Skies of Arcadia, SEGA's masterful work for Dreamcast

We know this well, we video gamers of long and medium experience, raised on Dragon Quest, fearless heroes ready for anything who, armed with a joypad and lots of patience, have spent entire days wandering through forests and dungeons of small great gems like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy.

Despite these being iconic sagas, capable of laying milestones in the video game universe that endure to this day, there exists an unforgettable rival: Skies of Arcadia, a truly legendary work.

The title is already evocative in itself, with that sense of freedom and desire for discovery that not only form the foundations on which to build any role-playing game worth its salt, but also invest the world in which Vyse and company’s adventures take place with a very special aura, different from the settings we are used to finding in other products belonging to the RPG genre.

We are in 2000, and Sega, with its Dreamcast, is trying with all its might to counter the overwhelming power of Sony, its rival company, which having deployed its relentless leviathan, a certain machine called PlayStation, really seems unstoppable.

Per Dreamcast, quality products certainly are not lacking, so why does Skies of Arcadia manage to stand out? First of all, the sky. Flying ships were certainly not a novelty in role-playing games, just think of Cid and his airships in the various Final Fantasy chapters, for example, but the imprint they are given is very different.

Dragons and gigantic monsters to summon with spectacular appearances, vast empires wielding impossible weapons, and spells capable of creating controlled apocalypses? All of this is, at least at first, set aside by the game’s developers in search of new narrative paths, giving space to exploration, with everything that follows: battles, pirate actions not by sea but by riding the clouds and brushing the wind with your fingertips, so as to reach true floating islands where dungeons and monsters to defeat are certainly not lacking.

I dialogues are another plus point of the game, beautiful and profound, with the possibility of choosing, on many occasions, the responses to provide that will affect the player's reputation. All the elements of Japanese imagination and their worldview are present, such as the search for balance between living beings and nature.

The plot, as per the tradition of the Land of the Rising Sun, begins with a viewpoint very close to the protagonist, then drags him, together with other characters you will meet during your journeys, into a complex story of wars and planetary threats, of titanic and dangerous creatures led by unscrupulous tyrants who have no morality, except that of power and filthy money.

Released later also for Nintendo Game Cube, under the title Skies of Arcadia Legends and with a more advanced and refined graphical section, it has reached over the years the status of a highly coveted and sought-after game by those who loved it more than twenty years ago and who still today feel the urgent need to put on trousers and a tunic, wield a scimitar, and fly far away on the wings, oops I meant ships, of fantasy.