'The Skies of Final Fantasy' or 'SEGA needs to make a new Skies of Arcadia'

My first JapaneseRPG (JRPG) ever was Skies of Arcadia: Legends on Gamecube, a technically unimpressive port of a Dreamcast game by Overworks, a team at SEGA. The game was, by all accounts, very cliche. However the feeling of exploration and the epic ship battles combined with a very charming and colorful world have given the game a cult following, your author included.

Japanese trailer for Skies of Arcadia: Legends... makes me want to play it again

A long time ago my friends and I sat down to attempt to play Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles on the Gamecube. The game was highly anticipated when first announced, this was Squaresoft breaking away from Sony and coming back to Nintendo. Some were dissuaded when the game was revealed to be an Action RPG very unlike Final Fantasy. It was a great experience but in the end was a short lived experience as the game was very shallow in terms of real storyline and was more of a party game in the end than an RPG. The game sold well, but let many people down and we never expected to see another one, or at least one worth owning.

[note: many people also had a huge problem with the game requiring GameBoy Advances for multiplayer as it made it much harder to find people to play with]

Eventually Square|Enix (Squaresoft merged with Enix in 2003 right before the launch of Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles) announced a new one coming for the coming Nintendo Wii, Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers (yes it has TWO subtitles). You can see the trailer below.

This video was a big hit, the world which was so shallow in the previous incarnation appeared much more fleshed out and the graphics were much better than most people were used to on the Wii (more on that some other time). It also struck a chord with many of the skies of Arcadia fans because it seems to have a bit of a Skies feel to it.

Today I just saw a brand new trailer that was released in Japan for this game as seen below.

The second half is the best and first half seems like a mish/mash of gameplay snippets badly spliced and set to bad music (imho). It still looks like a good game honestly, but it doesn't have that feel that I expected. It has made the wait for SEGA to announce a sequel to Skies all the more painful. What's worse it that Skies 2 was being worked on at one point, but SEGA pulled the plug in one of their stupid corporate shuffles. Since then SEGA has begun to redeem themselves by getting some good looking and very promising projects going (save for the Sonic The Hedgehog series, more on that another time as well) such as The Conduit and Madworld for Wii.

Sadly Skies of Arcadia never did well on the Dreamcast (a system that sold less than 5 million units) or the Gamecube (a system that was not for RPG gamers). Combined with the fact that SEGAs marketers really didn't do the best job marketing the game, choosing to focus on the character ranking system (a very minor throwaway bit imho) rather than the ship battles and characters, arguably Skies best aspects.

However, The Wii, a system that is possibly the fastest selling home console ever combined with the fact that Japanese RPGs are picking up on the system. Marvelous is bringing Arc Rise Fantasia to the Wii as Square|Enix brings FFCC: Echoes of Time [a DS/Wii crossplatform title], and FFCC: The Crystal Bearers to the system, and they are just the beginning for Square|Enix as Dragon Quest X is also coming to the Wii (Dragon Quest is much much bigger than Final Fantasy in Japan by a very large margin, and is gaining steam in North america since the release of Dragon Quest VII on the Playstation.)

So come on SEGA, bring Skies back from the dead, give it a new coat of paint (NOT REALISTIC!) and give us what we all want (it should be noted that practically yearly since the Gamecube release until it's death earlier this month Electronic Gaming Monthly had a rumor of Skies 2 being in development for Gamecube, PS2, or Wii, much to the Skies fan community's constant joy and sadness.)