special attacks and magic and such, and really made you think before you just started casting random spells). Same applies for character battles, but ship battles were still a nice change of pace.

The battle system itself was rather neat. Each character generated a certain amount of spirit per round (based on their level), and these spirit points could be used to cast spells (each of which cost a magic point and also had a spirit point value, which was how many spirit points you needed to cast the spell), do special moves, etc. If you got your spirit meter filled all the way up, you got a new special command where you could either do the uber move (called "Prophecy." All four characters in your party would get together and call down a moon to smash into your opponents. It dealt a lot of damage and made a few difficult battles much easier) or call in your ship's crew for help (while you didn't get many playable characters, there were lots of non-playable characters running around. You could get several of them to join your ship's crew, and they'd improve stats or give you special bonuses and aid in ship battles or, in this case, regular battles). If you called in your crew, the effects would depend on who you had active. Some crew members would boost your stats, or heal your characters, or do damage to your enemy. Thing is, every single active crew member would come out at once and do their thing. It was a sight to behold, let me tell you.

Anyway, I was really pleased with the game, and rather sad when it ended (though seeing one of the character's little ghost-like pet, Cupil, dressed up in a pirate hat and eye patch at the end had me laughing aloud). I think this game is one I could go back and play again. The characters were interesting enough, there were side quests I never got around to doing, and the game was just fun. Definitely worth the $20 I paid for it.

~chuck

Song of the Moment: U2, "Love Rescue Me"