Octeto Studios' Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire at first glance gave me that feeling of when I got my first GameCube and use to play Skies of Arcadia. Probably in my top ten favorite JRPG games of all time, it gave a new twist on the genre. You get your usual rag tag team of protagonists with your really powerful antagonist, but they gave you the ability to build your own airships. Lump it in with a great story and plot twists, and yea, it was an amazing game. So jumping into Sky Oceans was initially a fun experience, despite the buggy alpha release that caused me lots of issues, the game seems to be trying to give a new feel to the RPG genre.
I know I have done this disclaimer in just about every article I have written, and for those of you who have read quite many of them might be tired of it, but I do this for those who are first coming to these reviews. For the person who sees this for the first time. All reviews I do aren't based on the alpha or beta builds. Bugs don't deter me, even if they can be annoying. I try to envision on what the final product is going to look. So when you play one of the games on G.Round, have that same mentality as well. Not all of them will be optimized and polished, and you shouldn't expect them to be.
Okay, so lets talk about the graphics for a minute. At first, I wasn't really into the graphics in this game. It felt like there were three different art styles trying to smash into each other. When the game starts you get this pretty nice story, which was voice acted and well appreciated I might add, with the artwork looking in one form. Then the game starts and you get the actual character designs and a taste of what the bridge of the ship looks like, which is a completely different art style as the first. Then you have to move your base ship to and the world map looks different than the other two styles. So it was this collage of different styles and at first I was thrown off by this. I imagine when the game gets optimized and the graphics gets more textures, it will feel and look better. But in all honesty, it wasn't until you get to control the characters when I kind of figured out what they were aiming to do. This also ties in with this different feel and take on RPG's that I can honestly appreciate the developer is making.
For starters you get to control four planes and each one has a different set of abilities and moves. There aren't any random battles, as you have to fly into the enemies to go into fights. While outside of fights, you're flying around, solving puzzles like any other RPG. In this field you are able to do special abilities like heal your entire group, or get speed boost to one of the planes. This helps you complete puzzles and objectives. But let me tell you, once a battle starts, the game really shines. Giving you this comic book look and feel while mixing it up in feeling like you're doing an aerial battle. This is where the graphics really are done beautifully, and I feel like it was done like this for the alpha to give us the feeling of what to expect in the final product. Combined with a really exciting battle music and sound effects, I cannot lie, I was having a great time with it.
Speaking of the sound, because you know I'm all about audio in my video games, this game really gave me the feeling of aerial combat mixed with comic book anime feel. It was pleasing to hear. There were audio instability, but it was clear they thought hard about the soundtrack and made me want to listen to more of it. Kudos to the sound director on the team. The gameplay was really enhanced by it.
Sky Oceans: Wings for Hire seems to want to re-invent the RPG genre, while keeping all of the standard RPG tropes and I can see it working. The overworld felt like I was playing a mix of Zelda with 1942 mixed in. The combat system gave me that dog fighting feel but turn-based RPG style. I really cannot wait for a more durable build to come out. The controller interface and bugs with it kind of bothered me, forcing me to restart the game a couple of times. Again, it wasn't optimized to currently and looks like a very skeleton product at the moment. And that's okay, it's expected to be that way with a lot of our developers here at G.Round. The end product, I'm sure, will turn out to be a very fun RPG game, and hopefully the story is fully fleshed out and developed because judging from what I saw in the opening segment, it caught my attention highly. And this is a guy who RPG games is his actual life.
I want to see more of Octeto Studios and their project. I will be very excited on the next round and hope to see some more improvements, curves and more.
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